Lately I’ve been feeling hungry for the ocean. I ordered some photo prints lately, and made the mistake of hanging up this picture right beside my bed:

So now every day when I wake up I roll over and see the Pacific Ocean, and I’m like… aww… I miss the ocean.

It’s funny, I came back from Australia a year and a half ago and I haven’t really felt that way since I got back, until the past couple of weeks. Perhaps that’s because Ithaca has its own great natural beauty, and then Philadelphia was new and exciting, and then it was winter. But now it’s spring, and I miss the ocean.

I’ve been feeling restless lately. Things have been going very well at work, which is wonderful, but there’s so many places that I want to live in my lifetime, let alone visit… I struggle to balance that restless urge with the need to stay in one place long enough to deepen my skills and grow a community.

My hunger for experience leads me to want to move quickly and to rush through life, seeking novelty and easily becoming bored; but there are also experiences that one can only get from slowing down and staying in a place, a job, a relationship long enough to really let things deepen and settle in, and I want to know that kind as well. It’s just that… I feel young, and I feel like there isn’t time — like one day all of a sudden a switch will flip somewhere in my brain and I’ll never want anything to change again.

Which is probably bullshit, of course. But I feel like I need to experience all of life before that happens, so that I don’t miss anything. It’s like that thought: Live every day like it’s your last. Well, there’s so much that I want to do before I die. I want to live on the West Coast and in New England, I want to experience Europe and South America, I want to write books, I want to make art, I want to become really fluent in Spanish, I want to ski a double diamond, I want to hike the Appalachian Trail from start to end. And I want to have a career too, I want to make things that help people in their lives, and I want to have money so that I can do good things with it. I want to buy my high school a real computer lab, and fund scholarships for other people like me who want to make something of themselves. (Not to mention doing all of the things listed above.)

There isn’t much time if I want to fit all of this in. But it’s difficult to think, what can I do tomorrow? What can I do the day after that, to make a small part of all this come true? That’s what I need to start doing, though.

seeds are waiting
under the snow
just like i am waiting
under my skin

get ready to grow

Did you know that the same person, a Mr. Thomas Midgley, invented both leaded gasoline and CFCs?

Yes, the Earth has a lot for which to thank Mr. Midgley.

(And he went to my alma mater, Cornell, too. Crazy MechEs.)

In all fairness, CFCs were used to replace compounds that were even more toxic or explosive, and the long-term atmospheric effects weren’t known at the time. (Leaded gasoline is a bit of another story.) But I feel like there’s a moral in there somewhere. We can never see all the results of something that we do; but I’ll leave my conclusions from that for another day.

I learned today’s random fact while reading A Short History of Nearly Everything, which I highly recommend.

Imagine this: you’re used to doing things a certain way, a way that works well for you. Used to having the ability to freely connect to and interact with the world. (Free as in speech, and also free as in beer to some degree.) To being able to shop around for the tools you need. How are you going to feel when you’re suddenly prevented from using those tools, and not even given a good reason why?

You might feel what I’m going to call digital deprivation – literally, a sense of deprivation, of frustration at the absence of a valuable tool. (Something that exists! Is right there! And you can’t use it!) I think that this reaction is something that institutions – companies, and perhaps schools – are going to have to learn how to deal with and manage, more and more.

Of course, it’s something they’ve already been dealing with for years, but it’s only going to get worse. We’re all becoming used to being able to connect at will. And we’re used to being able to play on the web, to self-provision, to select from a vast array of goods and services. How much resentment does it actually cause, to suddenly be “shut off” from email / IM / WiFi / cellphone / digital camera / USB key / whatever? How much does it feel like an insult to have to work with the one crappy piece of software that’s provided to you, when Google has something that works better and is free?

In short, how much does it suck to not be able to acquire the things that you need – tools and interactions – in order to be better at what you need to do, when you have that ability outside of the institution where the work takes place? (This is the difficult thing: the fact that it’s both possible and useful. You just can’t do it.)

Now, stepping down off my soap box for a moment, I understand that there are good reasons why some of these measures are in place. Security. Compliance. Sarbanes-Oxley. Hackers. Viruses. In the financial services industry, where I currently work, all of these are huge concerns. So here’s what I’m proposing. (To all the CIOs who read this blog, haha.)

1. If there is a good reason (i.e. one rooted in security, legality, compliance, or ethical concerns) to deny access to something, then explain what that reason is to us.

I’m willing to forego my use of widget X if I know that there’s a good reason behind it, and I know what that reason is. If you have intelligent employees, they’re going to resent following blind orders, but they’ll be willing to forego something if it genuinely puts their jobs at risk. I know I would.

(Note: control for its own sake is not a good reason in my book. How much do you trust your employees?)

2. Otherwise, let us use it.

I can’t emphasize this point enough: denial of access should be justified. It shouldn’t just be the default answer to everything.

Furthermore: don’t just let us use it, let us use it openly and freely, without worrying that our jobs might be at risk. Heck, let us share it with others if we want to; if it really makes our jobs or lives easier, it might make theirs easier too, which leads to better productivity and morale in the long run. And if employees know that you’re not going to arbitrarily veto the use of something without a good, justifiable reason, they’re that much more likely to actually come to you and “declare” what they would otherwise do behind your back. So in the long run, security improves, too.

Productivity, good morale, and improved security. Sounds like a winner to me.

(For a good article from a manager perspective, see Users Who Know Too Much (and the CIOs Who Fear Them).)