Getting less sleep lately, and it’s not a bad thing. Here’s why. Thanks to the folks at Zipcar, who picked up half the cost, I was able to drive out to meet architectural pioneer Michelle Kaufmann and interview her for an upcoming SHELTER blog. Michelle has not only explored new ways of creating sustainable housing, but she is also fixing our buildings so they aren’t killing us. (“Officer, I’d like you to arrest that building for murder.”) I also met Nipun Mehta of Charity Focus, KarmaTube, and Karma Kitchen — all projects that are world-changers. Nipun makes awesome chai without needing to measure any of his ingredients. He also knows how to make social change by measuring social capital. I’m up nightly thinking about how I might make films that way, using creative people paid in karma bucks. More on that soon – and more about KarmaTube coming soon as I discuss a project with Birju Pandya, one of the guys behind it.
For now, let’s look at this staying up at night business. Actually, it starts in the morning when I am busy walking into walls. By ten I am able to form sentences, at least in my head. By six in the evening I am fully on, and by midnight ready to create great meaning. One in the morning – pure genius. Surrendering to sleep seems like defeat.
As Lisa Russ Spaar wrote in the New York Times recently, “For the insomniac Vladimir Nabokov, I think that sleep, which he called ‘the most moronic fraternity in the world, with the heaviest dues and the crudest rituals,’ meant turning off, even for a few hours, his quicksilver, voracious consciousness.”
Um, I don’t know if I have a quicksilver consciousness, but voracious works for me, and once I start the big thinking machine it’s really hard to turn off. As a result, we’ve instituted a few rules. No computers after 10 pm. No media unless it’s Sesame Street or Shirley Temple films. My wife likes to welcome sleep by reading in bed. Not me, so I spend many minutes flossing to give her time to concentrate on a few pages. Then the sleep boat leaves the dock.
Well, nighttime isn’t what it used to be, anyway. Way back when, night was dead calm if you wanted it that way. No emails, no phones. Your timekeeper was the groan of a garbage truck signaling 5 am; time to hug your pillow for an hour or two before work. Now, always, there’s Somebody Out There. Somebody’s Twitter feed to check, or Facebook statuses to poke through like dirty laundry on a dorm room floor.
Staying up all night doesn’t guarantee solitude, but it’s worth it if you like to chase words across a screen or make a jumble of video clips sing their song. For that, I’ll skip a few Z’s.
I just watched an inspiring short video. It didn’t cost me anything. It was on KarmaTube and is part of a movement called the gift economy.
What’s the gift economy? In simple terms it’s about giving stuff away for free without expecting anything back. Hold on, isn’t everything supposed to be monetized? Where’s the revenue stream in a gift economy? In other words, “show me the money!” Or, if you work at Goldman Sachs, “Where’s my multi-million-dollar bonus that I peeled from the hide of the American people?”
Well, what happens if there is no cash bonus, Mr. Blankfein? Worse, what happens if there is nothing tangible bartered or traded?
Now even I’m getting dizzy.
To steady my nerves I looked up a guy called Nipun Mehta, who is a leader in the gift economy movement. He has a lot of projects. There’s Charity Focus, a site that brings together volunteers with worthwhile projects. It started with the idea of gifting time.
Nipun Mehta was an engineer at Sun Microsystems who quit his presumably well-paying job at the age of 25. The Wall Street Journalpublished this explanation from Mr. Mehta: “I loved what I was doing and the people I worked with (but) I wanted to experiment with this idea of giving without any strings attached, doing things just for the love of it.”
He started building websites for nonprofits and this led to HelpOthers.org. It’s a site dedicated to small acts of kindness, like people paying for stranger’s meals at restaurants. Mehta is also giving away something called “Smile Cards” which give you ideas for nice things to do. You can freely download the designs and have them printed up. If you don’t want to do that, he’ll send you a few for free.
“We don’t charge for anything, nor do we advertise anything. The project is sustained by anonymous friends who donate what they can, not as a payment for what they have received but as a pay-it-forward act for someone they don’t know … someone like you.” – Nipun Mehta
He’s also practiced the gift economy in a project called Karma Kitchen. There are no prices on the menu and the check reads $0.00. It works because the person who was there before you pays for your meal, and when you leave, you pay for the next person. The experiment happens on Sundays at a restaurant in Berkeley, California and in another in Washington, DC. Berkeley, I get that. They are all communists there. But DC? If these goods and services are being given without strings attached, what is everyone gaining?
Something given away can even have a higher value than something paid for. In one of his blog posts, Mr. Mehta cites research that suggests that unless the compensation for work is adequate, you might as well not pay anything and get more effort. As he writes, “You get what you pay for. And if you never try paying for it, you might even get more.”
Which brings me back to KarmaTube. As somebody who’s made a living off media for several decades, I haven’t really warmed to the idea of free media. But Vimeo has become a useful tool to share work with others and build community. And some of that free stuff is pretty good. Like this:
Getting less sleep lately, and it’s not a bad thing. Here’s why. Thanks to the folks at Zipcar, who picked up half the cost, I was able to drive out to meet architectural pioneer Michelle Kaufmann and interview her for an upcoming SHELTER blog. Michelle has not only explored new ways of creating sustainable housing, but she is also fixing our buildings so they aren’t killing us. (“Officer, I’d like you to arrest that building for murder.”) I also met Nipun Mehta of Charity Focus, KarmaTube, and Karma Kitchen — all projects that are world-changers. Nipun makes awesome chai without needing to measure any of his ingredients. He also knows how to make social change by measuring social capital. I’m up nightly thinking about how I might make films that way, using creative people paid in karma bucks. More on that soon – and more about KarmaTube coming soon as I discuss a project with Birju Pandya, one of the guys behind it.
Well, what happens if there is no cash bonus, Mr. 
