Burnin’

It’s not often that I find something profound in the pages of The Wall Street Journal. But today I did.

…emailing at this frantic rate, is pleasing very few of us. It is encroaching on parts of our lives that should be separate or sacred, altering our minds and our ability to know our world, encouraging a further distancing from our bodies and our natures and our communities. We can change this; we have to change it. Of course email is good for many things; that has never been in dispute. But we need to learn to use it far more sparingly, with far less dependency, if we are to gain control of our lives.

In the past two decades, we have witnessed one of the greatest breakdowns of the barrier between our work and per­sonal lives since the notion of leisure time emerged in Victorian Britain as a result of the Industrial Age. It has put us under great physical and mental strain, altering our brain chemistry and daily needs. It has isolated us from the people with whom we live, siphoning us away from real-world places where we gather. It has encouraged flotillas of unnecessary jabbering, making it difficult to tell signal from noise. It has made it more difficult to read slowly and enjoy it, hastening the already declining rates of literacy. It has made it harder to listen and mean it, to be idle and not fidget.

This is not a sustainable way to live. This lifestyle of being constantly on causes emotional and physical burnout, work­place meltdowns, and unhappiness. How many of our most joyful memories have been created in front of a screen?

John Freeman, acting editor of Granta magazine fashioned his manifesto for slow communication from his forthcoming book, The Tyranny of E-Mail.

The passage above brings up a lot of things I’ve been dealing with for years. Electronic mail is but the tip of the iceberg. My professional identity is now tied (in part) to the Web, thanks to the success of AdPulp.com. Thus, I’m compelled to add content to the machine multiple times a day—an act which requires sifting through hundreds of Web pages and all the little bits therein fighting to be noticed. In short, I’m overexposed, and overexposure sadly is something I share with too many friends and colleagues.

Recently, I moderated an online debate between two old friends on the importance of Facebook. One friend argued for the social networking site while the other explained why he couldn’t be bothered. “Socializing on the Internet is not for me,” my reluctant friend said, noting what is for him: hiking Utah’s beautiful trails, riding his bike, reading books and writing books. This friend is a deep believer in slow communication. So much so he’s been traveling around the country this summer and intentionally choosing to leave his laptop at home (so he can enjoy his travels unencumbered). Email, he says, mostly upsets him, as it often comes, consciously or not, with a list of demands on his time.

I admire my friend’s clarity on this issue and his wise decision to allocate his time to physical world activities. Sometimes I think about closing the laptop, storing it on a shelf and forcing myself to rejoin the analog world of book stores, telephone calls and physical work. There’s probably a way to achieve the balance I need without taking drastic measures, but the fact remains I think about the cold turkey approach regularly, which tells me I need to change my habits, one way or another.

Frustrated with the lack of meaningful dialogue around the nation’s health care debate, columnist Paul Krugman let one rip in The New York Times yesterday.

Washington, it seems, is still ruled by Reaganism — by an ideology that says government intervention is always bad, and leaving the private sector to its own devices is always good.

Call me naïve, but I actually hoped that the failure of Reaganism in practice would kill it. It turns out, however, to be a zombie doctrine: even though it should be dead, it keeps on coming.

Yes, because the zombies–in this case the insurance companies and big pharma–have lots of money at stake. When there’s lot of money at stake, the public will be under-served every time. That much we know.

Krugman, unlike most Americans, is a student of history.

“We have always known that heedless self-interest was bad morals,” said Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1937. “We know now that it is bad economics.” And last year we learned that lesson all over again.

Or did we? The astonishing thing about the current political scene is the extent to which nothing has changed.

Sadly, our present day recession is bad, but not bad enough to break the stranglehold. We haven’t reached a tipping point yet. In the 1930s one-in-three Americans was out of work and let’s remember that women typically didn’t hold jobs at that time, which meant one-in-three households had no income whatsoever. Today, things are falling apart, but not as fast.

More importantly, the psychology of the situation isn’t leading Americans to fundamental change. Instead of coming to terms, millions are busy trying hard to hold on to whatever they have—their boat, their home, the college fund for the kids and/or a retirement nest egg. Let’s just get back to normal is the prevailing mindset and that’s not going to lead to radical change.

We needn’t look back very far to recall what a miserable start the Clinton White House had in 1993 because of health care. Whatever the powerful interest–health care, the gun lobby, welfare farmers, warring oilmen–they can be outdone, but only through a massive public uprising. And who has time for that kind of vigilance when there’s a job to keep (or find), kids to feed, dogs to walk and favorite TV programs to capture on the DVR?

Krugman is astonished that nothing has changed in America. He knows we ought to know better. But we don’t know better and therein lies the real challenge. How do we lead our neighbors, friends and family from the fear that binds them into a new era of cooperation and trust? I don’t know any way other than to write it out and talk it out.

The Oregon Trail is still an open road some 150 years after the first wave of white migration. I’m here from Omaha. Darby’s here from Cleveland. Our friend Chief is here from Minneapolis. And so on…

But what’s at the end of the trail today? Open-minded and friendly people. A unique craft beer industry and thriving winery scene. Locally-grown slow food. Bike lanes. Off-leash dog parks. Volcanoes, wild salmon, big trees and lots of beautiful flowers. But no coin, however shiny, is one-sided. Oregon is also home to a frightening economy.

Look at this graph from the Portland Tribune:

One-in-four Oregonians are under-employed and one-in-six is on food stamps. Talk about an ugly underbelly. When it comes to employment, it doesn’t get any uglier than the Beaver State (which is odd given that beavers are builders).

I’ve been on a hunt for an answer (any answer) to Oregon’s economic woes, because I don’t think it should be a mystery; rather it must be an obvious problem that all Oregonians–new and native–work to solve.

I’ve had the good fortune to speak with two ad agency principals in the past few weeks about the problem and one of the things I’m learning is a mix of economic forces like banking industry consolidation and the lumber industry’s new focus on its Southern U.S. operations (where it can grow more trees faster) have dealt a particularly harsh blow, as firms that were headquartered in Portland now have little or no presence in the city.

In the meantime creative class hipsters and laborers alike are pounding the pavement, with little hope of finding work. One has to wonder where the answers will come from. Portland Mayor Sam Adams wants the City of Roses to become the City of Sustainability and he sees massive job creation as a result of that pursuit. He might be right, but I think more radical solutions may need to be implemented and soon. For instance, legalizing industrial hemp and recreational use of marijuana would in one year’s time revolutionize the state’s economy, and the region’s because CA, WA and BC would be right there with us. It might sound far-fetched but what’s even more outrageous is the idea that one-in-three or one-in-two Oregonians might someday be out of work or under-employed.

Portland journalist Abraham Hyatt spent the last month organizing all the details that went into today’s Digital Journalism Camp, a free conference for journalists of all stripes. Given the state of newspapers and journalism in general, the price was certainly right.

One thing that wasn’t right was the no WiFi situation. Apparently, Sprint was going to provide WiFi but bailed at the last minute. There was one hot spot available but it was only good for eight connections. Some attendees plugged their machines to a physical port, some thanked their stars for a cell connection and others took notes the old fashioned way, by hand in a $1.29 notebook (can you imagine?).

Hyatt opened the day with remarks about re-imagining the work journalists do. He said journalists must find “nimble, pro-active and exciting ways of telling stories and describing the world we live in.”

The first panel of the day–on hyperlocal news sites–was led by business writer Michelle Rafter. She said if she had a million dollars she’d build and fund a hyperlocal news organization. Panelist Ken Aaron, Co-Founder of Neighborhood Notes, could relate. His site endeavors to break news on the neighborhood level in Portland. He described the transition Neighborhood Notes made from blog to news site and I was happy to hear they do, in fact, pay freelance writers for news stories assigned by the site’s editor(s). The rate is only $.10/word but it’s more than Huffington Post pays, or AdPulp for that matter.

During the morning’s second panel on SEO for journalists, I learned that I’m supposed to look at Google Trends for keywords and then place them in my titles, preferably surrounded by html header tags. I’m sure the experts are right, but that’s not how I roll. Writing creative headlines is a joy and not one I’m likely to give up any time soon.

I grabbed a free falafel for lunch and a bottle of water, courtesy of a conference sponsor. Over the lunch hour, I chatted with Steven Walling who writes for ReadWriteWeb and works for AboutUs. Alex Wilhelm, a.k.a @Alex, Co-Founder of Contenture told me about his new PayPal-like service for content producers (something I want to learn more about and perhaps put into play). Finally, Mike Rogoway, business writer for The Oregonian, entertained my questions about why OregonLive.com was down the street in a separate building. He reminded me that while both The Oregonian and OregonLive.com are owned by Advance, they are in fact two different companies. I know that, of course, but it’s something I can’t quite get my thick head around.

The one o’clock hour was Ginger Grant’s turn to entice the audience with the power of story and myth, in particular. By the way, this Grant is not a character on Gilligan’s Island. She’s a B.C.-based professor, speaker and consultant. Grant said when she looks at a company she doesn’t want to know job descriptions. Rather, she wants to know what people are good at and most passionate about. She said if we suck at something maybe we ought to stop doing it. Sounds logical.

Grant also suggested we each make a list with two columns. First, list “What You Love” and follow it with “What’s Not Working For You.” Then use what you love to fix what’s not working for you, she said. Interesting. With that math, I ought to be able to write my way out of financial instability. Hold it, I’ve done that (several times over). Yes, but it’s a challenge that never ends.