tank green dot com

That's Dr Tank Green to you, Marjorie.

On (the absence of) meaningful work

by //

Sometimes I wonder if we all have a single conundrum that we wrestle with all our lives or if it’s just me. As I have indicated before, the singular issue for me is about finding meaningful work.

Someone recently asked me why we even have the notion that work should be meaningful. My immediate response was Protestantism. It’s been a long time since I read it, but I definitely still subscribe to Weber’s theory that the Lutheran notion of being called to serve God by our activities in the world has become institutionalised in Protestant and capitalist cultures. Being called to serve God is de facto meaningful for those who believe and so, whilst we may have lost the Protestant framing over the centuries, the notion that we should find meaning in our work remains.

[Read more…]

On the climate change narrative

by //

Photo of me at about age 4 with environmentalist posters behind me.I was about 4 when this picture was taken. The point of it is not to showcase the lovely smocked dress my mum made for me, but to evidence the ‘vanishing wildlife’ poster behind me. I have always cared about the environment. I have no idea why, but I simply cared from a very young age and was a child member of the WWF and so forth.

This environmentalism, and yearly farm visits to feed the lambs, led to me being a vegetarian for over twenty years. It meant I stopped using plastic bags about a decade before there was a push for this. It meant I bought recycled products in the 1980s, and later did my own recycling long before it became normal to do so. In fact, I can remember being in my early teens and pontificating that the only recycled product I wouldn’t use was toilet paper. Quite hilariously, I thought that recycled things were made out of their previous selves, and I wasn’t about to use someone else’s old toilet paper. (Ha! God knows how I imagined they retrieved it…)

[Read more…]

On living a creative life

by //

For what feels like all of my life, there has been an inherent tension between what I have to do (school, work) and what I want to do (read, write, exercise, make things). I think that fundamentally, human beings are creative beings, if we understand creativity as discovery and exploration which is channelled according to our desires and aptitudes, but I have never figured out how to marry my creative urges with work. There just isn’t anything I want to be when I grow up.

When I was in my twenties, I solved this conundrum by working in environments I enjoyed (nightclubs, the music industry) as they were creative environments where it was okay to be not like the others. I didn’t mind so much that I felt unfulfilled professionally as at least I was supporting good times or the art/music of others. Moreover, I made sure that my personal time was rich and rewarding and full of activities and exploration. One of the reasons I loved the internet so much in the late nineties and early 2000s, was because it was a bunch of people making crazy art project websites in our free time.

[Read more…]

On acting from where you stand

by //

The other day, I was trying to explain to two incredibly brilliant, but thoroughly pessimistic people, why the world isn’t actually shit. I think they suffer, like many well meaning, middle-class people, from a saturation of mainstream and social media; it weighs them down with a profound, dystopian hopelessness.

As I have said before, I stopped using social media when Facebook rolled out it’s ‘timeline’ function, which, going by some googling, was about nine years ago now. I used Instagram for a while during the pandemic, but have since deactivated it in disgust. I also recently tried Twitter for a couple of months, as I have been thinking about how to share the writing I put on here. It will not be via Twitter, of that much I am sure.

[Read more…]

On low carb diets

by //

Graph of my rapid weight lossI have written previously about my dietary changes in response to a borderline insulin resistance test result, so I thought I would post an update on where I am on this journey.

As you can see from that graph, my weight kept dropping until I hit 52.5kg, at which point I got scared. That put me in the underweight category in terms of my BMI; more importantly, my sleep became affected and I was definitely losing muscle mass in my quads.

The theory of low carb diets (by which I mean eradicating cereals, grains, sugars, and starches from your diet), is that by replacing them with nutritionally dense foods we will eat less. The reason being that we get more bang for our buck with every egg, steak, and chicken drumstick we eat. Our bodies need less food because everything we put in it has a lot of what it needs, nutritionally speaking. So we don’t get hungry as often as we’ve eaten nutrient dense foods.

This is all true in my experience. However, what did not seem to happen for me was an adequate hunger mechanism. By which I mean, my body seemed to be so satiated in terms of nutrient intake that it was not registering a calorie deficit.

[Read more…]