Overlooked Posts of 2024

Introduction

Last year, I enjoyed an article in the New York Times about overlooked stories—those their editors felt didn’t reach as many readers as they should have. Following the Times’ lead, I blogged about overlooked albertnet posts. Did it make a mark? Well, of the twelve 2023 posts I spotlighted (one per month), two subsequently moved from last place to second place, and four moved all the way into first place (i.e., have now reached the  most pageviews of any posts that month). That strikes me as a pretty good response, so I’m going do this again. Below are the 2024 posts that I think deserved more attention from my readers (I’m looking at you, Mom). Like last year, I’ll explain why they deserve your attention.

January

I thought “New Year’s Resignation” was a catchy title since readers’ brains would automatically think “Resolution” when they hit the first syllable of that third word, and then be surprised. If my readers had any such reaction (which I now doubt), it evidently wasn’t enough to get them to click the link; this post has the fewest pageviews of any I ran last January. Perhaps “resignation” is just too negative a word … I’ve received advice that negative words turn people away and we should always use positive ones. But how, then, would we explain the success of the heavy metal band Megadeth?

I feel the Resignation post should have done better. I mean, don’t we all get sick of the swirl around New Year’s Resolutions, and thus shouldn’t readers welcome a suggestion like improving their capacity for resignation? Wouldn’t they be interested in how this behavior, which we’re all trained to feel bad about, can actually be a superpower? Well, to get that message they’d have to actually open the post, duh! I guess it really is all about window dressing. If I decide to do a post this month on the theme of New Year’s Resolutions, I’m going to call it “Make $150K working from home,” or maybe “Megadeth.”

February

The loss leader for February was “Virtual Reality Killer App!” Any reader expecting a well-researched, informative article on VR technology apparently doesn’t know me very well. The more a topic requires actual research, the less I do, and the higher I rev my BS engine. In other words, it should have been obvious that was a humor piece. Doesn’t everyone deserve a good laugh? I guess it’s possible you identified it as a humor piece but didn’t click through because you don’t think I’m funny. If that’s the case, why are you here at all? Shoo! Shoo!

What? You’re still here? You do think I’m funny? Well then click here right away! I won’t say more about that post because there’s a plot twist I’d hate to give away. So go read it now. And then came back here for the rest of this post. Or not. Whatever.

March

If you consider my lowest-performing March post, “The Power of Loafing,” in the context of my earlier “New Year’s Resignation” post, you might conclude I was (and/or am) burned out and just going through the motions of my life, running out the clock. And you’d be right. Er, wrong. Maybe both. Look, this was a useful post in challenging the so-called “grind culture” of “performative workaholism” while introducing a new buzz-phrase that’s sure to take the workplace by storm: “clip out.” Give it a read!

April

I haven’t seen much response to my April post “Can We Unplug Our Kids?” despite it being a serious commentary on an important societal problem. Oh, wait a second … I just realized this is the last sort of thing anyone wants to read, and that moreover reading is the last thing anyone wants to do. I should have posted a video of myself doing a silly dance, or better yet, a video of a really attractive woman doing a sexy dance. In other words I should have just forwarded something from TikTok, like everybody else.

But wouldn’t earnest parents be naturally drawn to this topic? And aren’t parents among the most earnest type of people alive? Maybe parents didn’t read this because they don’t see that I’ve earned the right to pontificate. Don’t they realize I’m a tall male so I automatically have the right? Well, anyway, I do think I’ve earned that right because I raised my kids in a highly unorthodox fashion and reported on the remarkable results. I should have titled this post “Raised By Nutjobs: the Sad Story of a Cell-Phone-Free Childhood!” Or maybe “TikTok Twerk Tease!” or “Megadeth.”

May

Once again, a useful-looking how-to advice post was largely ignored: “Five Home Remodeling Mistakes to Avoid.” Would-be readers may have seen that title and thought, “So what, I’m not contemplating a home remodel anyway,” or “What does this unheralded bookworm cyclist blogger know about remodels that the helpful folks at Home Depot couldn’t tell me?” or “OMG, after my disastrous remodel I can’t bear to think about that topic ever again.” Evidently they weren’t thinking, “Oh, this is obviously another purely BS humor piece along the lines of ‘COVID-19: Helping Teens Cope’ or ‘Plumbing Emergencies for Dummies.’ I’ll bet it’s a scream!”

This post takes five perfectly logical and reasonable rules of thumb and smashes them with a hammer. It is the perfect remedy for the dread that contemplating home improvement can generate. Here’s a teaser so you’ll understand what vein I was shooting up in:

Spring is in the air. Out in their driveways, your neighbors are beating on old Turkish rugs with broomsticks, maybe more enthusiastically than is really necessary. Birds are building nests in your trees, without asking. No matter where you look, spring cleaning and other restoration projects are underway. The warm breeze is whispering in your ear: “Time to start pulling your weight.” Or maybe that’s your spouse, and it’s proceeded from a whisper to plain speech to aggressive beseeching all the way up to a flat-out demand, which has become increasingly hard to ignore. So it’s time to bite the bullet and agree to a home remodel.

In summary, check this post out immediately!

June

I read an article yesterday about how a majority of the movies that Hollywood is working on this year are sequels, prequels, reboots, or remakes, because that’s the kind of crap that gets people into the theaters. The logic of this is not lost on me: I understand that people are lame and don’t like to gamble on new stuff. Thus, when a post does well, I often try to work my way around to a sequel. A post from 2009, “We Have a Winner,” has racked up about 1500 pageviews, and—get this—over 850 of them were in the last year alone. That’s not an albertnet blockbuster but it’s pretty solid. So in June I posted “We Have a Winner! – Part II” and it has done … very poorly.

This post concerns the winner of my second non-annual albertnet Amateur Product Review contest, and recaps the three consumer reviews I featured of various products, with one review each being a fake that I contrived. Then this post provides the correct answer and the winner’s brilliant commentary around how he came to his answer. Give it a read, it’s fun!

July

I am very disappointed with the performance of “What Are Men Extenders?” which concerns a term that (after harrowing Internet research) I traced etymologically to the movie “Barbie.” This post provides a very thorough definition of “men extender” and plumbs the fascinating topic of what products are the quintessential examples. This phrase is utterly useful, as is the examination of what it means to be a man—a man’s man, even—in our modern, enlightened times. This post is my finest on this theme since “The Sissy Syndrome” which I posted back in 2010, and which has been really popular. Read ‘em both!

August

Okay, the loss leader for August, “Ageing Focus – Make Balance a Habit!” is unabashedly earnest, helpful, useful, and understandably has been ignored. It’s really not very amusing and concerns the unpleasant reality of getting old and lame. I guess I could have titled it “Try This Weird Trick That Your Therapist Doesn’t Want You To Know About” or “Too Hot For TikTok!” but that would be a bait-and-switch. Look, there’s some helpful stuff in this post, okay? And if you want the punch line without having to read anything, just scroll down and watch a couple of the 20-second videos shot by my daughter. (In one of them you can hear her yawning, which is probably the highlight of the whole post.) Just do it. Do it for your future self, assuming you don’t want to be falling-and-you-can’t-get-up.

September

All of my posts did pretty well in September, but one had to be the loser, so I’ll draw your attention to “Major League Baseball FAQ – a Guide for Foreigners.” Given that a large percentage of albertnet viewers are overseas, I figured this would be popular (especially given the strong performance of “Super Bowl FAQ – A Guide for Foreigners”). But it hasn’t gone viral or anything (not really, not yet).

You should read it whether you’re foreign or not, whether you’re a baseball maven or a total newb. (My nephew, who played varsity baseball in college, says he learned a couple things.) It’s not because you need this knowledge, but because you need a laugh. Here’s an excerpt to whet your appetite.

Cuba has won more Olympic medals for baseball than any other country but they have never played in the World Series. How can MLB baseball call it the “World” Series?

Because America.

What is the seventh inning stretch?

This is when all the fans in the stadium stand together and stretch, since they’ve been sitting so long on those uncomfortable bleachers.

So it’s like yoga or Tai Chi?

No, just stretching out your arms a bit, and singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.”

Is it always the same song, across the nation?

No, in Boston they sing “Sweet Caroline” by Neil Diamond.

Why Boston? Why don’t they sing “Sweet Caroline” in North or South Carolina?

Nobody knows. That is to say, I don’t know.

October

It’s not often that the title of an albertnet post includes “Mea Culpa.” In case you’re not fluent in pig Latin, that roughly translates, “Just kill me.” I fell on my sword with this post (schadenfreude, anyone?) based on the myopia of my April loss-leader post, “Can We Unplug Our Kids?” My “Part II: Mea Culpa” post considers the social media conundrum afresh, letting parents somewhat off the hook and examining how the Internet industry is more to blame. I examine in particular how privilege and luck helped my family grapple with social media responsibly. Gosh, any time I tap into liberal guilt I ought to touch a nerve, right? With readers either commiserating or condemning me, possibly both? Well, not this time … people simply ignored it. Do you want to remedy that? Click here! (Note: reading the post will not actually help you save the world. But you might feel smug and/or indignant. Won’t that feel good?)

November

Frankly, November was a great month for albertnet. Its four posts have accumulated over 1,100 page views so far, and the count from those four is still climbing with well over 100 views in the last week. The least number of views is from “Bell’s Seasoning II – The Spawning” with only 180 views so far (38 in the past week). I already mentioned how sequels are supposed to be a slam-dunk, so what’s going on here? I even included “The Spawning” in the title, which strategy seems to have borne fruit in the past (e.g., “Tire Chains II – The Spawning,” “Keep Calm II – The Spawning”). And yet my Bell’s sequel hasn’t yet propelled me to international fame and stardom.

You should read it anyway, because it’s not just about a spice concoction that is the key to Thanksgiving, but also about a dogged blogger who is persistent beyond all reason. It’s almost like a cautionary tale, except there’s no moral (unless I missed it, in which case you could enjoy some first-rate dramatic irony). I know your next turkey dinner is over ten months away, but you should check this post out anyway.

December

Well, I posted only three times last month, and it’s probably not fair to pick on the most recent, lowest-performing post for December because it’s only been up for a week and a half. I’m talking about “A Mysterious Note” which is the strange, true story of a mysterious note, and includes as a bonus the even stranger, also true story of the time I terrorized a junkie during his heroin fix. At least, I think I terrorized him. I can only assume he experienced actual terror (since I’ve never tried heroin myself, obviously). Does any of this make you curious? Good, good. Click on through!

Here’s to 2025!

Thank you for visiting albertnet. I look forward to another year of writing about, well, anything that amuses me, and I hope you look forward to reading it.

Overlooked posts of 2023:

• Jan: Ask a Fitness Dweeb (now up to second most popular of the month)
• Feb: What We Should (and Will) Be Embarrassed By
• Mar: Schooling ChatGPT (also up to second)
• Apr: Errata
• May: More Tom Swifties
• Jun: Impromptu Commencement Address
• Jul: Gravel Riding in the Rockies
• Aug: If William Wordsworth Were Writing Today (now up to first place!)
• Sept: Jumbo-Visma & the Kuss Conundrum
• Oct: Epic Trans Alps Cycling Trip – Part VI (also now first)
• Nov: Undeterred - A Critique of a Book About Life Without Free Will (also now first)
• Dec: Cycling Smackdown – Small Cog Tale (also now first)

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.

The Power of Loafing

Introduction

I am not a lazy person and don’t consider myself an expert loafer. Nor do I advocate sloth in general. That said, I will argue that being judicious about when to take your foot off the gas can turn loafing into a superpower.

Who, what, where, when, why, and how?

This post is for the modern knowledge worker who nowadays has a lot of flexibility in his or her workday. The what herein is to explain how this freedom can be an issue. It doesn’t overmuch matter where this work is done, but the ability to work from home is part of the equation. When is of course right now and going forward, and the why is because I sense the encroachment of so-called “grind culture” and want to help spare you from it, just as I continually attempt to spare myself. Now, there is plenty of literature out there about the evils of grind culture, but I’m going to illustrate, through what I hope is a potent metaphor, how to convince yourself to passively fight it—that is, to loaf strategically.

Some background

If you haven’t come across the term “grind culture” (aka “hustle culture”), you either lead a blessed work life, or (like me up until recently) you have been missing out on a handy way to describe something you’ve surely noticed, probably pondered, and—I hope—have found yourself questioning. The New York Times, in this article, calls grind culture “performative workaholism” and cites Elon Musk’s pro-grind tweet, “Nobody ever changed the world on 40 hours a week.” It’s worth pointing out that Musk, who advocates working at least 80, is a douchebag.

Grind culture promotes unabashed ambition, supported by long hours and what its proponents like to call “grit” (though “self abasement” would be more accurate in this case). Its adherents don’t seem to realize, or at least don’t tend to acknowledge, that a company’s executives are the main beneficiaries of this culture. Grinders also apparently don’t grasp (or perhaps simply don’t care) that this relative minority of highly ambitious people can set a new productivity standard for a workplace, that spills over onto colleagues who might prefer greater work/life balance.

The Times article I just cited was written before the COVID-19 pandemic. Since then, I fear things have only gotten worse. These days, a lot more knowledge workers work from home, and the flexibility this gives them to tend to personal matters (e.g., picking up a kid from school, putting in a load of laundry) also gives management a reasonable basis for expecting employees to be available for a much longer period of time each day. As another Times article explains, “Cellphones and laptops have made it impossible for many people to wall off eight hours of the day for paid labor and another eight for everything else, and they threaten to return all of us to an era of nonstop, undercompensated labor.” And as this Forbes article asserts, even as productivity has increased with teleworking, management doesn’t often perceive this; a study by Microsoft found that “49% of managers of hybrid workers struggle to trust their employees to do their best work.” In this climate, perhaps the nervousness we may have about the visibility of our output (since we’re not observed to be in the office at our post) contributes to our temptation to send emails or Slack messages at 10 p.m.

So how do we combat this impulse to work longer and more? How do we fight the trend toward performative workaholism? For me, it’s a matter of differentiating between doing more and doing my best. Since this is a vague notion, I will now proceed to my metaphor.

Life imitates sport

I’m an assistant coach for a high school mountain bike racing team. Unlike a track coach who just stands around on the infield with a clipboard and shouts instructions, we cycling coaches actually ride with the kids, the whole time, every practice. This gets progressively, inevitably more difficult every year. The kids obviously never age because it’s a rotating crop: every year a quarter of them graduate and are replaced by incoming freshmen. I, on the other hand, am not getting any younger, or stronger, and my bike gearing isn’t getting any lower. Needless to say, the hills around here aren’t getting any flatter.

It’s been such a wet winter, there are only a few trails we can reliably ride without getting bogged down in mud. This leaves two main routes we can ride right now: Big Springs Trail and Seaview Trail. The summit of Seaview, at 1,905 feet elevation, is the highest point in the Berkeley hills, and the climb up it is a bitch. In fact, there’s a section I can barely make.

Let me describe how this works for me, with my last trip up it as an example. There’s this long, steep opening bit that is a total grind, but doable, and then we descend for a bit and catch our breath. Then it the trail starts climbing again, and this time of year we’re dodging puddles and so forth, and then, just before the grade gets truly brutal, there’s a very shallow, almost flat bit. I happen to have a photo.

After the slow slog up to this shallow bit, it’s always tempting to pick up the pace, but I never take the bait. For this reason, I frequently get passed at this spot, as happened last time. One of the kids I coach had been nipping at my heels the whole way, and when I laid off the pace here he blew right by me. I cared not a whit. He’s inarguably faster than I am, and after all my job isn’t to beat him, it’s to coach him. Moreover, my job in this moment was just to get up the damn hill.

I continued to loaf, and before long could hear another rider behind me. And now the grade suddenly became almost unbearably steep. I had no choice but to dig deep. I could still hear the kid behind me, gears whirring and panting increasing, and I now faced the hardest part of the climb: a very rocky place with a lot of tree roots, which don’t actually look so bad in this photo but can easily stop a middle-aged rider dead when he’s barely handling the climb to begin with.

Over the years I’ve compared notes with other coaches about the best path through this notoriously difficult section. On this last trip, I managed to thread my way through, just barely, through a combination of the perfect line and an all-out, leg-searing effort that bumped my bike over the inevitable rocks and roots I couldn’t steer around. And now here’s my point: the rider behind me didn’t manage it. I heard the distinctive sound of a cleat clicking out of a pedal (so he wouldn’t tip all the way over after losing all momentum) and the inevitable whuff of frustration. A rock or root had stopped him cold. And this didn’t happen because he’s less strong than I am (after all, in the group I ride with these days, they’re all stronger than I), nor because he’s less skilled. It’s almost certainly because he was closer to being redlined than I was when he reached that section: because he was already drilling it before the steep stuff began. On the shallow section, I wasn’t just loafing to loaf. It was a matter of survival. That steep, rough part is so hard, I have to be rested—physically and psychologically—before giving it my all to get through it. When a 100% effort is required, you (or at least I) cannot already be maxed out before reaching it. That pause to collect myself was as important as the odd, protracted centering routine a high-diver goes through before starting his or her dive.

Alas, the grade doesn’t ease up: this section of climbing demands several more minutes of excruciation. But you know what’s worse? Trying to get rolling again on a rocky, pebbly, loose, root-infested 16% grade with only one foot clipped in. It’s awkward and frustrating and saps your will. There’s a world of difference between making it the whole way in one shot, and getting stymied and starting over. Having to unclip from your pedal is how you lose a mountain bike race.

I trust this metaphor isn’t particularly hard for you to decode. Just as I would advise you, on your first-ever bike ride up Seaview, to ease up and rest your legs before the really steep part, I  want to convey to you how important I think it is to pace yourself elsewhere in life. Alas, the metaphor falls flat pretty quickly, because life does not  always imitate sport. In real life, you’re not heading up a known trail; you can’t plan ahead where you’re going to strategically loaf.

When to loaf in life

My workplace, which I suspect is typical of a modern American corporation in a fast-changing industry, is unpredictable. It’s generally impossible to predict when the hammer will come down. (I sometimes envy tax accountants or line cooks who know in advance when things are going to get crazy.) In my industry we’re conditioned to see change as opportunity, and to embrace the ethos of “disruption,” to figure out new schemes to go take more market share, and blah blah blah. We don’t have the luxury of cooling our jets just ahead of a big effort because we never know when that will be—or, more to the point, we’re supposed to be bringing it about ourselves, constantly. That is the essence of grind culture. (This extends beyond the workplace, of course, unless you’re a childless bachelor(ette) and orphan. Families introduce countless opportunities for entropy to throw us into a tailspin, particularly if we’re trying to run our family like a CEO would run a business.)

So, without guideposts like a really steep, rough section of trail, and with the constant pressure to find more work to do, how are we supposed to know when to loaf? My answer is “whenever we reasonably can.” Of course this will vary from job to job, and from life to life, but the point is, we are all free to pause and question, throughout our workday, what truly needs to be done next, and when, and why. Who is waiting on it? Am I doing this because somebody is counting on me, or am I trying to show somebody up?

In my experience, we’re not always given deadlines, but instead are asked how soon we can have something done. This question can feel like a version of “How good are you?” It can seem to force a reckoning: am I going to do right by my employer no matter what the personal cost, to prove I’m a team player and the kind of baller Elon Musk would praise? Or do I stick up for my right to work a normal day? Actually, I think this is a false dichotomy. Over-committing yourself and failing to deliver doesn’t help anybody. We have to accept—actually, to understand and to some extent define—what is sustainable for us. I define “sustainable” not as “the outer limit of what I am capable of” but “what I can sustain without wearing myself down, making mistakes, and spinning my wheels.” To return to my cycling metaphor, I don’t want to overextend myself, grind to a halt, and have to clip out of my pedal.

Strategic loafing isn’t just about how we run our day, but how long we run our day: when we decide to shut down and what shutting down means. Just as a physical workplace used to help us segregate work and life, the act of powering off our computers became the more modern way to close the door on the workplace, even for telecommuters. Now, as the Times has pointed out, cellphones can tether us for our entire waking life. Strategic loafing means the courage to close down Slack (etc.) at a reasonable hour and resolve not to open our work email until tomorrow. (Ideally we’d resolve also to limit indulgence in our digital “feed,” that fusillade of incoming crap so many invite in for their poor brains to grapple with on personal time. But that’s another post.)

More cycling metaphor

Cycling has taught me more than just how to pace myself in the moment. It has also taught me how to pace myself through the season. There is a time for rest, and a time to hammer. Yes, I can give it my all, that heralded 100%, but only for about two hundred meters until I go anaerobic. And I can dial my effort up until I’m at my anaerobic threshold (e.g., like when going up Seaview), but I can’t keep that up for hours at a time. And not every ride can be a hammer-fest; some days need to be mellow—a conversational pace. Time off is necessary, to let the body recover. The analogy here to resting our minds and psyches throughout our workweeks and careers should be pretty obvious to anyone who doesn’t brag about how long he’s gone without a lunch break or a vacation. What if all that world-beating doesn’t end up enabling a person to make a killing and retire at 45? Then what? Twenty more years of the same? I guess Elon Musk has never heard of base miles.

Call to inaction?

When I entered the corporate workforce, I was terribly afraid of workaholism. What if it ran in families? My dad was a hopeless workaholic. Every morning he was in the office by 8:30, came home promptly at 7:45 for dinner, then left again and wasn’t home until after 10pm … seven days a week. It was the rare week he didn’t put in at least 80 hours. Alas, this didn’t result in a particularly brilliant career; in fact, when he was right about the age I’m at now, he burned out completely and fell out of the workforce. (All three of his marriages had already ended.) That was my example of what not to do.

Such was my paranoia about falling into bad work habits, I made a point not to put in too many hours. I was willing to risk not meeting some vague expectation; I figured if my hours were too low my manager would let me know. Obviously my output had to be on par with my overworked colleagues, which meant working fast. Cycling had given me an obsession with efficiency, and I applied that to my career. Hoping that MO would be enough, I didn’t layer overlong workdays on top of it.

So did this approach work out? Well, here’s a telling anecdote. A few years into my career, I was at a team-building offsite in Palm Springs (back in the days of such things) and management presented a bunch of awards. I don’t remember the categories, etc. but toward the end our branch director presented a big one, and started describing the winner: he’s this, he’s that, and (this is the part that jumped out at me), “He is no stranger to working long nights and weekends.” At this, I started to feel something like sour grapes—as in, “Is that what it takes to get recognized around here?” but then I caught myself and reflected on my principles. I reminded myself, “Hey, I don’t need to be the big winner. There’s more to life than career ambition. I have work/life balance. Let this guy have his glory, he’s made sacrifices for it.” My rumination was suddenly interrupted when the director called out the name of the winner: “Dana Albert!”

I was absolutely stunned. Me? Long nights? Weekends? Huh? It wasn’t until I reflected on this later that I realized the director wouldn’t have been around in the evenings or weekends to see me hard at work, any more than my dad’s bosses had witnessed him. That I put in long hours was just an assumption. My reputation was based more on results than on rudimentary metrics like hours worked. So: if what ultimately matters is our output, who needs the performative workaholism of grind culture?

Let me be clear: I’m not advocating naps throughout the day, or only working eight hours a day as a golden rule. I’ve used the word “loafing” here somewhat flippantly, to get your attention. What I am talking about is more of a return to a work life with guardrails. If the traditional work/life boundaries are no longer available, at least we should have an awareness of the need to set new ones. I want to take care of myself first, and my employer second, because this serves us both better in the long run. Professionally speaking, I want to be the guy who, when a bomb is dropped, isn’t already overwhelmed, isn’t sleep-derived, won’t get frazzled, knows how to work fast, and can quickly put his hands on all the resources he needs. In a nutshell, I want to be the guy who’s not gonna clip out and tip over. To the tired old cliché “I work hard and I play hard,” I would add a crucial third element: “I rest hard.”

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Email me here. For a complete index of albertnet posts, click here.