Wikipedia is a wonderful thing. In a few brief moments I have acquired (temporarily) a lot of background knowledge, just enough so that I don’t make a complete fool of myself below. I find that the big W is often stimulating; I start to think along new lines as my opinion tries to realign itself with the facts/statements offered. Unfortunately, W can also be depressing once one realizes that everyone has already thought of everything and described it with nice pictures to boot. (In fact as soon as I said this, it occurred to me that W is not very artistic; I wonder what a truly avant-garde wiki would be like. I’m thinking here of the web equivalent of shit-in-a-can. On second thoughts, I think I’ve seen this part of the web already.)

I was reading up on materialism and the Protestant work ethic, and wondering if one gave rise to the other. This is probably not true for American materialism, since many of the immigrants came from catholic countries. Still, the way in which the Protestants adopted the “work hard to receive your reward” motto has some similarity to the way modern societies are co-opted into consumerism. Motto: “buy hard to be happy”.

I am definitely a materialist in the philosophical sense: I do not (currently) believe that there exists anything except matter. My dislike of social materialism stems from the observation that it is anti-social. Despite the hint of “spirituality”, I agree with W: “A main concern is that [social] materialism is unable to offer a proper raison d’être for human existence.”

Now, I don’t share the Protestant work ethic. I have a related trait called Protestant guilt ethic: I don’t work very hard, but I feel guilty about it because I feel I should. From time to time I do put in a good eight hours, but often I feel as if I am wasting my time. Some days are diamonds, some days are stones.

In addition to this blog, I also keep, or try to keep, a klog. (That is, a worklog. Get it?) It is much harder to do because, whenever I get excited about something, I forget all about the klog. There are large gaps, sometimes months, without any record. The origin of the klog is the feeling that another year has passed, and what have I accomplished? Nothing! This period of auto-accusory remorse was shortemed to a month, then a week, then a day. If I could only record my one accomplishment for the day, I would be satisfied. And then the last step: record every single activity. The idea is to extract the day/week/month/year accomplishment at the end of each of those periods, but this has not yet happened as far as I recall.

Here is an extract from today’s klog:

- 09:20-09:25 quick chat with cxx re jxx
- 09:25-09:30 parking disk
- 09:30-09:42 axx kxx msc stuff
- 09:42-10:53 long chat with bxx, lxx re misc
- 10:53-10:54 checked that mxx is available for icse wup
- 10:54 answ lxx email re mailing list
- 10:55 approved hxx's comment
- 10:55-10:58 answ jxx email re icse wup
- 10:58-11:13 SB, spoke to hons class re email
- 11:13-11:17 print new hons mark list
- 11:17-11:22 email to wxx, mxx re icse wup
- 11:22-11:34 uploaded hons marks to system

The names have been sanitized. I must admit that today’s entries do not look too bad. I have put in my time, and will probably put in another hour or two. But I’ve done my share and tonight I’ll sleep like a Protestant baby.