Category: Life

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Life

Imagine a World with No Spotify Outages

Yesterday, as you may have noticed, Spotify experienced an outage. Over the course of about an hour, tens of thousands of people reported that they were unable to listen to music at all. Spotify fixed the problem. Life continued.

Events like this draw attention to the fact that you do not own anything you stream. Even if you buy – say – a movie on Amazon’s Prime Video, you are reliant on Amazon’s servers to continue providing that content. It might feel alarmist to say that these streaming services might not be around forever, but many of these companies are struggling (although it’s worth mentioning that Spotify’s stock in particular has risen for most of this year.) Spotify laid off a significant portion of its workforce last year, culminating in a final cut in 2023 of 17% of its workforce. It’s trying to run a business that serves a significant portion of the world on around a 30% profit margin.

These days, when streaming is above and away the most common way to watch movies or listen to music, it’s sometimes hard to remember that we used to own the means of playback for our content. If Universal Music Group had an outage of some kind, that would have no impact on your ability to listen to your CDs or watch your Blu-Ray disks. You know what? You can still live in those times today.

I purchase all my music on either iTunes or a platform called Qobuz. Both offer streaming services, but will happily sell you downloadable files which you can then hoard to your heart’s content*. You have those files forever. No one can take them away from you, whether they have a software glitch, the company goes under, or you decide not to pay for their service anymore. My car stereo even has an SD card reader, so when I turn it on, my music starts playing, just like a CD or a cassette, but with 128gb of storage.

In Canada, a Spotify subscription costs $10.99 per month. Do you listen to more than $10.99 worth of music per month? I think I actually average a little more than that, but it’s worth it to me to own the music, not have to deal with Spotify’s horrible app, and to still have access to ad-free music when I’m having a tight month. Is it harder to listen on your phone? Yes. But there are apps for that.

Buying, downloading, and curating music on your own isn’t for everyone, and I get that. I’m not saying everyone should ditch Spotify and go back to the 90’s and early aughts. All I’m saying is that if you want to, especially after the outage yesterday, it’s still possible. And it’s been working pretty well for me.

*On iTunes, you do have to manually find and convert the m4a files to mp3, which is a pain, but not impossible. Also, I’m not sure how long iTunes will actually stick around.

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Life

Feeling Seen with T1D

Type 1 diabetes occupies a weird liminal space between visible and invisible disabilities. If you know what to look for, you can see the insulin pump that’s connected to me at all times. And if you were to touch where my site or sensor are, you’d feel something there. But if you didn’t notice either of those, and I didn’t tell you about it, you’d never know I was any different.

An ex of mine, when we started living together, got to see the process I go through every few days to change my site and sensor. “Wow, that really sucks,” she said. And it surprised me that it felt really good to hear. It feels like you aren’t “supposed” to let people pity you, but I didn’t feel pitied: I felt seen.

Most of the time, I handle diabetes – like we everyone handles their routine, daily struggles – alone and in silence. Most of the people in my life don’t know how much attention I pay to diabetes, how scary it can be, or how exasperatingly unknowable it is. They haven’t experienced the fear of not being able to afford supplies, or the frustration at spending more than $10,000 per year on them even when you can. They haven’t woken up at 3am four nights in a row with an urgent low blood sugar, or been confused as to why their blood sugar is high for a full 24 hours out of the blue.

To be clear, it’s often a lot easier to handle than that. There are many good, normal days. But I can never stop paying attention. And when life gets complicated for other reasons, diabetes is just another plate on the pile with dire consequences for ignoring it.

I wouldn’t want people to say it all the time, and I don’t want this condition to be the only thing people talk about with me, but sometimes, it feels nice to hear from someone with a normal pancreas that diabetes looks really hard to manage.

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Life

Moving a Concrete Block

When you’re burnt out, small obstacles can turn into enormous walls in your mind. When you feel behind, overwhelmed, and out of energy all at once, a task that’s big and important can feel enormous and critical. Something that helps me – and which I often forget to do – is to find a small thing I have the energy for right now that will make progress easier later.

Imagine you’re trying to move a concrete block from one side of a yard to another. It’s small enough that you can lift it, but large enough that moving it takes some effort. And you’re just. so. tired. You need to move the block, but you don’t have it in you right now. You have a few options.

First, you could push yourself and just lift it anyway. Never mind the damage you might do to your body or the lack of respect you’re showing your own needs in this moment. Time waits for no one, and the time is now. Sometimes, we have to do this. Other times, we convince ourselves that we have to for some reason. I think the unhealthy version of this often boils down to trying to prove something to someone in your past who told you that you weren’t good enough. At least, that’s what it usually ends up being for me.

The next option is to put it off completely. The block is just staying there. It’s inevitable. There might be a choice for someone else, but for me? No way. I give up. Again, sometimes this is the right choice. Picking your battles is important and healthy. Maybe the block, on reflection, doesn’t need to get moved as much as you thought it did. Or maybe moving it isn’t as important as other things. Other times though, we bury our heads in the sand because solving the problem seems too overwhelming. Most problems though, big and scary though they might be, have a weakness. Some problems get solved with a single, big, focused effort, and others can’t survive being chipped away at slowly and consistently. One indicator of whether giving up is a good choice is whether you’re walking away or running away. And, if you’re running, why are you running*?

Here’s the other option that I alluded to in the beginning: ask yourself, “What can I do now that will make the problem easier to solve later?” Maybe you can attach handles to the block so that, when you have energy, moving it be just 10% easier. Maybe you can call a friend and ask them to come help move the block next Tuesday. Or maybe it’s easier to cut the block up and move it in pieces.

Critically, you aren’t using this newfound approach as a way to force yourself to move the block now. You’re finding a small thing you can do now that will make it easier later once you’ve recovered.

*A quick note about running away: Some people will tell you that you should never run away from a situation, unless you are running toward something else. This absolute statement isn’t always true. People who truly believe this would be eaten by a tiger or crushed by a falling building as they calmly looked around for somewhere better to be. While it’s true that it’s often better to be proactive than reactive, if the situation you find yourself in is unhealthy or dangerous – be it physically or emotionally – running might absolutely be the right way to go.

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Life

Writing as a Tool for Thought

We tend to think of writing primarily as a tool for communication. And, to be honest, it is primarily a tool for communication. Maybe communication to someone else, maybe communication to a version of you or someone else in the future (i.e. record-keeping), but we write things down – mainly – in lieu of saying them face-to-face. But I think we sometimes overlook writing’s usefulness as a tool for refined thinking and problem-solving.

The easiest in-road for this idea is journaling. Journaling is having a moment right now, and for good reason: it helps. I don’t have a study to link here (you can search for it if you’re curious), but I can say, anecdotally, that journaling is very helpful for me, personally. Have you ever had the experience of explaining a problem to someone and just hearing yourself say it out loud, you come up with the solution? Journaling is kind of like that sometimes, with the added benefit that you can go back and look over what you’ve written.

But writing isn’t just a tool for thought in the sphere of mental health. When I’m starting a big, complex project for my company or for my day job, I often start with a document. I write out the objectives, I write out the unknowns, I list the options, and anything else that seems relevant to the project. Often, I’m the only one that reads them, but that’s enough. Because writing is a thinking tool.

There’s something magical that happens when you write down (and, critically, revise) an idea. It’s like having a conversation with yourself. Ideas that sounded perfect in your head, when they transition into the reality of the written word, reveal some of their flaws. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that writing – at least, good writing – requires you to take the perspective of the reader, so in a way, you have to imagine and account for the feedback given by other people. Or maybe it’s just the fact that seeing the ideas all in one place allows you to organize your thoughts better.

When I write a plan, in an exercise that often appears needlessly bureaucratic and red-tape-y, I don’t spend most of the time editing: I spend most of the time revising. I write, rewrite, delete, and move around sentences and sections until the document in front of me contains the most complete and succinct version of the idea I can create. As I’m writing, new ideas usually occur to me that were either missing from the original plan or that would make it better. Then, I put the document down for a while. I walk away, do something else, and give the paper (often digital paper, these days) and the ideas on it some time to age. I give myself some time to age too. When I come back with fresh eyes, there are some inevitably some changes I want to make. You miss out on all that evolution if you just rush into a project without writing.

I suggest you try it. The next time you’re trying to do something that you can’t quite wrap your mind around, write it down. Write down all the options you’ve considered, and why you picked the one you’ve picked. Organize it into sections. Then edit. Try to make it as clear as possible. And see what happens.

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Life

Inevitability

There are a lot of things today that feel inevitable. Climate Change, the widespread integration of AI into our daily lives, the constant mining of our private data with or without our consent, the rich getting richer – it all feels like too much sometimes. It can feel like we’re moving inexorably toward disaster, so why bother? One of the favourite retorts to someone dreaming of or yearning for a better world is “The real world just doesn’t work that way.”

The problem is, we don’t live in the “real” world. We haven’t for a long time. Where once we lived in huts in the plains hunting for food and huddling together for safety and comfort, we now live in a world of buildings and roads and laws and corporations and governments. Our lives are more heavily influenced by the trends of the economy – an artificial system which we created – than they are by some tiger lurking around the corner. This isn’t the “real” world. This is a world that we made and which we continue to shape with our actions.

We get to decide what our world looks like to a great extend. Every day, we have a choice. Sure, my choice doesn’t matter that much. But if you can find some other people and convince them to make the same choice, then you’ve got a movement on your hands.

The argument that forming a movement is the best way to change the world isn’t a new one, and it’s not what I want to highlight here. I want to put a spotlight on all the people saying that change can’t happen or that something – AI, erosion of data privacy, the rich getting richer – is simply a fact of life. There are, in my opinion, three kinds of those people: People who want you to accept the status quo, people who want you to accept the specific way they are changing the status quo, and people who have given up. The first two categories contain people who stand to benefit, either from the way things are or the way they want them to be. By telling you that what they want is inevitable, they’re trying to take away your ability to choose. Don’t let them.

The last category, people who have given up, is full of people who don’t have any fight left. And I think there are a lot of those these days. This is an overwhelming moment in human history. There’s so much going on all the time, and we get to see and hear all of it. Our phones always have more notifications to deal with, there’s always more news, and there are always more e-mails. Our brains are constantly bombarded by things to sort through that calmness and stability feel unattainable. The moments of reflection that we need to be at peace are robbed from us, filled with things that behave as if they’re urgent.

It’s not just the demands of phantom notifications that keeps us busy though. The housing crisis, the job market, the loneliness epidemic – there’s a lot to deal with right now. How can I choose a different world when I can’t even choose where I live or how long I’ll live there? How can I work to affect change when layoffs are rampant and I’m already stretched financially? And where do we get the emotional energy to solve anything when the social structures that keep us alive have been eroding since the 60’s, made even worse by social media platforms that prioritize and encourage social division?

I don’t have a big, sweeping, revolutionary change for you. But we all make small choices every day. When we use social media for personal use, we’re agreeing to let these companies mine our data and use it however they like. This isn’t an implicit choice, it’s explicit: you agreed to the terms of service. When we don’t write and call our leaders to show them our pain and let them know that their performance will be judged come election time, that’s a choice to accept the status quo.

What things in your life do you accept as inevitable? How can you make different choices?

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Life

Absolute Directives

I’m always suspicious of directives that are all-encompassing and absolute – Do this. Don’t do that. Always do this. Never do that – when they come with no accompanying rationale or context. It’s hard to decide whether you agree or disagree with a statement unless it’s backed up with an explanation.

Why does the person telling me this believe it’s true? Why do they believe it’s true for me? In what situations does it apply? In what situations doesn’t it apply? And what is the consequence if it happens anyway?

Warning labels often fit into this category, despite having good intentions. “Do not drink alcohol while taking this medication.” “Only use as intended.” “Do not mix with….” These are important instructions, but the lack of accompanying information creates a pocket of danger: what is the result if it happens anyway? If you decide to drink alcohol while on the medication against the advice, or if you failed to understand the product directions, or if the product actually does get mixed with whatever… what happens then? What do I do to fix it? How bad is the outcome?

I think sometimes this information is left out because of liability concerns, or because the person writing the label thinks that, if we know the consequences, we’ll decide they aren’t that bad and do them anyway. But managing risk is an important part of life, and how do you manage risk if you don’t have all the available information?

The reality is, while many people will blindly follow the directions (if they read them at all), a lot of other people will say “forget it” and do it anyway if it’s important enough to them. And since they don’t know what problems to look out for, they can’t plan for the risks they’re assuming. They’re going in blind, and that’s dangerous.