How to Leave No Trace

Do things like the gatekeepers tell you to do them. Think in the ways your textbooks teach you. Write about what everybody writes about. Comment on big blogs only. Retweet the usual influencers. Please a huge audience. Don’t try to be original, and if you do, be original in a foreseeable manner.

Also, lick everybody’s ass a lot, because maybe one day you’ll need a favor.

The Idle Musings are short posts of 300 words maximum. They are published on The Friendly Anarchist every other Tuesday. Grab the RSS feed to get them right into your reader.

“It’s all about Creating Opportunities” (Interview with Pieter D.)

I am very happy to present you the first Friendly Anarchistic Interview with Belgium employee, politician, entrepreneur, social activist and hardcore vacationer Pieter D.!

I met Pieter earlier this year during my Amazon trip, and was fascinated by his strategies to reduce unpleasant work and maximize time for his personal projects and travels. As opposed to anti-employment strategies, Pieter not only manages to have a secure job, but also to follow his passions. By knowing the rules and bending them, he is able to take several months of vacations each year, while perfectly fulfilling his duties on the job. For me, Pieter’s approach is a great example of real-life lifestyle design. He does not care about fame and money, but about broadening his horizon and helping others. Without further remarks, let’s jump into the interview we did during the last weeks by mail.

Pieter, thanks for sharing your experiences and strategies with the readers of The Friendly Anarchist! First of all, a quick question about your pay job: What are you doing to make money?

I have a 9-5 office job in a government department, but in contrast to a lot of younger colleagues I don’t have a career plan or great ambitions to work myself up to a higher position. I participate in courses and tests, but I don’t feel like joining the rat race of making career, paying a mortgage for a house, having a big car, etc. My ambition is to create opportunities for other people and to make a small diffirence in this world with my projects.

So while being a full-time employee, how many weeks of vacations did you have in the last year, and how did you use them?

In 2009 I had 18 weeks of vacation and 3 months of  sabbatical leave. In Belgium, the latter can be taken for a minimum of 3 months and a maximum of 6 years during your career. In that period you still get paid some €335 each month.
I like to use my time for traveling. In 2008, I went one month on a trip to Brazil, Argentina and Paraguay, 2 weeks to Ghana and 1 month to Zambia, Botswana, Namibia and South Africa. From November 2008 until January 2009 I spent my sabbatical in Ghana to start with the construction of a Community Center with an NGO I co-founded.
After that, I spent one month of 2009 traveling in Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay and one month in Costa Rica, Nicaragua and Panama. Apart from that, I also took several city trips within Europe.

As far as I know, you are not a millionaire. So what’s your secret to be able to finance these large vacations and travels?

The most important thing is the way of traveling. I search on the internet for cheap plane tickets, and I travel just with a backpack and look for cheap places to stay and eat. For example, during my last trip to Central America I spent an average of €36 a day for sleeping, eating, drinking and transport.
Another reason is that I saved a lot of money during the years that I didn’t travel. Also, since a few years, I live temporarily back in the house of my family. That is giving me the opportunity to save a lot of money. In Europe it is not very common to live like that. I am taking advantage of my current situation to travel, because in my opinion “to travel is to experience life” and I understand it as my walk to destiny.

This sounds really intriguing. I think it’s what happens to a lot of travelers – once you’re out there, you don’t wanna stop anymore. As for your “walk to destiny”, where did it lead you? You are very active in a lot of ways: Apart from your full-time job, you’re involved in local politics and in development aid. Could you talk a bit about that?

I don’t know what the destination of my walk will be, but one thing that changed my life is my encounter with Africa and the project that was the result of it.

In 2005 I was traveling through Ghana when I met Natty Johnson, a rasta guy who was making drums. At the bar, with a view at the Atlantic Ocean, we talked about a lot of things and about business. The guy had a lot of ambition but didn’t have the chances, so I decided to try to sell drums in Belgium for him. I created an opportunity and from that moment the project was started.

In 2006 I began importing drums and other musical instruments to Belgium. In 2007 we got the idea to connect the business with a social project. I made the plans and in march 2008 we bought materials and the first stones of what will become a Community Center in Ghana.

In November 2008 I went for 3 months to the country – already my fifth visit – and launched the construction of the foundation of the Community Center in the village of Adoteiman (northern Accra). The goal of this project on the one hand is to provide medical first-aid material, mosquito nets for malaria, and contraceptives for AIDS prevention. On the other hand the center is aiming to become a meeting point for children and young people who want to develop their artistic, dance, drum and sport skills. Besides that we want to give young people the chance to do volunteer work in the villages and schools. It’s all about creating oppertunities.

In January 2009 I registered my own NGO in Ghana, The Bimbi Foundation. Bimbi is the village in Congo were my grandparents lived in 1957 for 3 years. Also my mother went to school over there. It’s a symbolic gesture and a link between Africa and my family. In the last week of my stay in Ghana I organized the visit of a member of the Belgian parliament, Rudi Daems, a television-crew and some newspaper reporters concerning the illegal e-waste dumping. Because it’s a long story to tell it is better to watch the documentation “E-waste from Antwerp to Ghana”.

My political commitment started when I was 18 years old in 1997 as president of the young liberals. In 2000 I was elected as the youngest member of the City Council and re-elected in 2006. In 2003 and 2004 I worked for the Minister of Justice and the Minister of Development Cooperation.

What are you fighting for in Belgium politics?

An important cause in my political career is the local heritage. In 1998 I gathered 2000 signatures to stop the construction of a big building in the middle of the city center just in front of an ancient little castle and its park. The protest didn’t help. The majority pushed through and the building is now spoiling the heart of the town. This year I was successful and could prevent the destruction of an old brewery. The government declared it a historic monument and now the City Council has to renovate it.

Recently the majority in the City Council called me a communist. I tried to save an other old building from destruction because of the historical value. But the building is private property and it’s not very liberal to ask for government protection for a private building but my opinion is that you can’t build a future if you don’t respect the past. These old buildings give the city a soul.

And what are the next steps on your “walk to destiny”? Any clear plans yet?

My next step on my “walk to destiny” is to connect my project with another project in Latin America and one in Asia. I am sure one day I will find that connection. It’s only a matter of time.

As for traveling, I will make some trips to Cuba, Ghana, India, Nepal and maybe Colombia, Syria and Jordan.

Some people believe in coincidence but I am not. Everything has a meaning and nothing happens like that. Some people are crossing your path of life and some people travel with you on that journey, sometimes for a while and sometimes they stay.

With so many activities in addition to your pay job, what are your plans in relation to that? Do you want to stay employed as long as possible, or are you thinking about leaving your job one day and focus entirely on the other issues?

I have been given civil-servant status in my current job and thus can work for the government until my pension. I can change my department if I want to. But you never know what the future will bring. In my current position I still can take more than five years of paid and two years of unpaid sabbaticals. So, there are still a lot of opputinities to do and for me the present is important.

Most people spend so much time focusing on the future that they forget that their life is happening right now. It is like Mark Twain said: “Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did do. So throw off the bowlines, sail away from the safe harbor. Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.”

Thank you very much for the interview, Pieter, and all the best for your current and future projects!

Beyond Lifestyle Design

We are living in a world of buzz words. To get some fame and make a bunch of money, your “lifestyle” should be “cool”, and by “designing” it, you’re aiming to be part of a “clique” that wouldn’t mind working more than four hours a week.

See the words in quotes? Maybe it would be helpful to just forget about them and to take an approach to lifestyle design that goes beyond the gadgetry and marketing buzz that much of traditional and social media like to advocate.

In reality, lifestyle design isn’t so much about adventurous traveling and beautiful girls and ceaseless twittering and expensive phones. While all this may be part of your personal way of life, lifestyle design could be so much more, if we had higher ambitions: It could help to convert everybody’s lives into something bigger, building upon the best that both history and science fiction have to offer. It could connect art and everyday life, protest and support, happiness and anger, activism and idling, creativity and freedom. Most importantly: Lifestyle design could reach more and more people. New people. People that never knew about lifestyles and coolness and design and cliques. And about the options they have.

The goal of lifestyle design should be breaking boundaries, not cashing checks.

The Idle Musings are short posts of 300 words maximum. They are published on The Friendly Anarchist every other Tuesday. Grab the RSS feed to get them right into your reader.

How Being Idle Helped Me to Be a Better Programmer

I’m excited to present the first friendly anarchistic guest post on this site! It was written by Oscar Del Ben who writes about personal development and productivity over at FreestyleMind. You absolutely should visit his website and subscribe to his RSS Feed. For The Friendly Anarchist, Oscar writes about how smart idling may lead to better results in the work of a programmer.

When we hear the word idle, we often think at laziness, undoing things, etc. But being idle is not necessary a bad thing, and in this article I want to share my experience of how being idle helped me to be a better programmer.

There’s a famous principle in programming called “Don’t repeat yourself”, or DRY. This principle states that if you have already written a function to accomplish a task, you shouldn’t write it again to solve a very similar problem – instead you should use a higher level function that does the job for both scenarios.

For non programmers, we can give another definition of DRY, which is more general: Don’t repeat what you already did.

In general, you are considered a better programmer if you can write something that works well and can adapt to change, and DRY is often the easier way to achieve that state. Now, the DRY principle may be one of the most important things you’ll ever learn, and programming is just one area when we can apply it.

For example I have many websites and I need to do a backup of them every day. Usually you just log into each server and download a backup of the database and of the application files. This is a time consuming task, so I’ve written a program that does it for me. Even better, the program saves the backups with the date in the filename, so I can go back in time if I need to. Now I only need to run a command to have a full backup of all my websites. This is smart idle.

But as I said, DRY is not limited to programming. For example, if you leave lots of blog comments, you should consider the use of a plugin that automatically fills your name, URL and email address in the comment area. I use a program called Text Expander on the Mac, which works as a text replacer. For example, if I type “bxxx” then the program will automatically replace it with my blog address. You can use this program for a lot of other situations.

If you learn to apply the DRY principle, you’ll accomplish a lot of tasks that were only eating your time. I believe that we should focus on creating new things, and not on maintaining what we did previously, and here’s where DRY comes to help.

Illustration based on a photo by Giorgio Montersino.

Idleness and Action: A How-To

This article was written after my good friend Philipp wrote me the following lines about The Friendly Anarchist: “At first, I found [your posts to be] contradictory. You’re writing about the benefits of idleness on the one hand, and then about how good it feels to do something at all. So what is your point? Do nothing or do something? I don’t know, but I suppose you mean exactly the TWO of them.”
Philipp is absolutely right with the points he makes: My writings may look paradoxical. Yet it’s exactly that paradox and the combination of idleness and action that I’m after.

Idleness in a World on Speed

Idleness is evil. At least, that’s the impression you get when talking to most people nowadays. We are living in a world of speed: Full-time productivity and ever-continuing growth are our central objectives to thrive and make a living. Thus, we have to avoid idleness, and by all means we have to avoid its sinister cousin, procrastination.
At first, this sounds like a typical big boss invention: Doing nothing and putting things off is a bad thing. Hell, who doesn’t enjoy some water cooler talk in the office or twittering a bit instead of doing whatever your employer wants you to do? The problem is, we hear this depreciation of idleness and procrastination way too often – so we internalize it to the point that it becomes something we earnestly believe in. And of course, this perception is fomented by 21st century witch doctors telling us everything will be fine if we pay attention to their magic spells and buy their productivity books.

But there are some people challenging this mindset. What I call idleness can be found under a lot of different names and labels, and is even related to areas one wouldn’t think of at first: Take the slow food movement or, as a reader told me, permaculture and its “laziness principle” in optimizing agriculture.

Idlers may be underrepresentated in the public, but not in the populace. The reason for this is probably that we don’t care too much about putting ourselves up on a stage. On the one hand, in the actual climate public support for idleness might put our jobs in danger; on the other, for many idlers, it’s just… well, too much work. As I recently reblogged over at the Friendlyanarchistumblr: “20% of people identify themselves as chronic procrastinators. That number would be higher, except that most procrastinators can’t get around to participating in the poll.”

The thing is, idlers are not generally doing nothing. While I strongly advocate lying in bed til noon or celebrating mondays with a bunch of friends on the beach instead of sitting in an office, I wouldn’t want to do that every day, every hour, for all my life. Most idlers wouldn’t.

The Active Idler

While idlers don’t feel bad relaxing, looking at clouds, daydreaming and generally doing nothing, we don’t do nothing all the time – we also know when to start doing stuff, and how to do it efficiently. We won’t probably get moving on Monday mornings at 8am just to please the system. But then, maybe we would. Or we would prefer a Thursday afternoon or a nightshift on the weekend. We’ll find the appropriate moment.

The core of idleness, at least for me, is not doing nothing, but avoiding stupid work. While your mileage may vary, stupid work for me has a lot to do with filling out forms, storing documents in large manila folders and sitting in neon-lit meeting rooms with a bunch of badly-dressed office clerks. I just don’t enjoy that stuff and generally don’t consider it a good use of my time.
But I know I cannot fight the system always. So when bureaucracy turns its ugly head towards me, I better fill out that form or they’ll lock me away as an enemy of the state. So yeah, I’ll get active. I’ll do it. But I won’t care any more than necessary. I do the ugly stuff I have to do, but I avoid it where I can.

It’s completely different when it’s about stuff I like. I have no problem to sit down and write a blogpost or paint a picture or do a portrait photo session or sit down to explain the history of Colombia or the philosophy of myth to interested people. I can spend hours analyzing and discussing what’s happening in international politics or writing a decent paper. I won’t do that all the time either, but it’s certainly nothing I would ever escape from. While useless tasks suck energy from me, taking action in my passions gives me this energy back. While there is a time for idleness, there’s also a time to get moving!

Idleness and Action in Real Life

Now, how can we integrate both sides of the coin into our lifes?
In my opinion, there are five basic steps to become an active idler.

1) Begin with being idle. We are moving way too fast nowadays. Don’t fall into that trap. Instead, just like Idler Mouse deep down in the bucket of cream, first take some time to evaluate your situation. Don’t just start doing tasks that are thrown at you. Better, use the idle approach to get clear about what you want to do, what you have to do, and what stupid tasks you can avoid.

2) After that, enjoy the Magic of Getting Started. Don’t think about it anymore, but enter “Do Mode” and enjoy the adrenaline rush that will be released into your body. Whatever there is to be done, do it right and do it now.

3) Avoid perfectionism and finish things. Especially with stupid but unavoidable tasks, nothing will prevent you more from attaining the peace of mind of an active idler than being a perfectionist. (I struggle with this a lot, so I know what I’m talking about.) If you strive for perfection, you will never get your things done and you won’t be able to relax at the beach, neither. So just finish whatever you have or want to do – or at least reach a milestone – and then enter “Idle Mode” again.

4) Limit your action time. Parkinson was right: The more time you have for finishing a task, the longer you’ll need. One of the best ways to avoid the problems of perfectionism mentioned above, is to consciously limit your time for any given duty. If you have an appointment to meet a friend for lunch and go swimming afterwards, you will be able to finish the task at hand in the morning, just to be able to get out with peace of mind.

5) End with being idle. The task is done. You may think about the next thing to do, but don’t forget to relax. Meet that friend, read that novel, visit that park, play with that dog. After all, nobody wants you to get a stroke, so don’t forget this part!

Following this strategy has turned out pretty useful for me. Stress gets reduced, focussing becomes easier, sitting at the beach without remorse feels great. What about you? Ready to become an active idler by finishing the stuff at hand and then just relax for the rest of the day? Go for it!