Adults Work to Kill Time

I have an eight-year-old son. He already knows about otiose corp. He laughs and says, “That’s so weird.” He also says he’ll help Dad. My daughters, six and four, seem more interested now than when I was building “useful SaaS for the world.”

My wife, I think, sees it as: he’s doing something strange again. Not about money. She wants me in work that adults can read at a glance. That’s a funny difference between adults and children. Adults feel safe when something fits the frame of understanding — they call that “clear.” Children get excited when something falls outside the frame — they call that “fun.”

While driving my son to basketball practice, I told him something worthy of the CEO of otiose corp.: “Adults work to kill time.” And: “For you, practice and schoolwork are killing time too.”

At family dinner he announced to the table, “Dad says he works to kill time,” laughing. My wife — an elementary school teacher — looked a little appalled. “What a thing to say!” I’ve driven myself hard at basketball, at work, at programming, at running a company, so I’ll say it anyway: that posture — treating it as killing time — sits better on a human being.

I’m not sneering at people who go all out. Going all out still means something.