I’ve started watching this YouTube channel called London Eats. Not sure why. Maybe because I find it relaxing?
This guy zooming around the capital in the dark making food and parcel deliveries on his electric bikes and scooters. It got me thinking about the gig economy. How these workers don’t have a traditional employment contract, but are paid a fee per job.
After four hours of work this guy earned less than minimum wage and called it a good night. How? Less than minimum wage? Is the gig economy a way for employers to hire cheap labour? The apps these workers use must take a cut of the profits although they do offer meagre bonus payments if you work harder, faster, completing more deliveries within certain time periods.
The London Eats guy augments his meagre earnings by filming his shifts and turning them into quality viewing. He also confesses to having a day job so his shifts only need to be a few hours. He also sells swag from his channel and has sponsorship from various companies. So he’s making ‘his gig’ work. But I’m curious how others are faring from this industry, being paid per delivery.
I guess it’s nothing new. In my youth I worked for a company that paid me 1p for every flyer I delivered. If I could deliver one a minute that’s 60p an hour! Sounded great as a kid needing to augment his pocket money, but even with inflation an adult wouldn’t do it. Explains why so many of us were school age delivering those flyers. Child labour.
The gig economy is here to stay. It makes sense for the employers as it’s cheap labour. And as there appears to be no shortage of willing workers it must be profitable enough for some. Or maybe they just like working when they want to, being by themselves travelling around the city listening to their tunes going door to door, having no in-person boss.
Waiting..
Have you ever considered how much of our lives we waste just waiting? Waiting for public transport, parcel deliveries, holidays, the weekend.
Waiting, waiting.
I needed a change of scenery so I decided to take the bus into town to hang out in my favourite coffee shops reading and writing. I’m at the bus stop actually willing the bus to arrive, constantly looking down the lane for it. Why? I don’t have an urgent appointment to get to. I’m not in a rush to be anywhere in particular. Yet here I am in waiting mode. Waiting for a bus, which isn’t late.
We spend so much of our lives in queues waiting. Wasting time willing actual time to pass, not being in the moment. This is probably part of why we are stressed so much. Everything is scheduled and automated these days and yet it’s still not fast enough. Microwaves get hotter and faster yet they seem slower. How? Are we so impatient?
It’s later now and I’m in my coffee shop with fresh brew in front of me staring out the window people watching. Watching people in a rush to get somewhere, queuing waiting for a shop to open, waiting by a bus stop looking impatient. Such busy impatient lives we lead.
Ferris comes to mind and his quote about stopping and looking around once in a while. If we don’t life will pass us by while we are waiting.
The Net
Do you remember the Sandra Bullock movie The Net? I loved that movie when it first came out. Not for the storyline or because Ms Bullock was in it. I loved it because it showed me a possible career path that I didn’t know existed. One that I thought looked perfect to me.
You see Sandra’s character tested computer software for a living, all from the comfort of her own home. She didn’t have to deal with long commutes or co-workers. She worked freelance when she wanted for whomever she wanted. Free from office politics and office parties. Bliss!
I vaguely remember the rest of the movie. It was probably so-so. Not as good as Speed or Demolition Man (remember the seashells?). But I do remember it igniting the idea of becoming a freelance tester, a troubleshooter of software, and an ethical hacker.
It’s interesting where ideas can come from. A book, an overheard conversation, or a conspiracy movie from the 1990s.
Thanks for the career inspiration Ms Bullock!
Graphics adventure nostalgia
I grew up in the 80s and 90s, the era of the point-and-click graphics adventure games. Games like The Curse of Monkey Island, Broken Sword, Universe, and Dreamweb.
I have a large tome on my shelf dedicated to the graphics and storylines of these games. Simon the Sorcerer, Beneath a Steel Sky, and The Legend of Kyrandia to name but a few. I spent many hours of my youth immersed in the worlds conjured up by these games. Sailing the seven seas, exploring foreign lands, looking for treasure, saving fair maidens from dragons, or just hanging out in bars talking to the drunken natives in the hope of eliciting a clue in order to make further progress in my adventure.
People say that when they dream they can’t recall if it was in colour or black-and-white. When I dream I can recall not only the colour but the resolution! I recall many a happy hour spent exploring the world of Valhalla and the Lord of Infinity to many calls of “It’s a skull!”, or “It’s just a book”.
I’ve explored many a low-resolution pixelated world in my day. Minecraft players don’t know what they are missing!
So long and thanks for all the 8 and 16-bit memories!
DuckDuckGo
I’ve switched to using the Duckduckgo web browser on my laptop and phone as it promises to reduce tracking and increase privacy.
Early thoughts are that I am indeed seeing a lot less adverts, pop-ups, and opt-in modals. The video player is great as most YouTube videos play on it no trouble with zero adverts. It’s only the occasional one that insists that it is played through YouTube.
There are a few bugs in it though. One annoying one is where you have two instances of the browser open on your computer with each displayed on a different screen. If you select a bookmark in one it sometimes opens in the other replacing what was already in that window. This is especially annoying if it was a YouTube video and you have to then go back to it and find out exactly where you were up to.
Overall though it works much better than Chrome’s incognito mode. You can still be tracked by each site you visit but you automatically reject the third-party tracking cookies and content.
I still keep Chrome around as there are a handful of sites that only seem to work properly with it. I also use Google search on occasion as DuckDuckGo search filters-out a lot of stuff that you may actually want.
Still, early days..
Aimlessly surfing
There’s a kind of procrastination art to aimlessly surfing; surfing with no goal in mind, just following links and recommendations, seeing what interests you.
You may come across useful nuggets of wisdom, products you never knew existed, entertaining websites, or cats doing something unremarkable. I’m not sold on the cats thing.
Nostalgia trips await, as does losing hours watching fail videos or people are amazing videos. I personally prefer the latter as I like to look for the good in humanity rather than consuming entertainment at the expense of others, but that’s just me.
Maybe you are into ASMR or ambience videos? Study with Merve or walk through the streets of New York or Tokyo at night in the rain or even a thunderstorm. Maybe even walk through the slums of the Philippines with Larry PH, or drift BMWs through Berlin.
The internet is a vast place.You can get lost just aimlessly surfing. Lost in content and time.
What will you find today?
Musings on working in London
I’ve worked in IT for the best part of three decades and somehow during all that time I’ve managed to avoid working for a company based in London. I’ve been there for several interviews and many meetings but I’ve never had to work there.
It wasn’t on purpose, it just didn’t happen. And I’m ok with that, now.
Don’t get me wrong I do like to visit London. Piccadilly Circus, the Trocadero, the underground. Over time I’ve come to appreciate living and working in the countryside. As I’ve gotten older I’ve learned to enjoy the gentle ebb and flow of life outside the cities and major towns of England. It’s nice on occasion to go into London for a meeting or event but that’s it. I find it too.. peoply.
I like people and the intenseness and craziness of cities, but in moderation. I don’t think I could live and breathe that amount of people and activity every day.
It helps that I live so far from the nearest city and that the trains are so expensive as both combine to supply me with the perfect excuse as to why I can’t work there. The maths just don’t add up. The cost of train tickets and travel time make such a commute too expensive. You end up giving a huge part of your income and time to just getting to your desk each day.
During the pandemic I got used to life in my village. After the pandemic I joked that I had become village agoraphobic, in that I rarely left the confines of the village. It is a pleasant existence. It also saves on fuel costs and car insurance!
So despite the younger me anticipating a busy life in the city, the older me has come to appreciate the calmness and slowness of life in the countryside.
When things don’t go to plan
When things don’t go to plan.
When a spanner is thrown into the works.
When people let you down.
When it’s one of those days.
When the brown stuff hits the fan.
It’s easy to become depressed, trigger anxiety, and become stressed out. It’s a natural reaction. Yet the more you feed that particular reaction the stronger it will get. The trick is to grow thicker skin. What doesn’t kill you and all that.
Life is complicated. Plus the more technically advanced we become as a species the more complex the problems will get. The more big things you own like cars, houses, and businesses, the more problems you are likely to face. Renting properties? You have to deal with lettings agents, tenants, and contractors. Own a business? There are customers, suppliers, employees, lawyers, accountants, and so on. You get the picture. The more you take on in life the more opportunities there are for problems to occur.
When life knocks you down the trick is to get back up, brush yourself off, and get on with it. Grow thicker skin. You will have to deal with idiots, incompetence, plain stupidity, angry people, delays, wear and tear, the economy, inflation, greed, and many more variables that shape the world that we live in.
Each day that you wake up, think that today will be a good day, but I will probably have to deal with people who are lazy and incompetent, or mean, angry, or just generally having a bad day. I may suffer losses in terms of time and money but I will survive this thing called life.
This problem that is stressing you out right now; you won’t remember it in five years time. Maybe not even in a year. So why stress about it now? Resolve it as best as you can and move on. Learn from it, grow, then let it go.
Things don’t always go to plan, so plan for them not to, and then you won’t be so stressed when the inevitable happens.
Embrace the wild rain.
Hustling
Instagram is full of people pushing products and trying to show complete strangers how amazing their lives are, but there are some nuggets of wisdom on the platform. I don’t post myself, I just have a sock puppet account I use for OSINT purposes, which if I’m honest I may also use just to browse.. on occasion.
One thing I’ve learned from Insta is how much some people really hustle. By hustle I mean work hard at promoting their brand, their products, their whole reason for being.
For example just look at The Rock or Mark Wahlberg. They both post multiple times a day pushing their products and movies. If you didn’t have Insta you may only hear about their occasional movie and catch a snippet of news about them and probably think they have it easy, make a movie, collect the millions, repeat, right? With thanks to Insta you can actually see how much they are hustling. Up in the early hours each day hitting the gym, then promoting their clothing / alcohol / sports nutrition products, then doing interviews and photoshoots, followed by attending events for further networking opportunities. It looks exhausting!
These two are constantly hustling. And they are not the only ones. Check out Arnold and Stallone. Both in their 70s still hustling like crazy. Like a duck swimming we have this picture of these celebrities in our minds that everything is easy for them on the surface, but Insta pulls back the curtain and shows us how crazy active these people are underneath, working at maintaining their image and brand.
Take a look at sports personalities and fitness models. In the gym multiple times a day, promoting their classes or courses, doing photo shoots and training videos, attending events and working hard to promote both their image and what they are selling.
It may be full of cat videos but there are still nuggets of wisdom on Insta.
Digital mindfulness
I’ve discovered a new form of relaxation, using a digital form of procrastination that I like to call digital mindfulness.
To indulge in this past-time you have to have reached a god-like mode in an open-world video game. Something that can be played offline where you have completed the game, or campaign, and unlocked everything. By everything I mean one hundred percent completion of absolutely everything and every easter egg found and all weaponry and power-ups unlocked. Your character is essentially pretty indestructible.
Once in this state whenever you are bored you can just boot your game and just go explore the digital world aimlessly, maybe collecting more stuff, killing stuff, exploring looking for possible easter eggs that no one has found yet, or at least reported online.
There are several such go-to games in my collection depending on my mood.
For something mild where children are around I like to dip into Lego City Undercover. I enable a few mods such as turbo on all vehicles so I can get around faster. It’s a pleasant PG way to pass some time.
For something more adult there’s Days Gone. Get on your customised motorbike and head out into the post apocalyptic wasteland hunting freakers and looking for easter eggs. There are a few. Have you found the naughty photograph or bottles of whiskey?
My current favourite is Horizon Zero Dawn. I have the sequel to play but somehow I just like dipping back into the game with my shimmering armour exploring the various landmass areas hunting machines and crafting. Hours can easily pass before you notice.
They say everyone should practise mindfulness as a form of meditation and a way to relax. I’d like to add digital mindfulness to that recommendation. Go try it.