Don't just do something — stand there!
On prestige, quitting and Argentina's debt crisis
Several years ago, I developed a terrible habit. Unaccustomed to actually liking my job, I would routinely apply for roles I didn’t want. For sure, part of the problem was ego. Despite having something close to the perfect arrangement — autonomy, creativity and the unofficial right to disappear home in the afternoons — I’d spot lesser jobs at more prestigious newspapers and feel compelled to fill out a form. Like some 1980s horror film featuring a renegade DocuSign update.
It was odd, because I’d done my time at high-status institutions doing spectacularly tedious tasks. Tell someone you work at the Treasury and it sounds impressive — certainly more so than the Wales Office. But there are few things more hollow, more bruising to one’s sense of self than the gap between how something looks, and what it is like in reality.
And while I have no doubt regressed across multiple dimensions in the intervening period, I have at least learned to quit, even when I’m behind. I often reach for one of my favourite inverted aphorisms1: “Don’t just do something. Stand there.” The urge to act, the compulsion to fix, the desire to submit an application — these are all forms of avoidance. A ploy to deny the uncomfortable possibility that nothing needs to change.
I’ll be honest with you. This was meant to be a brief intro for one of those mini review newsletters, with a particular focus on books and TV that I was supposed to like but stopped reading and watching. Yeah, it’s been a rough week/two-and-a-half years and things kind of got out of hand. I can’t help constructing anecdotal bridges that threaten to collapse under the slightest evidential weight. Nevertheless, here we go:
Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!
Richard Feynman was to physics what Bugs Bunny was to baseball, specifically the short where Bugs takes on an entire professional team by playing virtually every position. Feynman was present at Los Alamos for the Manhattan Project, involved in the Challenger space shuttle disaster investigation2, won the Nobel Prize for his work on quantum electrodynamics and helped establish modern particle physics as a computable field3.
He was also a renowned storyteller, able to communicate complex ideas using simple language without ever dumbing down. There’s a reason why, if you can name only one non-Einstein physicist, it’s probably Feynman. So I downloaded the audiobook (actually, I downloaded it over a decade ago) hoping for some of that famous Feynman philosophical charity.
Instead, the reader is subjected to endless edited anecdotes (I know I’m one to talk but it was almost like those headache-inducing jump-cut YouTube videos) which lurch between unrelated topics, with an assumed interest in the man rather than the ideas. Look, if you’re pre-disposed to be charmed by 1950s academic culture and the novelty of the quirky scientist, just accept you have given up on life and stream The Big Bang Theory instead.
