I spent a small part of the day working on this site, and a little bit on the upcoming webseries Higher Inebriations, but spent most of my time listening to podcasts and waiting for new posts to show up on my RSS feed. I did a lot of meta-work, but that doesn’t add up to much – changing wordpress settings doesn’t make more blog posts show up, nor does futzing with google chrome extensions make more interesting reading material appear.

But anyone who’s ever had a crap job will tell you, its much harder to go to work on a Monday than a Thursday. Mental inertia seems to be one of those things that can build infinitely, so each day you do nothing just makes the next one even harder. Sometimes you just have to make work happen, even when there’s nothing to be done, so that you’re not too drowsy when something good comes along.

The upside to this is that inertia goes both ways – an mind at rest tends to remain at rest, but a mind at motion tends to continue in motion. This blog and my assorted hustles, schemes and Million Dollar Ideas are dumb hobbies that make no money right now, but all it takes is for one to make a splash for them all to retroactively become the groundwork for something worthwhile.

Do something today that feels like work, and when real work comes, you’ll be prepared.

What’s the upside to knowing breaking news?

Tiger Woods got in a car accident a few days back. Thanks to breaking news, and twitter in general, we found out long before any relevant details were available; he was definitely either seriously injured or not seriously injured – Schrödinger’s Tiger, if you will. This information was absolutely useless, even to bookies and his sponsors. But we knew about it right away!

TechCrunch argues crowdsourcing the media via Twitter is good – after all, that’s how the Mumbai shootings, “the miracle on the Hudson,” and Michael Jackson’s death broke long before the mainstream media reported them. But for what purpose? The people of Mumbai had a need to know about a terrorist attack, of course, but what about the people of California? Michael Jackson’s camp would definitely want to know right away when he died, but I highly doubt they found out via Twitter.

While there are a handful of cases where a mass audience finding out about a crisis is valuable, such as a tornado warning or an Amber Alert, most breaking news has no tangible value for nearly anyone who will hear it. Despite the “personalization” of news over the last few years, I’ve yet to see a chyron pop up on MSNBC saying “Justin Falcone, your car is being towed.”

My generations immersion in “Breaking News” began in early Septermber of 2001. I was in history class, junior year of high school when the teacher made the announcement that passenger jets had hit the World Trade Center and Pentagon. Being sixteen-year olds hundreds of miles away from the events, we were powerless in the situation. The President, who actually could do something with breaking news like that, chose to finish reading “My Pet Goat.”

We all watched the news for the rest of the day. There wasn’t any other choice, really, since they were simulcasting the news broadcasts on nearly every channel. It was inescapable. It was the global conversation. It was fantastic, mind-blowing TV.

The event, bar some even more horrifying disaster, will be the defining moment of my generation, the “where were you when…” that everyone has an answer for. Anyone who’s enlisted in the armed forces or even flown on an airplane knows exactly how far the effects of 9/11 have trickled down into our day-to-day lives. But I watched dozens of hours of news, as bits and pieces were coming in, pundits breathed fire, and Ashleigh Banfield became a sex symbol. The single piece of information that has any real weight in the world is that terrorists, sponsored by afghanistan, hijacked some planes and crashed them into US landmarks. Every other piece of information I absorbed about 9/11 in the following years has been essentially irrelevant. Interesting, often, and occasionally something would affect my method of thinking, but for the most part it made as much difference in my life as the plotline to a sitcom.

Of course, breaking news does have real value for some people – namely, the media. A news organization that breaks a hot story gets higher ratings that lead to more advertising dollars. A hot story is currency for a news outfit. Yet like most currencies, a hot story is only valuable because we believe it to be so. Sure, some people actually need to know about Tiger Woods right away, just as gold has a number of limited industrial uses. However, for the rest of us, it is only the pleasure of having a new shiny bauble that gives it any value.

However, if we measure the news as pure entertainment, things work out a little differently. Knowing world affairs has essentially the same value as knowing football scores or movie plots; it gives people something to talk about. As trivial as that sounds at face value, even lifelong bonds need small talk to fill in the space between the big ideas. Most conversations with my closest friends, some of whom i’ve known since elementary school, revolve around movies or tv shows. Even at a professional level, knowing about an article in your given trade publication and being able to discuss it with someone in your industry is much more valuable than the actual information one learns from said article. And, as I mentioned above, a shared news event like 9/11 or JFK’s assassination becomes a cultural touchstone.

Finally, there’s the pure value of the news experience, independent of the facts it describes. When I was a stockboy, scanning in our delivery of magazines, I would scoff at the tabloids for conflating the misadventures of basic cable personalities with “actual news.” Now I realize that even the articles in a beautifully written and exquisitely detailed magazine like the economist has exactly the same practical value as Kate Gosselin’s familial drama. While the Economist is more entertaining to me and affects me in a deeper way than Star magazine, the reverse is true for much of the world – my news snobbery is no different from the contempt I felt at a younger age for sports fans. Sports and tabloids aren’t “for me,” but a great basketball game or a shocking and titillating celebrity story is just as valid an expression of as a heartwrenching story or a beautiful song.

Important news has its place in the world, right beside important novels and important records and important art. News is just a particularly effective format because it depicts the real world, much in the same way a photograph has more inherent gravitas than a painting. Popular news connects society, shocking news excites and entertains, informative news teaches, and beautiful news enriches the soul.

With additional research, editing and pontificating by Adam Wright.

I have numerous brilliant schemes — I call them “Million Dollar Ideas” — that I have no way of implementing myself, and unlike Tourfilter, aren’t thoughts that come across to normal people; for example, I doubt anyone else has even considered the puppy bouquet. All I can do is unleash this gem upon the world and hope someone with the necessary skills and funds will do something about it. In upcoming weeks, you’ll be able to read all about them in this space.

However, I do have one idea that I can do something about: I can make a men’s magazine that caters to the young urban non-professional. This is my real million dollar idea: Modern Serf.