Squaring Up

David Ryan

David Ryan is a boat builder and USCG licensed master captain. He is the owner of Sailing Montauk and skipper of Montauk''s charter sailing catamaran MON TIKI You can follow him on Twitter @CaptDavidRyan

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6 Responses

  1. Rufus F. says:

    Aside from the occasional guilty feeling of personal laziness, I’m really enjoying these posts.Report

    • Tod Kelly in reply to Rufus F. says:

      This.  I like living vicariously through David, but there is this constant sad reminder that I have a relatively hard time getting motivated to simply clean my garage.Report

      • Rufus F. in reply to Tod Kelly says:

        It’s funny. I’m singing in two bands, writing a dissertation, blogging, and teaching my own new course, and still I think, “Well, it’s not like I’m building a boat!”Report

        • Tod Kelly in reply to Rufus F. says:

          Oy.  I’m on the lazy-ass far end of the people lamenting they’re lazy thread.Report

        • David Ryan in reply to Rufus F. says:

          Rufus, Tod,

          You may remember back in Part 2 of my Thermomixed Up series this quote from Megan McArdle:

          There is, of course, the joy of acquisition.  And why give that short shrift?  The high may be temporary, but the same is true of climbing a mountain.  Why valorize one over the other?

          And this one from Part 1:

          One of the running themes of the economist Robin Hanson’s excellent blog is that arguments like the ones found in these books are actually an elite-status proxy war. They denigrate the one measure of high-visibility achievement—income—that public intellectuals don’t do very well on. Reading “Shiny Objects,” you get the feeling that he is onto something.

          And this quote from Reihan Salam in my Sarong… post:

          “[W]e are in a sense living through a cultural war in which some who’ve chosen, say, more leisure and prestige are waging a symbolic struggle against those who’ve chosen more income — the object is to devalue the accumulation of material possessions, to characterize it as “greedy,”…

          This build is the longest time that I’ve had a regular schedule in my entire life since high school; 8AM till 4PM or later, Monday through Friday.

          One of the unexpected benefits of having a regular schedule is that I don’t waste nearly as much time or emotional energy worrying about whether or not I’m spending my non-building time productively. If I want to watch TV, I watch TV. If I want to write blog posts, I write blog posts. No wondering if I should be doing something else.

          The other benefit, and one I’ve long known about, is that working on boats (or mowing the lawn) leaves a lot of room for thinking about things while you work. While we work, we talk about “stuff” or even just doing repetitive work and ruminating.

          So far that’s taken me through Greed, Envy, and now Sloth. No doubt Pride will soon make an appearance.Report