Status Updates From Dedicated: The Case for Com...

I enjoyed my reading much more today. I suppose I just wasn't in the right headspace. Should stick to novels and for my "just before lights out" reading!

As someone who has enormous difficulty sticking with things, I am definitely interested in the premise, but I'm finding the writing quite tedious, so far. It feels like an endless parade of short quotes or references with a few sentences around them, the repetition of this pattern taking me out of the narrative. It rather feels like something I might write. Still, it's early days.

Read Chapter 13, 'The Flood and the Forest'. Honestly was rather repetitive; I guess near the end of the book it's trying to bring it all together a bit, but I could have done without it, especially given that there's another (admittedly small) concluding chapter still to come.

Read Chapter 12 about education and profession, advancement versus attachment. My opinion is a balance between liking change and broad orientation on the one hand, and disliking distance, careerism and indifference. I don't want to spend my whole life on one thing, but nor do I want to feel like it doesn't matter how I perform because I'm just going to change course, anyway. Thankfully, that balance seems doable.

Finished Chapter 11, about honor and the willingness to espouse a sense of morality rather than being neutral about things to avoid disagreements or limiting one another's freedom of choice.

Read Chapter 10 about financialization, liquefaction, commodification, commoditization. This book is more politically engaged than Range, and I find myself agreeing with part of this at least. It's complicated, because I don't necessarily like the focus on tradition and the indictment on people changing things in their lives (simplification for space), but I agree with the importance of solid local connections.

“Commitment is the first step towards changing the world — and our fears of commitment are standing in the way of jumping in” p. 17

“Commitments are relationships, and relationships are like living things…When the life has gone out of a commitment, it’s no longer a relationship—it’s a dead rule.”