Today, Tempelhof might’ve been colder than you can imagine – but it is always worth a trip.
Cameraless
My camera has been in repair for what feels like an eternity – so I have increasingly played around with Instagram, a quick little photo-sharing network that runs exclusively on mobile devices. It is quick, dirty, inescapably hip and yet a pretty fun way to share little moments (whilst geotagging them, the nerd me excitedly adds), keep up with photographers and friends and catch a glimpse into their lives. It is also doing what flickr would do if they weren’t stuck in ~2007. So for a lack of alternative pictures, here are some moments as captured by the trusty iPhone – if you enjoy them, follow me @olivegreen.
Work-Life Integration
Two days left before Christmas and I am on a train from Berlin to Hamburg, trying to set up a wireless connection from my phone to my computer. It is only after having cursed my cellphone provider and having stared out into the blackness beyond the window that the utter absurdity of this scenario strikes me: These are my first few hours of vacation and I am desperate to get a few more emails out of the door, to begin the free days with a clean slate as it were. Remember how they say that a reporter’s work is never done?
We were sitting at a Russian restaurant a few days ago, next to a strange array of tinted glass filters, boiling flasks and rubber stops. The waitress was ignoring us, so we sipped our drinks and talked about the past year. Both my housemate and former housemate had spent the year like me, working a lot, learning even more and coming to grips with what it means to spend three quarters of the waking day huddled behind some kind of screen. As the conversation moved into the direction of last year’s electricity bill we agreed that they would handle the numbers while could stick to words, and so I found myself doing emails from the phone. When I bopped my head up after a while, the electricity bill had been sussed out and we picked back up on the topic of emails. “The trouble is that we have effectively entered a phase when everyone is expected to be reachable all the time,“ said Janka. Smiling, she added “Work-life balance is a buzzword of the past, at the office we now call it ‘work-life integration’.“
This permeability of everyday life is both a blessing and a curse. It means that work can be done at hours much more flexible than ever before. Among my friends I can hardly find anyone longing for the days of working on the clock, leaving work at the stroke of five. As The Atlantic put it so fittingly: The freelance surge is the industrial revolution of our time. You don’t even need to freelance to feel this; everyone who has ever worked from the comfort of their own bed would agree.
Nevertheless, it has become increasingly hard to draw any kind of line between work and free time – you may have left the workplace, but it certainly hasn’t left you: There’s always something to prepare for the next week, always that extra email to write and increasingly an expectation towards others that they, too, will check their accounts, will respond to your requests and be available for that overtime work when you depend on it. That way, it counters exactly the kind of workers’ rights that generations of people bitterly fought for. The catch is ultimately that I am not even sure I want to drop my pen at five – psychologically, the fluidity of working time seems to have as many benefits as it has downsides.
Maybe it helps to keep in mind the simple idea of my friend Vilmos, who’ll put in 100% of his attention at work to then take off a few months to escape to Asia. We were sitting by the river last year when he outlined the idea in the bright sunshine of a late summer day. “Why not leave for a bit, each year”, he asked, taking a sip from his beer. “If you can work 9 months and then fly to Thailand, you have effectively won at this game.” I reckon that 2012 shall be interesting year to work on this balance – after all, winning is humble enough of a goal.
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10 moments of 2011
As the end of the year is fast approaching, I am continuing a tradition (of sorts): Here are ten memorable shots from the year.
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Every breath you take
Inevitably, there comes a time in your life when you find yourself out of touch with the modern world. It can creep up on you, after having accepted the status quo and refusing to follow each of the newest innovations. Or it can you take by surprise, like an unexpectedly forceful tidal wave. Either way, the time will come when young people shake their heads about your inability to understand whatever innovation is dominating their lives. It has happened to virtually all generations before us, why should we be an exception?
I used to believe that I might be particularly prone to having the rug pulled out from underneath my feet: Having experiencing the rapid pace of technical innovation of the late 90s and the emerging internet age, I had frequently seen paradigms changing from one day to another. Because of this, I had settled into a comfortable self-image of being able to keep up with everything new: Sure, I may not use Twitter to the full extent of its capabilities, but I get it. All of this seemed a given until I encountered Path.
Created by a couple of folks around Shawn Fanning (of Napster fame), Path is currently wedging it’s foot into the door of what we consider social networking. The platform runs on mobile phones and allows you to create a digital logbook of activities, arranged into a coherent stream of activities – hence the name of the platform. What is so striking about Path is not that it blatantly mashes together a bunch of other social networks but that the result is unapologetically Orwellian; prompting me to feel like I have entirely missed the boat. The idea is to literally chronicle your each and every move through constant interaction with the software, starting in the morning with the touch of a button labelled “Awake”.
In their demo video, a beaming Path employee lists the things she uses the network for and manages to sound creepier with each item:
I use Path to share photos and videos, who I’m with, where I am, what music I am listening to, what I’m thinking, when I wake up and go to sleep.
So far, it is too early to tell if Path is going to take off. Yet from what I have seen online, it is currently enjoying a somewhat rapid rate of adoption. That is surprising to me, exactly because it has “too much information” written all over it. I wouldn’t claim to know the absolute truth about what amount of online sharing is right, but software like this signals to me that we may be entering a crucial period when this question is being answered by our online behavior. The point is: Less can most definitely be more – and just because we have the technology to enable more sharing doesn’t mean to we also need to engage in it. Let’s face it: Nobody’s life is interesting enough to be broadcast every waking minute. This is why I remain cautiously positive that we can use the internet for something much greater than publishing a never-ending stream of trivialities. But then again, in terms of the internet I may also have to get used to such ideas of mine becoming quickly outdated.
“Five times a night.”
There’s nothing quite like dragging a bag through a deserted street in Istanbul after a night without sleep and then hearing the muezzin start chanting from a set of creaky speakers. The sun was about to come up, the sound was ricocheting off the walls. We had no idea where we were, everything was closed and one wondered who the prayer calls were even for – they seemed to just evaporate into the cold morning air.
I had never been to an Muslim country before, and Istanbul probably qualifies as Islam Light. While they had managed to build an impressive array of mosques at every available street corner, the religion did not strike me as the least bit dominating. Far from it: The Turks knew precisely how to give tourists what they wanted, and proudly displayed up to five different types of “Turkish Viagra” at the public market. Signs next to the product bore the encouraging messages “No sleep!” or “Five times a night”, hastily scribbled on the signs. To emphasize the overall theme, salesmen would shout “you lucky man!” whenever Anika and I walked by.
The insanity did not stop there, however. Istanbul as a whole made me scratch my head in wonder, since much of it did not seem to make any apparent sense. First, there was the contrast between a glossy airport and the run-down neighborhoods a couple minutes from the main attractions: A burned-out car stood upon a heap of trash, superimposed before the silhouette of yet another epic mosque. Entire sections of the city consisted of rows of shops selling the exact same product: Areas with shops selling nothing but pots and pans (often featuring leopard prints!), tunnels full of the exact same clothing. You’d think the competition would drive them apart, but salesmen instead stood together and chatted over skinny glasses of tea at every hour of the day.
The challenge quickly arose to finding parts of the city where nobody calls you “my friend” in an attempt to sell counterfeit watches. Considering the relative chaos of Istanbul’s streets and our lack of a map, we just began walking, took hundreds of steps up from an area that looked like it should be in communist Russia and finally emerged in the middle of something that actually felt genuine. Little did we know that our explorations would turn into a 20 km march through the city: Whenever I was ready to break down, Anika would spot another place on the horizon she wanted to see and so we walked, munching freshly roasted almonds and stumbling from one chaotic neighborhood of shops and restaurants into the next.
In retrospect I am not entirely sure what I expected from Istanbul, yet I kept looking for clues to confirm some image of the city. It is huge but seemed smaller than I had pictured, since each neighborhood was something else. When we finally took the ferry over to Asian side on our last day, I felt a bit overwhelmed by the daunting task of seeing another metropolis. What we did find were incredibly friendly people, a ton of good food and a bar with Turkish coffee, right at the Bosphorus. Despite of it being late November, we sat outside in the sun among the tea-drinking locals that did not seem to mind the company of tall, blonde Northern Europeans. I guess that was when it finally came together.
“Everything was better back when everything was worse.”
You may not know why, but it makes you unhappy.
A long time ago, This American Life taught me that while you are doing something, there is always the myriad of things you are not doing at the same time, and really – what you ended up doing is just the tip of the iceberg of all those available options.
For work, I recently had the opportunity to speak to Barry Schwartz, an American psychologist who has been pondering the question of choice from the viewpoint of freedom: How does the freedom of choice affect our decision-making and what impact does this have on us? Let me just say that he essentially explained my whole life to me when he took on the idea from the radio show: Not only does the feeling of not having done something else subtract from the joy of what you have chosen to do, the expectation of using freedom to choose also weights down on people, since they feel pressured to alway optimize what they are doing.
“You’re not shackled the way your parents or your grandparents were, what could be better? It just turns out that when you give people this kind of unconstrained opportunity to reinvent themselves, they don’t know what to do. Or if they do it, they look over their shoulders, convinced that they’ve made the wrong decisions, made the wrong career move, the wrong romantic choices and so on. So you are plagued with doubt, you are always dissatisfied with whatever you’ve chosen because just around the corner there’s a better option.”
Or, as the New York Times put it: The word “decide” shares an etymological root with “homicide,” the Latin word “caedere,” meaning “to cut down” or “to kill,” and that loss looms especially large when decision fatigue sets in.
What makes this so insightful is that it explains a lot of the petty indecision I happen to be prone to. One thing that comes to mind is traveling, something I have written about before. As a matter of fact, the vastness of what is out there ties me down and makes it hard to just go out and see places. In this age of the internet, being bombarded with a constant photo stream of othe peoples’ travels, one feels obliged to do something similar. Schwartz argues that the path out of this paradox lies not in constant pondering the options but in being content with what there is – or acting spontaneously. Does opting for the latter still count as spontaneity? I’ll give it a shot.
