11 | 2021 is the Year of Time
How I'm rethinking time for the new year, an agricultural revolution, the first cyber black market and more
Good morning,
On the back of my annual review, there’s been a few changes I wanted to make. But, there was one larger theme that I’m framing my year around. For me, 2021 is the Year of Time.
This involves two different perspectives - saving time and spending time.
We never get time back, and it always comes at an opportunity cost. Where we’re spending time could be spent elsewhere. So I want to optimise for that. When thinking about how I could save time, two big ones came out at me:
Hiring a cleaner - I hate cleaning. It takes up my time, and I’m not good at it. A cleaner coming in fortnightly for a couple of hours would be enough. And I’ve able to find one cheaper than my Personal Hourly Rate, which is a huge bonus
Meal-prepping - Batch cooking many meals in one go would save time cooking each meal. There’s also the benefit of making the food cheaper by buying larger quantities in bulk
There are also smaller ways to save time. I’ve created many keyboard snippets for common sentences, templates and automation scripts for everyday tasks. The time savings all add up.
I find myself often acting like I’m in a rush. If I’m at the gym in the morning before work, I rush exercise to start my day ‘on time’. I scoff food during my meals to finish the meal as soon as I can. Instead, I want to spend time more intentionally. Exercise in the gym until I’m sweaty and achy. Enjoy the food I’m eating.
Rushing means I’m missing out on the simple things. But it also creates stress, like I should be doing something else with my time. By spending time more intentionally, I’m improving my headspace too.
🧠 What I’ve been learning this week 🧠
It's a commonly held belief that overpopulation leads to famine. And so we need to come up with new ways to create enough food to feed people. It isn’t true that overpopulation automatically leads to starvation. Overpopulation does lead to urbanisation, however. We turn fields into houses, so there's less land to grow crops on. So, we need a solution - and that solution may be vertical farming.
Vertical farming stacks crops on top of each other so that they can fit into smaller space. And they don't use soil. Instead, seeds are grown in nutrient-filled water (a technique called hydroponics) with LED lights (no sun). VF is a massive shift in how we approach agriculture and makes it more accessible. VF allows us to grow crops in conditions that otherwise seemed impossible.
It seems like a no-brainer to support vertical farming. But there are hurdles. A VF start-up needs to pay high up-front costs to get started; they need a considerable amount of equipment to operate. Legislation doesn’t favour VF either. When we imagine organic produce, we think it’s free of pesticides, and VF food is free of them. But under EU law, organic food must be grown in soil. Does growing crops in water make VF food any less organic?
The biggest issue of all though is energy consumption.
VF needs so much light that if it uses non-renewable energy, it emits more than regular farms. That’s a big blow if we ever want to start seeing more VFs pop up and demonstrates why we need a green revolution to support humanity's next stage.
📚 What I’ve been reading this week 📚
This week I was hooked to my Kindle, reading about the Silk Road. The Silk Road was the first significant darknet marketplace, where you could use Bitcoin to buy drugs. And guns. American Kingpin by Nick Bilton details its founding and takedown.
What started as the idea of a libertarian Texan ended up becoming a vast criminal enterprise. Ross Ulbricht, its founder, was worth millions upon his arrest. And could very well have become a billionaire (especially with Bitcoin's current value). Many federal agencies were after him. But his downfall was his sloppiness at the beginning. Bilton uses short chapters in the book to make it a gripping one, throughout reading I was thinking “one more chapter”.
If you’re interested in one of the most important ‘companies’ in the internet’s history, you should buy this book.
👀 Recommendations 👀
Miami Mayor Francis Suarez is using Twitter more effectively than any politician I’ve seen. He’s directly engaging potential constituents by asking “how can I help?”. His use of Twitter and the migration of remote workers to Miami will be taught in future political science classes
Politicians globally should pay close attention to how @FrancisSuarez uses Twitter. Rather than empty partisan soundbites, he's using Twitter as a tool for positive engagement to benefit his city. It's a refreshing approach that more should follow.(And now he’s following me on Twitter too)
I stumbled across this thesis about online dating by Dan McMurtrie at Tyro Partners, a hedge fund. (I wasn’t googling for advice, I promise!). It’s fascinating to see the change in gender dynamics, how women now have the power over men for the first time in human history. Interestingly, online dating's visual nature looks to have resulted in a drop in fragrance sales - as fragrances aren’t as important as skincare cosmetics in an Instaworld
That’s all for this week.
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