My research on remote work and four-day workweeks studies alternatives to the usual way of working. Doing that work, I came to see the question underneath it: what kind of work do people want, and do employers and society make room for it? And beneath that lies a larger question, one that ties this work together: what kind of life do people hope to live, what do they think is possible, and what place does work have in it? My research on the meaning of work takes up this question most directly, and so does a new seminar I will teach in spring 2027, A Self of One’s Own.
The question is also a personal one. For years, I read mostly to learn how to do my work well. Then I began to wonder what my own work was for. Looking for an answer led me to many of the readings below, and later to Vipassana meditation. Vipassana trains attention on bodily sensation rather than on thoughts, feelings, or stories, and it asks me to meet each sensation with equanimity. Meditation has not given me a clear answer, but it has set me on the way toward one. Along the way, I have come to see how much of experience goes unspoken, and how much of it we do not know, or do not know that we do not know. The readings below are some of what I met on that way, listed in the order I read them. Each changed something in me, if only a little.
2012
Getting Things Done— David Allen
It changed how I handle the whole flow of work. Ever since, my tasks have lived in a system I trust rather than in my head.
I found this while writing my dissertation. It took the mystery out of writing: a paper is no more than a few dozen paragraphs, each doing one thing, strung together. Seeing it that way made writing manageable, and it was a great relief.
From Writing Process Reengineering
Scholarly prose is composed in paragraphs. … Given a little training, you can compose a paragraph about anything you know in about half an hour.
2016
Deep Work— Cal Newport
Newport showed me that not all work is equal. The work that matters most needs long, dedicated stretches of time, and we have only a few hours a day for it, so working longer does not mean working better. He also made me braver about saying no to what distracts me.
The Art of Loving— Erich Fromm
Fromm changed how I understand love: not a feeling for one person, but an attitude toward the world as a whole, and a capacity one learns and practices.
From The Art of Loving
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love.
2020
Man's Search for Meaning— Viktor E. Frankl
I read it during the pandemic, when it felt especially fitting. Looking back, I think the book planted a seed, an interest in the question of meaning that I have slowly followed since.
From Man's Search for Meaning
Live as if you were living already for the second time and as if you had acted the first time as wrongly as you are about to act now!
From “Logotherapy in a Nutshell,” the second part of the book.
Siddhartha— Hermann Hesse
I had a vague sense that experience matters. Siddhartha made it clear: you do not really know something until you have lived it, until you have run up against the world yourself.
Since then I have read most of Hesse’s novels, among them Demian, Steppenwolf, and The Glass Bead Game. Of these, Demian is the one I love most, at least for now.
From Siddhartha
“When someone is seeking,” said Siddhartha, “it happens quite easily that he only sees the thing that he is seeking; that he is unable to find anything, unable to absorb anything, because he is only thinking of the thing he is seeking, because he has a goal, because he is obsessed with his goal. Seeking means: to have a goal; but finding means: to be free, to be receptive, to have no goal.”
Translated by Hilda Rosner.
2021
Making the Familiar Unfamiliar— Zygmunt Bauman, in conversation with Peter Haffner
Bauman had a rare gift for naming what is hard to name: the moods and undercurrents that run beneath the surface of a fluid, unsettled (post)modern world. Reading him, I saw what sociology can do at its best.
Work hard. A painter creates a work of art, a mathematician solves a problem, a gardener plants and watches things bloom and bear fruit. That is happiness. You have to create something. … Pride in a job well done, finishing a task, overcoming what looked like an insurmountable obstacle—all of this makes us happy. Everyone longs for it deep down. Today we have lost the joy in our own work, the pleasure of doing something well.
From the Chinese edition I read; English translation by Claude (AI).
2023
Letters to a Young Poet— Rainer Maria Rilke
I give a copy to each graduate student I advise. Feng Zhi’s Chinese translation opens with his own preface, which I love.
From Rilke’s fourth letter, in Feng Zhi’s translation
You are so young, all still lies ahead of you, and I should like to ask you, as best I can, dear Sir, to be patient towards all that is unresolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms, like books written in a foreign tongue. Do not now strive to uncover answers: they cannot be given you because you have not been able to live them. And what matters is to live everything. Live the questions for now. Perhaps then you will gradually, without noticing it, live your way into the answer, one distant day in the future.
People like to compare youth to spring, and the comparison is apt. Yet the likeness lies less in youth's brightness, like the radiance of the spring sun, than in another side: the sorrows of youth, and its growing, are more like a spring that unfolds through overcast wind, rain, and cold.
English translation by Claude (AI).
2024
Mimetic desire— René Girard, as I first heard it from Zhu Rui
I first met Girard’s idea through Zhu Rui, a philosopher at Renmin University, where I studied, who kept teaching while he was dying of cancer. A boy does not want a toy car until his sister reaches for it. Since then, I keep asking how much of what I want, including what I want from work, I learned by watching what others want.
For Girard, the lesson here is a mechanism of desire shared by adults and children alike: most of our desires are produced by imitating others. The boy did not want the car to begin with; he wants it because his sister wants it. The same goes for the girl. When we do not know what we want, when desire comes loose from the worth of things, some quite arbitrary outside trigger can set off a conflict of desires, even a war.
As I noted it down; English translation by Claude (AI).
Worth reading whole. Among the many things that stayed with me: his “Great Thoughts Time,” and his habit of thinking a problem through himself before looking at anyone else’s answers.
From You and Your Research
If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one.
心的表达[Expressions of the Heart]— 李沁云 Li Qinyun
A therapist’s account of her own years in analysis and training. I read it with my own life in view, stopping at nearly every idea to ask whether it described me. What stayed with me was the idea of reclaiming the unlived parts of a life: pieces of the past we never fully lived, which keep surfacing until we take them back as our own.
Ogden later proposed that psychoanalysis is a process in which the analyst helps the patient “reclaim the unlived life.” His English word, reclaim, means more than “recover”: it carries the sense of asserting ownership over something once again. … This work of integration amounts to living again—openly, consciously, and fully—the fragments and even whole stretches of life that were never really lived, usually because the paths of feeling were blocked, so that they truly become part of one’s own experience. From then on, they no longer surface only from the dark corners of the mind, leaving us afraid, shaken, or overcome with grief without knowing why.
English translation by Claude (AI).
Existential Psychotherapy— Irvin D. Yalom
I put off this long book for years. When I finally opened it, at a time I needed it, I could not stop. It gave me names for four givens of existence—death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness—and a way to see how much of our anxiety comes from facing them.
Since then I have read most of Yalom’s books, among them When Nietzsche Wept, The Schopenhauer Cure, and Staring at the Sun.
The existential view stresses a different kind of basic conflict: neither a struggle with repressed instincts nor one with internalized adults, but a conflict that arises when the individual confronts the givens of existence. … This book deals with four ultimate concerns: death, freedom, isolation, and meaninglessness.
From the Chinese edition I read; English translation by Claude (AI).
The Death of Ivan Ilyich— Leo Tolstoy
As he is dying, Ivan Ilyich begins to suspect he has lived the wrong life. Reading it, I came down with a mild case of what Yalom would call death anxiety.
From The Death of Ivan Ilyich
“Maybe I did not live as I ought to have done,” it suddenly occurred to him. “But how could that be, when I did everything properly?” he replied, and immediately dismissed from his mind this, the sole solution of all the riddles of life and death, as something quite impossible.
The resource that helped me most in building AI into my daily work.
Alienation and Acceleration— Hartmut Rosa
Rosa does not pretend to be value-neutral. Behind his account of a world that keeps speeding up is a clear idea of what a good society would be, which he later works out in Resonance: one that makes room for a relationship in which people and the world answer each other.
From Alienation and Acceleration
Hence, modern subjects can be described as minimally restricted by ethical rules and sanctions, and therefore as ‘free,’ while they are tightly regulated, dominated and suppressed by a largely invisible, de-politicized, undiscussed, under-theorized and unarticulated time-regime.
The Ethics of Authenticity— Charles Taylor
I have long been skeptical of “follow your heart.” Taylor did not change my mind about it, but he showed me where the real problem lies. Being true to oneself is a genuine ideal, he argues; it goes wrong when it cuts itself off from anything that matters beyond the self.
From The Ethics of Authenticity
I can define my identity only against the background of things that matter. But to bracket out history, nature, society, the demands of solidarity, everything but what I find in myself, would be to eliminate all candidates for what matters. … Authenticity is not the enemy of demands that emanate from beyond the self; it supposes such demands.