I joined the executive board of a professional organization. I haven’t even attended my first meeting of the board yet but I have already discovered that there’s a major drama going on in the organization regarding a gentleman named Jack.

Within the past couple of weeks, several board members resigned in protest over Jack and shared reams of letters condemning him. Other people wrote reams of paperwork in support.

I’m now really excited to be on the board and see the man who’s evokes such powerful feelings in others.

The main charges against Jack are that he allowed part of the professional conference to take place in person and not online, refused to demand vaccination proof and masks at the conference, and “once used a word that can be construed as offensive to the disabled community.” I’m starting to think I will probably not hate Jack.

Reading fiction hones our deep focus skills like nothing else because it puts is into a trance-like state in which we go deep inside our minds. As we read, we create images and scenes to accompany the words on the page. The process is intensely pleasurable, and this is one more reason to cultivate deep focus. It feels good. It’s the cheapest, deepest pleasure that’s always there.

Here’s the guide for interpreting the feelings you might have experienced during the deep work exercise.

1. Guilt and anxiety that you weren’t doing anything. This is the easiest thing to beat. Simply remember that “I have to be doing something useful all the time or I’m a bad person” is the most surefire way to get nothing done. If you see yourself as a machine or an instrument to do stuff, you don’t let the actual you, the person who is bigger than any activity you might engage in fully to exist.

2. Discomfort, sadness, fear, anger, depression. This means that your unbearable affects aren’t boundaried up and are leaking all over your life. You are probably the kind of person who often lacks energy to do even the most important stuff. You probably believe that your biggest problems are “procrastination” and “laziness.” The reality, however, is that procrastination is a myth. You are not lazy. Laziness doesn’t exist. You are simply tired from having to mop up the leaking unbearable affects all day. This is the hardest work there is, so congratulate yourself for being the hardest working person around.

Everybody has unbearable affects. You are not a bad person for having them. Right now they are trampling all over your life like a scared herd of rhinos instead of being corralled neatly in a place from which they can’t escape. Deep affects will have to be gathered and locked up. Forget about deep work. This is no way to live your life when these bastards are crapping everywhere freely. I recommend spending 15 minutes every day doing nothing and observing what thoughts, words, or images are surfacing and causing pain. Write them down, identify the source, and look for what could be a boundary that would keep them at bay. I can write more about unbearable affects if people are interested.

3. Boredom, need for stimulation, an itch to grab a device, a book, a source of information or entertainment. This is the effect of living in a culture where everything aims at robbing us of our capacity to focus deeply. Love is attention. Once your capacity to concentrate your attention on yourself and others is broken, you can no longer truly love yourself or them. Regaining the capacity to be very attentive to your own thoughts is very doable. It takes some practice but it’s like absolutely any skill. The more you practice, the better you get.

4. Profound enjoyment. This is how it should be. Psychological health is finding your own life endlessly fascinating. From brushing teeth to making the bed, we are supposed to be extremely interested in every aspect of our lives. If being alone with your thoughts isn’t fun, something isn’t working right.

If there are emotions that surfaced during the exercise that I didn’t name, mention them in the comments and we’ll talk about them.

Every few years, I install an app where I track everything work-related that I do. Then I see how many hours a week I do anything that can be interpreted as work.

The result is always the same. I work between 21 and 26 hours a week. It was so when I was in my first year as a professor, and it remained the same now that I’m department chair.

My definition of work is very generous. It includes teaching, grading, research, chair work, emails, reading, writing, meetings, translation, watching educational videos, and even painting. Talking to students, talking to colleagues, public speaking, everything.

The reason why I manage to do all this in such a short time is deep focus. Deep focus is a semi-hypnotic state where you go deep inside, and everything gets done extremely fast. Except for talking with colleagues but those I simply avoid as much as I can.

To find out how prepared you are for deep work, I suggest the following exercise. Do nothing for as long as you can and observe how long you lasted and what you felt in the process. By doing nothing, I mean exactly that. Don’t use technology, listen to music, talk to people, etc. Just be alone with your thoughts. Did you last 15 minutes? An hour? Two? If you did 5 hours, I’ve got nothing to teach you about deep work.

It’s very important to track what you felt. Once you try the activity and figure out the feelings you experienced, I’ll tell you what they meant and how to proceed.

Cancel culture always leads to the cancellation of culture.

Oleksiy Arestovich

Streetlights came back to Kharkiv for the first time since the beginning of the war:

Appropriately, the lights and the sky together recreated the colors of the Ukrainian flag.

I love hanging out with older people. Today I went to lunch with two friends in their seventies. We talked about:

• The friends who died recently with a detailed breakdown of their illnesses and symptoms.
• Tissue necrosis with a detailed and actively savored descriptions of symptoms.
• The ailments they suffer from currently, as well as the ailments they think they or their friends might suffer from with detailed descriptions of symptoms.
• Bedbug bites and a detailed description (including a physical demonstration) of the symptoms.
• A list of recent vomiting and incontinence episodes with – yes, you guessed right – a detailed description of the symptoms.
• A list of traumatic injuries suffered throughout their lifetimes.

As a result, I lost my appetite and ate almost nothing, which greatly advanced my dieting goals. Also, I feel young.

That’s a very, very conservative estimate. Russia has been trying to take Bakhmut since August. Sacrificed at least 20,000 soldiers cannon fodder. And still hasn’t taken it.

Bakhmut is a very tiny, militarily insignificant little town. There’s no military rationale that explains sacrificing so many soldiers and an enormous amount of equipment to take it. If Ukrainians decide to leave Bakhmut, there are 6 more towns like it that Russians would have to take to get anywhere.

The massive sacrifices Russians have made to take Bakhmut have no parallel in modern military history. There’s no strategic reason for the effort. It’s done simply because Putin seems to consider it a matter of personal honor to take Bakhmut.

Ukrainian efforts to keep Bakhmut do have strategic meaning, on the other hand. Ukraine is preparing a big counteroffensive. It makes sense to grind down Russian troops and equipment near Bakhmut, forcing Russians to bare crucial parts of the frontlines where the Ukrainian offensive will take place.

I’ve heard that some Russian parrots rare geniuses have declared that whatever Russia is doing around Bakhmut constitutes proof of Russia’s imminent victory in the war. We’ve been hearing from these same people about this imminent victory all through Russia’s failed offensive on Kyiv, Ukraine’s brilliant counteroffensive in the Kharkiv Region, Ukraine’s lightning-fast counteroffensive and liberation of Kherson, and so on. Curiously, the very obvious failure of Russia’s imminent victory to transpire has not dissuaded the followers of the Russian plants in question from trusting them. And what do you call a person who consents to being fooled, time and again, by the same dishonest propagandist?

Recently, a batallion of Russian soldiers from Irkutsk filmed a teary-eyed plea to Putin complaining that they were given no weapons, no equipment and no training before being sent to Bakhmut. The video went viral but by the time that happened, they were all dead, every single one of them. These are all completely untrained civilians who aren’t even given a pair of boots. They get mowed down before they can say boo, let alone achieve anything. If that sounds like a victory, I wonder what your definition of a major trouncing is.

I looked up the directions to my accountant on Google Maps, and the app told me his office is 47 minutes away. This is a very tiny town, and nothing is 47 minutes away. I stared at the app for a long time before realizing that I’d been using it for walking directions in Spain, so the app was still trying to tell me how to get places on foot.

I’ll definitely miss my 15km daily walks I made in Spain. We have great hiking trails in the area but who has the time to walk for hours each day?