I got up at 4am in order to catch the earliest flight possible to San Francisco. I had a workshop there the next day and a mission to accomplish first.

Somehow, my flight landed an hour and fifteen minutes early. I mean, I’m not complaining. But that’s really early. Gave me *plenty* of time.

I BARTed to Oakland and Ubered to the Leona Heights Park to find it. There aren’t any good directions. Even experienced hikers familiar with the area struggle.

Heck, I was searching all over when I came upon a dog walker and he didn’t even know.

But… I found it.

That’s Old Survivor. I know the pic isn’t great. It’s hard to see, which is kinda the point. Let me get my face out of the way.

Old Survivor is a redwood about 80 feet tall – we’re only seeing the tip of it here. And it’s 500-600 years old. It’s managed to survive the clear-cutting loggers that stripped the rest of this land.

It survived because it’s not a very pretty tree. See how the branches are all wonky and uneven?

Loggers want your traditional sequoia with its perfectly smooth taper. They can turn that into lumber for a house. The loggers didn’t want this one.

I first learned about Old Survivor from Jenny Odell in her beautiful book, How to Do Nothing, where she points out that Old Survivor still stands because it was useless for capitalism.

Capitalism thrives because it eats up its means of production. It deports the very people that make its products. Truly, not a sound practice but that’s what we get from people who only think about money, in the short-term.

Old Survivor and being useless to capitalism are on my mind a lot.

For example, there’s this time-for-money mindset in finance circles that wonders why should you, with your $300/hour salary, do a task that you could outsource to someone else for $20/hour. In some ways, I understand that thinking.

But when we take it too far we start looking at how to maximize every moment of our day, where every hour is to be used for maxing out our money making. Our whole lives, as a source for capitalism.

Yesterday I was scrubbing the thick gunk out of my oil diffuser. It wasn’t going well and I wanted to give up. I thought to myself “What’s this thing cost, $20? How much do I earn per hour?? Just buy a new one.” But this is the thinking that leads to overconsumption. To more plastic waste. And to believing my time is worth nothing more than to make money.

This mentality forgets that there’s joy in restoration. There’s satisfaction… which is priceless.

I scrubbed, in homage to Old Survivor.

Your life is bigger than a paycheck. How can you be a bit useless to capitalism today?