Nothing is more precious than time. It’s not an accident that we celebrate birthdays — full orbit trips around our star — in addition to milestones of physical, mental, or social accomplishment. It’s also of interest to note that when we pledge ourself in marriage, we swear to be together ’til death do us part. In both cases, we are celebrating the passage and gift of time. Time is the most precious and the most personal thing we have to gift. Our allotted time is very limited, and once it passes, there is no getting it back. No amount of wealth or social connections can retrieve time lost. When it’s gone, it’s gone. As far back as we are able to glimpse into our history, people traded in goods and services. We make things. It takes the time it takes. Some tasks can’t be hurried and some are tied to events beyond our control, like weather and natural disasters. But we didn’t start selling our actual time, as opposed to goods and services, until recently. We sell our time cheap and value it even less. When people talk about “slow quitting,” they are talking about minimizing what they accomplish during…
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Posts written by Olga Werby or Christopher Werby
Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Diagnostic Errors, Ethnographic & User Data, Mental Model Traps, My Books, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles
Expanding Definitions
by Olga Werby •
I have taught children, teens, and adults for many years. And I am noticing a trend — as a people, in the name of a more just society, we try to make our definitions ever more expansive. Sounds like great thing, right? But consider this. Decades ago, children diagnosed as autistic were few and their symptoms had to be severe to get this diagnosis. Now we have an autistic spectrum. More and more children and adults get placed on this spectrum. We seem to want to catch as many autistic individuals as we can by expanding the definition of what it means to be on the spectrum. We are being ever more expansive in the name of justice. But shouldn’t we be expanding the spectrum the other way instead? Perhaps it is better to be more inclusive in our definition of what it means to be on the “normal” spectrum. We are all different. We all have a grab bag or positives and negatives. And that’s a good thing. It takes all of our differences to create a great society. So we can treat ADHD kids as different from “normals” or we can think of them as us. Dividing children…
Background Knowledge, book promotion, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles
My Writing is My Phrontistery
by Olga Werby •
Phrontistery is an ancient Greek word meaning “a place for thinking.” I love cool words and phrontistery not only feels good on the tongue, but its meaning really appeals to me — it describes a space specifically dedicated to thinking! For many people, bathrooms are a perfect phrontistery. They are for me, too. Showers score high as well. But I think I do my best thinking when I write. With my fingers on the keys, I can clarify my thinking and also discover ideas that must have been hovering around my subconsciousness, ready to be revealed to my eyes through my fingers. Writing is a metaphorical phrontistery for me. And probably in the days when diaries and journals were popular, many others found capturing words in a tangible medium clarified one’s thoughts and opinions on all sorts of matters. Luckily for my friends and family, I write mostly fiction — my phrontistery cleverly hides the true identities of many. Lately, I have been devouring books at a high rate. As a result, my little collection of notes (over a thousands and counting) has been growing. I consider my notes app as part of my phrontistery. I jut down ideas for…
Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles
Witchy Readings
by Olga Werby •
Time flies and it’s October — witchy season is upon us! Fall has always been one of my favorite seasons — the need for a nice sweater and thick blanket, the ability to enjoy a nice fire, the smell of rain in the air, the bright colors of changing leaves. It’s a perfect season. Halloween just makes it doubly so. As a family, we always were into decorating with pumpkins and skeletons and all things spooky. We ran the Carnevil Driveway for a decade, giving away over a hundred pounds of candy in a night. We invited all of our friends and neighbors to participate as creeps (term of art for those employed by a carnival) in full costumes and wearing fun personas as they scared (in a nice way) the little boys and girls that came out to Trick-or-Treat to our door. To this day, our basement in full of decorations: a wall of heads, corpse in a trunk, iron hands holding a severed head, tons of black lights, and thousands of other big and small props that go bump in the night. There were even a few years when we put together two of these — one in…
Cultural Bias, Cultural Differences, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles
Love of Reading
by Olga Werby •
I assume that people who read my newsletters love to read as much as I do. Reading is the best form of escapism. It’s a way of stepping into another life, another world. It can be completely immersive and totally consuming. You can read to match your internal moods or to shift them into a completely different direction. Reading is awesome fun. I’m sorry for those who don’t know this. That said, even some great stories won’t be great for every reader or even be appropriate for a particular time in their lives (or circumstances in the world). I have been reading a lot lately, catching up on the giant pile of books that I acquired during the height of the pandemic but never got around to actually consuming. My pile is still very high, but I did discover some gems and also some books that are simply not for me (or not for me right now). I am getting better at putting those books away partially read — that’s a new skill that I just recently learned. Prior, I felt that I had to read to the last page (appendixes included) once I’ve started a book. Now, I am…
Newsletter, Perception, Pipsqueak Articles
Stress Response
by Olga Werby •
Stress is an actor in all our lives. As we grow up, our stress grows too. We perceive that stress as a sign that we are coping with more than our historical share. Every generation believes that their stress surpasses that of the generation before. So it is probably just an illusion — or delusion. What’s most important is how we cope with stress. Not all stress coping mechanisms are learned. Some are probably encoded — they come for free with our genetics. It can be easier to see these mechanisms in action by observing animals — particularly pets, whose behaviors we know intimately. Take, for example, two very different species that we have had as pets over the years — Terri the tortoise and Kushy the ferret. Terri comes from an ancient lineage of chelonians (Greek word for tortoise), who have walked and swam upon the Earth for hundreds of millions of years. Kushy the ferret is of the Mustelidae family — weasels and skunks. Kushy was a descendant of a domesticated breed of ferrets that first became pets about four thousand years ago. We bought Kushy at a pet store; Terri was a rescue. Terri’s natural habitat is…
book promotion, Cultural Differences, Newsletter, Pipsqueak Articles
Coming-of-age in the Modern World
by Olga Werby •
There is a whole genre of coming-of-age stories — stories that describe a transition from childhood to adulthood. The transition could be fast, forced by some external events, or painfully slow. And sometimes, it might not happen at all — we all know people who we charitably describe as having “arrested development” issues. This is how Wikipedia defines the coming-of-age genre, too, adding: “Coming-of-age stories tend to emphasize dialogue or internal monologue over action, and are often set in the past. The subjects of coming-of-age stories are typically teenagers.” But is it correct to place teenagers as protagonists in coming-of-age books? In Victorian times (1937 to 1901), the female protagonists used to be about fifteen or sixteen — girls of marriageable age! For these children, coming-of-age meant going directly from playing with dolls and right into a marriage bed. Boys were perhaps a bit older, 17, their swords changed from wood to metal over the telling of their coming-of-age stories. Think of The Vicomte De Bragelonne or The Count of Monte Cristo, written in 1847 and 1844, respectively. The young count and Edmond were just teenagers when their stories got started. Edmond got to live to be an old man.…