The unexamined life is not worth living — Socrates

Socrates didn’t have a smartphone. If he had, he might have been less cavalier about the mortal consequence of an unexamined life. The distractions of life interrupt introspection, and we have built a world around us to collect and channel and amplify those distractions. We are no longer oaks putting down roots, we are leaves in a river; we float and bob in the current. It is beautiful, in its way, but it lacks depth.

Wake up and take control of your own cipher — Chuck D

The modern psyche aches for self-possession as much as Socrates ever did. We flock to the authentic. We eat local; we shop indie; we grasp for things with permanence and we try to hold on. Each new soothsayer peddling some ancient tradition as a restorative balm for the soul gets our enthusiastic, if divided, attention.

Self-knowledge doesn’t come from a farmer’s market or a flea market, though, and it doesn’t come in a brilliant flash of insight purchased from the self-help list at amazon. Self knowledge comes from looking in the mirror each morning and, from the moment you wake up, making your decisions in manual mode, not automatic.

Look in the mirror. Get past the human reflex to make eye contact with your reflection, and look at your face. Is it shaven? Groomed? Why? Because it’s what you did yesterday, and last week, and the week before that? Maybe it’s because you made a choice at some point to shave it. Is that choice still right? How do you know?

When I started NSID 5 years ago, I did it because I’d never seen my face with a beard. 1 month to see my own face in a new light. Have you seen yours? Have you seen it recently?

In the month of December, we support each other in this most basic piece of self-examination. We let it grow, let our faces express their base nature. We don’t shave. And we see what happens. Join us. Post your photos to the NSID flickr pool, tweet with the #nsid hashtag, track your colleagues in the aggregator. It’s good for your soul.

Socrates and Chuck D would want you to.

In his (excellent) book Bowling Alone, Putnam argues that the inner circle of your life, family and close friends, act as a stabilizing function, they resist change. When the change is something self-destructive, this is a healthy and helpful thing, your family and friends remind you of who you are and bring you back. But when you want to try something different, that conservative force can become a barrier, and Putnam notes that in these cases looser social bonds become critical: people who know you, but don’t feel a need to keep you the same, who can enjoy and encourage your experimentation. (Ze has more to say about this exact passage, here).

NSID doesn’t judge. No Shaving in December is a tradition built on the idea that, once a year, it’s fun to see what your friends look like when they let themselves get skeezy. Don’t give them a hard time, join in! Put down the razors and trimmers and trappings of everyday modernity, and let yourself start to look really unmaintained. It’s freeing. It’s sometimes surprising. And hell, it might make you more trustworthy.

We have:

• a flickr pool (Get those day 0 images in, please – we need comparables for your eventual shagnificence.)
• hashtags: #nsid or #nsid2010 if you prefer timeliness
• an aggregator

What more could you want?

NSID for Charity

The NSID community has always been full of kind spirits. I know this because each year, they ask me if our month of madness can be associated with a charitable cause in some way, to give the suffering of our spouses and sometimes ourselves a greater sense of purpose. I love that idea, and so as I did last year, I invite you to make a donation (US/CDN) to the Michael J Fox foundation for Parkinson’s Research. They have impressed me as a smart, well run charity acting to fight a disease that robs people of their ability to perform many of the basic tasks in life, like shaving, that we can toss aside for giggles.

A donation is not in any way a requirement for participation in NSID. For some people it helps motivate them to stay loyal to the cause, for others it helps them keep their significant others at bay, but it’s a decision I leave with you.

Either way – It’s November 30th – get that last shave in and start uploading those photos.

For 11 months of every year, we all live our lives integrated– embedded, if you will– with our fellow citizens, hewing to their customs; blending in. For 11 months of the year we rarely even speak of the movement. But not this month.

It’s time for NSID operatives to go live.

First, remember our history. In 2007 I first spoke publicly of the cause, and in 2008 our numbers exploded. No Shaving In December has participants on at least 4 continents, participants of both sexes, and participants of all ages and stations in life. In fact, a recent survey I just made up confirms that every LinkedIn user is, at most, 3 hops away from an NSID participant.

Second, remember our cause. NSID’s not a political movement. It’s a silly, awesome getting-together of people who sort of like to see how they look when they stop shaving for a month. It’s permission to try something different and in that sense, our cause is freedom. Look at the flickr pool; it’s incredible. I love looking at these people I know to be cleanshaven getting all rustic and funky. How could you not want to be a part of this?

Third, remember your strength. Your job too important or high-visibility to stop shaving for a month? Bullshit – John Lilly did interviews with the LA Times mid-NSID like a champ. Your face doesn’t grow a proper beard? Hogwash – Claire‘s been doing NSID 3 years running, and Gavin soldiers through “patchiness issues” because his follicles don’t tell him how to live his life, he tells them how to live theirs.

No shaving. 31 days. We tweet using the #nsid hashtag, we document our progress in the flickr pool, and we aggregate it on noshavingindecember.org. I’m proud of all of you – I love this time of year. Are you in?

Epilogue: The Charity Angle

[Everything below is optional. NSID is about freedom, and fun, and if you don't want to be bogged down by deeper sentiment there is no need to do any of this. For some people, this part may actually make it easier to enjoy NSID, though. If that's you, read on.]

NSID is a scruffy, scratchy time in the first few weeks, and that can be hard on pair-bonds. Over the years, the #1 NSID request I’ve gotten is to find a way to make NSID participation a charitable act, to make the suffering of our significant others more noble.

Choosing a charity to pair with NSID isn’t easy, but I think the Michael J Fox Foundation is a good fit. To me, Parkinson’s disease is insidious for the way it steals your independence by stealing your ability to perform simple tasks. Shaving, holding a razor to your face, is something I have the luxury of doing or not doing basically for fun; I like the idea that NSID could help a research foundation trying to cure people of a disease that takes that away. MJFF’s open approach, using ~90% of donations to directly fund Parkinson’s researchers, seems like a solid one to me and, I’ll be honest, it doesn’t hurt either that they will cut both US and Canadian tax receipts.

So here’s how it works. If you want in on this aspect, start your NSID participation with a donation (US/CDN). When conversations come up about the scruff, tell them you’re doing it for charity, get those people to donate, too. And if, at some point, your wife/girlfriend/boyfriend/husband/cat can’t take it any more and insists that you shave, the price of that shave is a matching donation. The more your friends donate to defend your cause, the bigger the matching donation will have to be. And in the worst case, you make it through the month, and MJFF still gets a donation or two they might not otherwise have had. Make sense?

The only catch in all this is that I don’t have a centralized way to track MJFF donations. Let’s use the comments area on this post for that, shall we?

This is different though, because I’m talking about something really important. Not just to me, but to people everywhere who think ideas like “freedom” and “adventure” are more than just words.  People who think that it is the duty of a responsible citizenry to resist injustice, and to throw off the shackles of polite society when they reach too far into our world, when they transgress too much.

Last year, I introduced people to this struggle, and the response was overwhelming.  This year, we aim to do more.  To reach more people. To change more lives.

We need you to be a part of it.

Tomorrow is the first day of December.  If you are someone who lives with the hegemony of social pressure, someone who is compelled to hold knives against your own flesh defying every instinct evolution has given you: NSID is your emancipation.  We don’t care if you’re male or female, young or old, unix-hacker bearded or barely able to grow hair, NSID is your chance to stand with friends and get shaggy.

Join the flickr pool, post updated pictures, fill the #nsid twitter stream, blog the news out to the masses.  Be part of the revolution.

And don’t worry, in January you can shave it all off again.  It stops itching around the 8 or 9th day.

[UPDATE: NSID now has a tracking page: noshavingindecember.org (Good idea, Humph!)]

I tend to shave pretty regularly, and I think people tend to prefer it that way, for the most part.  I do too, really.  But sometimes you need a chance to stretch your follicles and see what you’d look like if only.  And so, NSID was born:

No Shaving In December

I have been delinquent in not introducing the concept sooner, but in truth, the first NSID was not a full month long anyhow, and we keepers of the faith welcome late arrivals in any case.  Don’t view it as a contest, or a strict discipline, view it as an opportunity.

If you have to shave early because of some social function – so be it – consider resuming your hobo look afterwards if there’s still time.  If you have to shave it because it itches like an unholy FIRE, that’s okay.  NSID is not about judgement.  It’s about self-actualization which, unless I am sorely mistaken, and I’m not, is right at the tippy-top of the god damned pyramid.  It’s the gift you give yourself.

Know too that you are not alone.  I am here.  Robcee is here.  Beltzner and bhearsum and claire are here too.  Shaver defied the destiny of his very name to join our motley crew, and mconnor is a member by default.

We have a flickr pool.  You know what to do.