Found 108 bookmarks
Newest
35 bits of advice - Erik Torenberg
35 bits of advice - Erik Torenberg
This doesn’t mean that everything that has happened to you is a result of your actions. It means that you develop an ability to respond to whatever happens to you, even if you don’t control the consequences of your actions. It means exerting maximal agency towards the things you can directly change (your behavior), and maximum acceptance towards things you can influence but not control (external circumstances, other people’s behavior).
Our responses typically come from patterns and scripts handed down from our parents and our pasts. We are not hostage to those patterns, we can update them. A pattern that's run through your family for generations can stop with you. Vision is bigger than baggage.
A pattern like anxiety may have been helpful in a previous unsafe environment but is maladaptive for our current safe environment.
Cognitive behavior therapy or Byron Katie’s work helps us get new training data by asking questions like: “are you absolutely sure that’s true? How do you react when you believe that thought? Who would you be without that thought?“ This is great for updating limiting beliefs, of which we have many that are often mostly incorrect and holding us back.
loving people and wanting other people to flourish on their own terms, independent of what’s in it for you—even when it’s at your expense.
Write down a list of what you want in your relationships and the types of people you want personal and professional relationships with and then make sure you are bringing those attributes to the table too. e.g. If you want loyal friends, *be* a loyal friend. Focus on “being” rather than “having”, because you can only control the former, and by doing so you can influence the latter.
We want to get that job because we want respect, autonomy, recognition, connection. But there are thousands of ways to meet that need. Acknowledging this makes you more flexible to what life throws at you, and makes it more likely you’ll get what you actually want deep down. A lot of stress in my life came from being set on certain strategies when if I appreciated what need I was trying to meet, I could have been more flexible in switching strategies.
“I’ll be happy once I hit X goal” may be motivating, but it won’t be true—you’ll just move the goalposts. If this is how you’re motivated now, it’s unlikely to last because at some point you’ll figure out that your pattern is unfulfilling and you’ll stop following it. Then you’ll need to find a new way to motivate yourself. A more durable motivation comes from genuinely enjoying the process and the contributions and the relationships that stem from it.
You can’t be in your body and be stuck in your brain at the same time. The way out of the brain loop is through the body. If you feel feel the feelings it might take a few minutes or hours to pass them, whereas if you repress it it might take months or years.
Keep in touch with old friends more broadly. Call them randomly, even if it’s been years. Keep track of what they care about.
Be able to acknowledge when you are not in a secure place, and be able to reset by working out, taking a walk, listening to music, talking with a friend, etc. Wait until the anger or trigger passes before acting. And never fight over text. And if you ever find yourself in a fight, realize you’re in one and calm down and ask yourself why you’re fighting.
Deposits into your own bank account look like being proud of yourself — contributing to others, gaining competence at something that matters, doing the right thing, keeping promises to yourself and others, and taking good care of yourself.
Track what people and activities and habits make you feel better and which drain you. Track when you get triggered or or when you trigger others and see if you can identify patterns.
Do a weekly audit where you can look backwards and reflect on what brings you closer to yourself or and vice versa and readjust how you spend time accordingly.
Although rewiring is worth doing, it's easier to change your environment than to change your insides. Change your environment & then let the new cues do the work.
If you’re going to offend someone, do it on something you care about. Not on an off hand remark or action that didn’t mean anting to you. If you’re unsure, wait a couple days to see if you still mean it. Usually you don’t.
Grudges are ankle weights on your soul.
If you have extended anger with someone, even if they’re in the wrong, you’re both losing.
Empathize with what needs they were trying to meet through their actions and then either reconcile with them or move on with the levity of being grudge-free.
Try other tactics to get curious about other people instead of righteous. If you look at their childhood photos it’s hard to be mad at them. If you have your hands on your heart it’s hard to be angry at them. If you’re hugging your partner it’s harder to fight with them.
One self-connection exercise when triggered is: How do you feel? (vent) How does that feel on the inside? (connect with deeper feeling) What do you want? (suggest strategy, get action oriented) What would that give you? (connect with deeper need)
Use language that emphasizes the fact that people can change: Use verbs over adjectives and observations instead of judgments. For example, instead of saying, “X is always late”, say “X has been late the last three times.”
Don’t bring work mode to relationships and vice versa. For work, you want to be efficient, outcome oriented, and prioritize winning above all. With people, you want to be effective, process oriented, and prioritize connection above all. For work you want to be right (accurate), for relationships you want to be happy (connected).
Don’t keep score, your patience will run out. And equality doesn’t matter. On your death bed you won’t wish things were more fair, but you’ll regret that your insistence on fairness prevented you from connecting with an open heart.
everyone has a micro impact on their families, friends, and local communities and we don’t pay enough attention to making it great.
Use things like politics, sports, social media etc as ways to meet or get closer to other people, but don’t use it as something to make you angry or further from others.
Cultivate what makes you unique. The more distinct your path is, the less competition you’ll have, and the less you’ll compare yourself to others because you’re running your own race.
Envision the highest version of your own success and strive to get as close to it as possible while also being happy with wherever you land.
Your past was what you needed to get here (no regrets), and fretting about what will happen in the future bond what you need to prep for it won’t help either
Most ambitious people on their death beds wish they were less hard on themselves. The happiest people are best at focusing on what they can control and not letting past drama or future worries get in their way.
Asymmetric upside opportunities could lead to new relationships or forms of growth. Asymmetric downside opportunities could lead to sacrificing your health or your relationship or your reputation.
#advice#guides#list#opinion#philosophy#lifestyle#careers#work-life#relationships#introspection
·eriktorenberg.substack.com·
35 bits of advice - Erik Torenberg
We Don't Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.
We Don't Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.
Anyone can point at something and say it’s broken, corrupt, or destined to fail. The real challenge? Building something better. The cynic sees a proposal for change and immediately lists why it won’t work. They’re usually right about specific failure modes — systems are complex, and failure has many mothers. But being right about potential problems differs from being right about the whole.
The cynical position feels sophisticated. It signals worldliness, experience, and a certain battle-hardened wisdom. “Oh, you sweet summer child,” the cynic says, “I’ve seen how these things really work.” But what if this sophistication is itself a form of naïveté?
Cynicism comes with hidden taxes. Every time we default to assuming the worst, we pay in missed opportunities, reduced social trust, and diminished creative capacity. These costs compound over time, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy in which cynical expectations shape cynical realities.
Pattern recognition is valuable — we should learn from history and past failures. But pattern recognition becomes pattern imprisonment when it blinds us to genuinely new possibilities.
Why spend years building something that could fail when you could spend an afternoon critiquing others’ attempts and look just as smart? The cynical stance is intellectually rewarding but culturally corrosive.
The alternative to cynicism isn’t unquestioning optimism. It’s more nuanced: a clear-eyed recognition of problems coupled with the conviction that improvement is possible. Call it pragmatic meliorism — the belief that while perfect solutions may not exist, better ones do.
things are broken, AND they can be fixed; people are flawed AND capable of growth; systems are complex AND can be improved.
Here’s a more charitable reading of cynicism: it’s not an intellectual position. It’s an emotional defense mechanism. If you expect the worst, you’ll never be disappointed. If you assume everything is corrupt, you can’t be betrayed. But this protection comes at a terrible price. The cynic builds emotional armor that also functions as a prison, keeping out not just pain but also possibility, connection, and growth.
Not all domains benefit equally from cynical analysis. Some areas — scientific investigation, financial planning, and security systems — benefit from rigorous skepticism. Others — creative endeavors, relationship building, social movements — often suffer from it.
What would it look like to embrace pragmatic meliorism instead of cynicism? Acknowledging problems while focusing on solutions Learning from history without being imprisoned by it Maintaining high standards while accepting incremental progress Combining skeptical analysis with constructive action
When you feel the pull of cynicism, ask yourself: Is this helping? Is this default skepticism making you more effective or just more comfortable? Are you choosing the easy path of criticism over the harder path of creation?
#opinion#public-life#culture#philosophy#mindsets
·joanwestenberg.com·
We Don't Need More Cynics. We Need More Builders.
You and Your Research, a talk by Richard Hamming
You and Your Research, a talk by Richard Hamming
I will talk mainly about science because that is what I have studied. But so far as I know, and I've been told by others, much of what I say applies to many fields. Outstanding work is characterized very much the same way in most fields, but I will confine myself to science.
I spoke earlier about planting acorns so that oaks will grow. You can't always know exactly where to be, but you can keep active in places where something might happen. And even if you believe that great science is a matter of luck, you can stand on a mountain top where lightning strikes; you don't have to hide in the valley where you're safe.
Most great scientists know many important problems. They have something between 10 and 20 important problems for which they are looking for an attack. And when they see a new idea come up, one hears them say ``Well that bears on this problem.'' They drop all the other things and get after it.
The great scientists, when an opportunity opens up, get after it and they pursue it. They drop all other things. They get rid of other things and they get after an idea because they had already thought the thing through. Their minds are prepared; they see the opportunity and they go after it. Now of course lots of times it doesn't work out, but you don't have to hit many of them to do some great science. It's kind of easy. One of the chief tricks is to live a long time!
He who works with the door open gets all kinds of interruptions, but he also occasionally gets clues as to what the world is and what might be important. Now I cannot prove the cause and effect sequence because you might say, ``The closed door is symbolic of a closed mind.'' I don't know. But I can say there is a pretty good correlation between those who work with the doors open and those who ultimately do important things, although people who work with doors closed often work harder.
You should do your job in such a fashion that others can build on top of it, so they will indeed say, ``Yes, I've stood on so and so's shoulders and I saw further.'' The essence of science is cumulative. By changing a problem slightly you can often do great work rather than merely good work. Instead of attacking isolated problems, I made the resolution that I would never again solve an isolated problem except as characteristic of a class.
by altering the problem, by looking at the thing differently, you can make a great deal of difference in your final productivity because you can either do it in such a fashion that people can indeed build on what you've done, or you can do it in such a fashion that the next person has to essentially duplicate again what you've done. It isn't just a matter of the job, it's the way you write the report, the way you write the paper, the whole attitude. It's just as easy to do a broad, general job as one very special case. And it's much more satisfying and rewarding!
it is not sufficient to do a job, you have to sell it. `Selling' to a scientist is an awkward thing to do. It's very ugly; you shouldn't have to do it. The world is supposed to be waiting, and when you do something great, they should rush out and welcome it. But the fact is everyone is busy with their own work. You must present it so well that they will set aside what they are doing, look at what you've done, read it, and come back and say, ``Yes, that was good.'' I suggest that when you open a journal, as you turn the pages, you ask why you read some articles and not others. You had better write your report so when it is published in the Physical Review, or wherever else you want it, as the readers are turning the pages they won't just turn your pages but they will stop and read yours. If they don't stop and read it, you won't get credit.
I think it is very definitely worth the struggle to try and do first-class work because the truth is, the value is in the struggle more than it is in the result. The struggle to make something of yourself seems to be worthwhile in itself. The success and fame are sort of dividends, in my opinion.
He had his personality defect of wanting total control and was not willing to recognize that you need the support of the system. You find this happening again and again; good scientists will fight the system rather than learn to work with the system and take advantage of all the system has to offer. It has a lot, if you learn how to use it. It takes patience, but you can learn how to use the system pretty well, and you can learn how to get around it. After all, if you want a decision `No', you just go to your boss and get a `No' easy. If you want to do something, don't ask, do it. Present him with an accomplished fact. Don't give him a chance to tell you `No'. But if you want a `No', it's easy to get a `No'.
Amusement, yes, anger, no. Anger is misdirected. You should follow and cooperate rather than struggle against the system all the time.
I found out many times, like a cornered rat in a real trap, I was surprisingly capable. I have found that it paid to say, ``Oh yes, I'll get the answer for you Tuesday,'' not having any idea how to do it. By Sunday night I was really hard thinking on how I was going to deliver by Tuesday. I often put my pride on the line and sometimes I failed, but as I said, like a cornered rat I'm surprised how often I did a good job. I think you need to learn to use yourself. I think you need to know how to convert a situation from one view to another which would increase the chance of success.
I do go in to strictly talk to somebody and say, ``Look, I think there has to be something here. Here's what I think I see ...'' and then begin talking back and forth. But you want to pick capable people. To use another analogy, you know the idea called the `critical mass.' If you have enough stuff you have critical mass. There is also the idea I used to call `sound absorbers'. When you get too many sound absorbers, you give out an idea and they merely say, ``Yes, yes, yes.'' What you want to do is get that critical mass in action; ``Yes, that reminds me of so and so,'' or, ``Have you thought about that or this?'' When you talk to other people, you want to get rid of those sound absorbers who are nice people but merely say, ``Oh yes,'' and to find those who will stimulate you right back.
On surrounding yourself with people who provoke meaningful progress
I believed, in my early days, that you should spend at least as much time in the polish and presentation as you did in the original research. Now at least 50% of the time must go for the presentation. It's a big, big number.
Luck favors a prepared mind; luck favors a prepared person. It is not guaranteed; I don't guarantee success as being absolutely certain. I'd say luck changes the odds, but there is some definite control on the part of the individual.
If you read all the time what other people have done you will think the way they thought. If you want to think new thoughts that are different, then do what a lot of creative people do - get the problem reasonably clear and then refuse to look at any answers until you've thought the problem through carefully how you would do it, how you could slightly change the problem to be the correct one. So yes, you need to keep up. You need to keep up more to find out what the problems are than to read to find the solutions. The reading is necessary to know what is going on and what is possible. But reading to get the solutions does not seem to be the way to do great research. So I'll give you two answers. You read; but it is not the amount, it is the way you read that counts.
Avoiding excessive reading before thinking
your dreams are, to a fair extent, a reworking of the experiences of the day. If you are deeply immersed and committed to a topic, day after day after day, your subconscious has nothing to do but work on your problem. And so you wake up one morning, or on some afternoon, and there's the answer.
#dreams , subconscious processing
#advice#career#philosophy#writing#research#work/productivity#stem#science#talks#transcript#academic
·blog.samaltman.com·
You and Your Research, a talk by Richard Hamming
The Top Idea in Your Mind
The Top Idea in Your Mind
You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want to think about.
barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind.
Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head.
just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.
#philosophy#advice#writing#ideas#work/productivity
·paulgraham.com·
The Top Idea in Your Mind
Notes on “Taste” | Are.na Editorial
Notes on “Taste” | Are.na Editorial
Taste has historically been reserved for conversation about things like fashion and art. Now, we look for it in our social media feeds, the technology we use, the company we keep, and the people we hire.
When I ask people what they mean by “taste,” they’ll stumble around for a bit and eventually land on something like “you know it when you see it,” or “it’s in the eye of the beholder.” I understand. Words like taste are hard to pin down, perhaps because they describe a sensibility more than any particular quality, a particular thing. We’re inclined to leave them unencumbered by a definition, to preserve their ability to shift shapes.
’ve found a taste-filled life to be a richer one. To pursue it is to appreciate ourselves, each other, and the stuff we’re surrounded by a whole lot more.
I can’t think of a piece of writing that does this more effectively than Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In her words, “a sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about... To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble.
Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. Someone’s home can be decorated tastefully. Someone can dress tastefully. The vibe cannot be tasteful. The experience cannot be tasteful.
Someone could have impeccable taste in art, without producing any themselves. Those who create tasteful things are almost always deep appreciators, though.
we typically talk about it in binaries. One can have taste or not. Great taste means almost the same thing as taste.
They’re the people you always go to for restaurant or movie or gear recommendations. Maybe it’s the person you ask to be an extra set of eyes on an email or a project brief before you send it out.
It requires intention, focus, and care. Taste is a commitment to a state of attention.
As John Saltivier says in an essay about building a set of stairs, “surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.”
To quote Susan Sontag again, “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.” The sought-after interior designer may not mind gas station coffee. The prolific composer may not give a damn about how they dress.
Taste in too many things would be tortuous. The things we have taste in often start as a pea under the mattress.
it is often formed through the integration of diverse, and wide-ranging inputs. Steve Jobs has said, “I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”
taste gets you to the thing that’s more than just correct. Taste hits different. It intrigues. It compels. It moves. It enchants. It fascinates. It seduces.
Taste honors someone’s standards of quality, but also the distinctive way the world bounces off a person. It reflects what they know about how the world works, and also what they’re working with in their inner worlds. When we recognize  true taste, we are recognizing that alchemic combination of skill and soul. This is why it is so alluring.
many snobs (coffee snobs, gear snobs, wine snobs, etc.) often have great taste. But I would say that taste is the sensibility, and snobbery is one way to express the sensibility. It’s not the only way.
If rich people often have good taste it’s because they grew up around nice things, and many of them acquired an intolerance for not nice things as a result. That’s a good recipe for taste, but it’s not sufficient and it’s definitely not a guarantee. I know people that are exceedingly picky about the food they eat and never pay more than $20 for a meal.
creating forces taste upon its maker. Creators must master self-expression and craft if they’re going to make something truly compelling.
artists are more sensitive. They’re more observant, feel things more deeply, more obsessive about details, more focused on how they measure up to greatness.
Picasso remarking that “when art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” Taste rests on turpentine.
the process of metabolizing the world is a slow one. Wield your P/N meter well, take your time learning what you find compelling, and why. There are no shortcuts to taste. Taste cannot sublimate. It can only bloom. To quote Susan Sontag one last time, “taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.
#aesthetics#taste#culture#trends#philosophy#definitions#art#design#core-term#lifestyle
·are.na·
Notes on “Taste” | Are.na Editorial
The Only Reason to Explore Space
The Only Reason to Explore Space

Claude summary: > This article argues that the only enduring justification for space exploration is its potential to fundamentally transform human civilization and our understanding of ourselves. The author traces the history of space exploration, from the mystical beliefs of early rocket pioneers to the geopolitical motivations of the Space Race, highlighting how current economic, scientific, and military rationales fall short of sustaining long-term commitment. The author contends that achieving interstellar civilization will require unprecedented organizational efforts and societal commitment, likely necessitating institutions akin to governments or religions. Ultimately, the piece suggests that only a society that embraces the pursuit of interstellar civilization as its central legitimating project may succeed in this monumental endeavor, framing space exploration not as an inevitable outcome of progress, but as a deliberate choice to follow a "golden path to a destiny among the stars."

#sci-fi#history#future#philosophy#space#govt#tech#culture#science
·palladiummag.com·
The Only Reason to Explore Space
What are conference talks about? - the stream
What are conference talks about? - the stream
It's crazy how so much industry conf content is an ad these days. Ads obfuscate and conflate truth and opinion.
This is why events like Handmade Seattle or Strange Loop get so much love. They are about technology and people and values, not tools and companies.
When I write a talk, I almost always just want you to walk away thinking about the technology you create as an instrument for advancing your values, and a lens through which to view the world with those values.
if I do my job right, you won't go back and use the library I talked about, or whatever. You'll think about the values you're advancing when you build your technology, and think about the perspective it reveals to its users and audiences.
#blog#ideals#talks#themes#advice#philosophy
·stream.thesephist.com·
What are conference talks about? - the stream
the essence of love is... annoyance?
the essence of love is... annoyance?
When you’re enmeshed with someone, both their flaws and their positive qualities become your whole life. This is, I guess you could say, the downside of intimacy. Seen from afar, someone might look like a house you’d like to promptly move into—pretty, spacious, great wood floors. But when you’re actually living inside them the sound of construction coming from the upstairs window and the leaky ceiling make you crazy.
some people prefer to be bored in intimate relationships, and others prefer to be annoyed. I was noodling on it this morning, wondering why I'd always rather prefer to be annoyed.
would you rather be far enough away from someone to feel peace, or would you like to have your psyche entwined with theirs, with the downside of constantly being exposed to all their flaws?
In relationships, there’s some kind of balance you have to strike that’s personal to you—you want to be able to tolerate significant annoyance, because every person you can be truly intimate with is going to come with their own particular set of downsides, but you don’t want to end up in a state of permanent exasperation.
But people who are more organized and structured have a far greater number of internal partitions. It can hard for them to be as present, as soft and consuming and close.
Generally, the people who are most capable of expressing love are soupy, gushy, and disorganized. Their structurelessness can be unsettling—when I’m around them, I feel like I’m submerged in a warm and comforting swamp. But nevertheless a swamp!
When I was younger, I thought that love occurred as a result of comprehensible, desirable qualities. Like, I fell in love with him because he’s tall and beautiful and kind. In reality, I find that there’s some of that, but mostly we fall in love for reasons that have little to do with our partner’s virtue. It’s more that something about their way of being hooks onto us—their attachment style is similar to our mother’s, or the way they listen makes us feel deeply understood.
Romance is annoying. It exposes our vulnerabilities, our worst qualities, the patterns we like to pretend we’ve outgrown. Romance teaches you that what you claim to value is not what you actually value.
Their bad habits disturb any semblance of peace you once had. It’s relatively easy to remain calm around a pet or a child, because we don’t expect them to know better. But an adult knows better! How can it be that they are intelligent, capable, fully possessed of free will… and yet they use their free will to be annoying?
We are given aphorisms like “No one is perfect” and “relationships are hard.” We are given diagnoses like codependent and avoidantly attached and “the day-to-day entanglement of marriage is fundamentally opposed to the mystery that sustains sexual attraction.” Well, in trying to come up with my own theory of love, I’d like to submit: closeness is fundamentally annoying.
Closeness is annoying because it’s about the surrender of control.
#relationships#dating#introspection#philosophy#love
·avabear.xyz·
the essence of love is... annoyance?
When To Do What You Love
When To Do What You Love
People pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. But there's an obvious exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if you love football, and you're good enough at it, you can get paid a lot to play it.
it's clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a software company. He didn't just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed, but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it.
If you want to make a really huge amount of money — hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars — it turns out to be very useful to work on what interests you the most. The reason is not the extra motivation you get from doing this, but that the way to make a really large amount of money is to start a startup, and working on what interests you is an excellent way to discover startup ideas.
Many if not most of the biggest startups began as projects the founders were doing for fun. Apple, Google, and Facebook all began that way. Why is this pattern so common? Because the best ideas tend to be such outliers that you'd overlook them if you were consciously looking for ways to make money.
there's something like a midwit peak for making money. If you don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're most interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you can't usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.
When you have trouble choosing between following your interests and making money, it's never because you have complete knowledge of yourself and of the types of work you're choosing between, and the options are perfectly balanced. When you can't decide which path to take, it's almost always due to ignorance. In fact you're usually suffering from three kinds of ignorance simultaneously: you don't know what makes you happy, what the various kinds of work are really like, or how well you could do them
Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring out what to work on is a problem that could take years to solve, the sooner you start, the better.
You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?
If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring
The less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this "staying upwind." If you're unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math
The root of great work is a sort of ambitious curiosity, and you can't manufacture that.
#career#advice#work/productivity#lifestyle#philosophy
·paulgraham.com·
When To Do What You Love
Brat - Sherry Ning
Brat - Sherry Ning
AI: "Brat" is presented as a complex female persona that embraces both vulnerability and power, using charm, mischief, and art to navigate life's challenges while maintaining a balance between sincerity and playfulness.
Brat is asking for forgiveness instead of permission, because red lip gloss and watery eyes will get a “ok, go ahead—but just this time” out of any grumpy, middle-aged parking enforcement officer.
We’re captivated by femme fatales and Bond girls. We make muses out of women like Marilyn Monroe—her breathy “Happy birthday, Mr. President” at Madison Square Garden can make us feel embarrassed, mesmerized, or even disgusted, but one thing it can’t make us feel is angry: How can you get mad at an attractive woman for showing off what she has (without admitting your own envy or insecurity)?
Brat is wearing dark sunglasses to watch men play beach volleyball.
Brat is exchanging looks with a girl friend whenever a shirtless man walks by, synchronously swallowing a smirk that could’ve wiggled out of control, then going back to the conversation.
I care about how something is written as much as I care about the plot. That’s why commercial nonfictions are like Kleenex—to be used and discarded, if used at all.
I don’t want information; I want enchantment.
Jung said that the study of the soul begins and ends with Mercury, the pagan god of merchants, profits, and thieves. He’s the Tinder Swindler. He’s Anna Delvey. He’s a trickster and a master storyteller. He’s in the Forbes-30-under-30-to-prison pipeline. The Ancients designated a deity to mischief because it is a vice to try too hard to be sincere. You’re either sincere or you’re not; one does not try to be sincere. For example, if I say, “I’m humble,” am I actually humble? What mature person has to say, “I’m mature”?
Mercury represents a kind of detachment. I’m not saying that it’s good to lie or cheat; I’m saying that trying too hard isn’t the best way to get what you want. There’s something blatantly wrong with the pickup artist, yet, there’s something not quite right about someone who doesn’t have any game. You may be a good person, but what if you’re just not fun? If you’re so smart, why aren’t you happy?
Brat is a kind of transparency. It challenges hypocrisy and shakes up complacency. Brat is a splash of brandy in the cake—a little genuine fun in polite society.
Paradoxically, you need a dose of Mercury to keep things honest. It’s why the goofiest faceless accounts on Twitter are the most genuine people in real life, or why you and your close friend use the most unserious memes to describe the darkest times of your lives.
#trends#culture#identities/femininity#social media#philosophy#digital-culture#viral
·sherryning.com·
Brat - Sherry Ning
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People

AI Summary: > This article challenges the common advice to "surround yourself with smarter people," arguing that it's logically flawed and potentially harmful. Instead, the author proposes seeking out "differently free" individuals who can provide non-sequiturs and unexpected perspectives, keeping one engaged in an "infinite game" of continuous learning and growth.

We can finally define what it means for someone to be differently free from you. They are people who are playing just a slightly different game than you are. That difference makes them a reliable sources of non sequiturs in your life. Waiting for nature to present you with a parrot or a piece of corn to awaken you out of a finite game is a tricky, chancy business.
Differently free people change the equation in an interesting way. When you include a person in your life, it is because they have a definite worth (possibly negative) in whatever finite game you’re asleep in at the time. This means there is at least some overlap between their game and yours; some similarity between how you keep score and how they do. Some meaningful relationship (possibly adversarial)  between how you define winning and how they do.
This means you have a model of the person in your head. One that predicts how they will value things.
it is the parts that don’t overlap that matter. There are things that have a defined worth in their lives that are non sequiturs in yours, and vice versa. When you see through the eyes of a differently free person, you expect to see a landscape of presumptively valued things. A landscape based on your predictions of how they value things. When the other person appears to value something that doesn’t even register with you, for a moment, that thing turns into a non sequitur, a candidate parrot. It lingers just a little bit longer in your own mind than it would if you yourself saw it. Long enough that you do a double take and notice it consciously.
My alternative to the heuristic, which many of you have heard in off-blog conversations, is that I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. It’s reciprocal. I suspect the people with whom I develop long-term relationships are the ones I surprise regularly. The ones who find me predictable don’t stick around. We’re not talking any old kind of surprise, but non sequiturs. Surprises that you can’t really relate to anything else, and don’t know what to do with. Mind-expanding surprises rather than gap-closing surprises.
#advice#lifestyle#culture#relationships#philosophy
·archive.is·
Don’t Surround Yourself With Smarter People
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context. To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.
The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.
If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.
The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy
Anything that increases the rate and resolution of information you get from the context will help. And anything that makes it easier for you to act on the context.
A common reason we filter information and become blind to the context is that we bundle things when we think. Thinking about our career, we might think in abstractions like “a job.” But really a career is made up of a bunch of different things like a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. It is often easier to find a fit if you unbundle these things, and think about the parts that matter to you individually. Do you actually need more status? Or can you find a better fit if you go low status?
Another common reason the feedback loop of unfolding often works poorly is that people have decided on a solution already. They have turned on their confirmation bias. They have decided that a certain solution is off-limits. Let’s say you are 34 and haven’t found a partner but want kids. If we unbundle this, it is clear that the problem of having a kid and the problem of love are not the same thing, so you could solve your problem by having a kid with your best friend instead. But this feels weird. It is not the vision you have for your life. And it seems dysfunctional. Observe that feeling—it is, perhaps, a part of the context. There is some information there. But to unfold, do not write off any solutions. Leave them all on the table; let them combine and recombine. Many good ideas look bad at first. To increase the rate at which you understand the context, you want to develop a certain detachment. When the context thrashes one of your ideas, you want to say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It takes practice. But it is worth getting better at. Reality is shy—it only reveals itself to those who, like honest scientists, do not wish it to be something else.
The faster you can collide your ideas against reality, the faster you get feedback.
The school system is centered around visions, not unfolding. You are asked to make decisions about realities that are five, ten years down the line, and you get no feedback on your decisions.
you’re less torn by anxious attachments when you recognize how something must naturally and necessarily unfold.
Knowledge is freedom from getting mad at facts.
Detachment does not mean you don’t care what happens. It just means you don’t care whether a specific thing happens or not. You want to know the outcome of the coin-toss (you care), but you don’t care whether it is heads or tails even if you’ve bet on heads (you’re not attached to a specific outcome). The important thing is that something happens, which means you’ve successfully kept play going, but without keeping score.
Emotional Self-Management: I like to think of this as accepting the emotions you have instead of having emotions about having emotions in an endless stack.
Fear. Not fear, plus anxiety about fear, plus guilt about anxiety about fear, plus shame about displaying guilt about experiencing anxiety about having fear. This is emotional focus. Instead of retreating from an emotion through layers of additional emotions until you find one you can deal with, you experience the actual emotion for what it is.
#lifestyle#philosophy#design#self improvement#career#advice#relationships#design/processes
·archive.is·
Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning
Flirting isn’t limited to romance. Flirting is an attitude that only playful and happy people can have and enjoy. It’s the virtue of being uncommitted—to people, to philosophies, to bets. Flirting turns uncertainty, something we usually fear, into pleasure. It’s being able to take yourself less seriously. It’s being able to react to discomfort with humor. Fortune is a lady and she favors whoever makes her laugh. Most people can sting like a bee but not everyone can float like a butterfly. You can change a conversation you don’t want to have by turning your shoulder, lowering your chin, giving a mischievous smile—a gesture my mother would call “coquettish”—and asking a slightly provocative personal question. Flirting lets you turn the tables without killing the tête-à-tête.
#relationships#lifestyle#themes#philosophy
·sherryning.com·
Diary of a Lover Girl - Sherry Ning
written in the body
written in the body
I spent so many years of my life trying to live mostly in my head. Intellectualizing everything made me feel like it was manageable. I was always trying to manage my own reactions and the reactions of everyone else around me. Learning how to manage people was the skill that I had been lavishly rewarded for in my childhood and teens. Growing up, you’re being reprimanded in a million different ways all the time, and I learned to modify my behavior so that over time I got more and more positive feedback. People like it when you do X and not Y, say X and not Y. I kept track of all of it in my head and not in my body. Intellectualizing kept me numbed out, and for a long time what I wanted was nothing more than to be numbed out, because when things hurt they hurt less. Whatever I felt like I couldn’t show people or tell people I hid away. I compartmentalized, and what I put in the compartment I never looked at became my shadow.
So much of what I care about can be boiled down to this: when you’re able to really inhabit and pay attention to your body, it becomes obvious what you want and don’t want, and the path towards your desires is clear. If you’re not in your body, you constantly rationalizing what you should do next, and that can leave you inert or trapped or simply choosing the wrong thing over and over. "I know I should, but I can’t do it” is often another way of saying “I’ve reached this conclusion intellectually, but I’m so frozen out of my body I can’t feel a deeper certainty.”
It was so incredibly hard when people gave me negative feedback—withdrew, or rejected me, or were just preoccupied with their own problems—because I relied on other people to figure out whether everything was alright.
When I started living in my body I started feeling for the first time that I could trust myself in a way that extended beyond trust of my intelligence, of my ability to pick up on cues in my external environment.
I can keep my attention outwards, I don’t direct it inwards in a self-conscious way. It’s the difference between noticing whether someone seems to having a good time in the moment by watching their face vs agonizing about whether they enjoyed something after the fact. I can tell the difference between when I’m tired because I didn’t sleep well versus tired because I’m bored versus tired because I’m avoiding something. When I’m in my body, I’m aware of myself instead of obsessing over my state, and this allows me to have more room for other people.
#writing#philosophy#introspection#mental health
·avabear.xyz·
written in the body
What’s a secret all gay men keep that straight people don’t know? : r/askgaybros
What’s a secret all gay men keep that straight people don’t know? : r/askgaybros
When you grow up having to navigate the world with two minds, you can at least (hopefully) bask in the absurdity of it all. It also helps numb the pain.
Growing up differently and gay oftentimes made us feel alienated, lonely, and the black sheep of our families. To figure out who we really were and to learn to navigate the world in a healthy way we were forced to do a form of work that not many straight people are confronted with. The stuff that bothers straight men I know seriously makes me laugh. You can tell they've had to never do the work to search deep within themselves to find meaning and to move past unacceptance. I seriously look at being gay as a gift now. I wouldn't change it for all the money in the world because I'm proud and grateful to be who I am. I've honestly become the systemic change in my family because I've never had to follow the cookie cutter mold and I'm not afraid to speak up and voice important opinions.
The amount of self reflection one has to go through for being gay in this world is insane.
I still in my early 20s but I've changed so much backwards thinking in my family just by being myself and challenging some of their opinions. Also when straight men talk about being lonely I always just laugh and tell them I do feel lonely but I've been lonely since I was like 12 or so, atp I don't even feel lonely I've learnt how to keep myself company due to years of introspection.
Rules matter less than people think. We've already broken the grow up get married to a nice girl and have children rules that most of the world goes along with, so we tend to be more questioning when it comes to other rules
You can live your life however you want - not to societal expectations. Your partner is someone you likely truly get and gets you because they're also a guy - no mystery or gender related differences. No external expectations of marriage, or having babies / kids etc. Also no PMS, no biological clock ticking and putting deadlines in your life. And also added bonus, if you're similar size then you can share your clothes.
DavidtheMalcolm • 23h ago Oppression doesn't make us all better people. Like the narrative that feminism pushes hard is that oppression makes us kinder, nicer, more empathic than straight white men... and sometimes that's true. Sometimes there's great examples of that. But so many of us are just broken trash people who no sane person would want in their life.
#discussion#identities/lgbtq#coming-of-age#philosophy#themes
·reddit.com·
What’s a secret all gay men keep that straight people don’t know? : r/askgaybros
My favorite thing about getting older
My favorite thing about getting older
But here’s a constant: each year you learn more about yourself. You see yourself in different environments, different styles of living, different communities and friend circles which reward slightly different things. You get to see yourself bend to the world around you as you evolve from one stage of life to another.
I’m convinced each of us has certain fundamental dispositions, whether they’re contained in our genes or attachment styles or Enneagram types. But we’re also prone to making up stories about ourselves, stories that we wish were true. Time is the best antidote to all our attempts at self-deception: it’s easy to lie to yourself for a day, but a lot harder to lie to yourself for a decade.
#philosophy#self improvement#introspection#existential
·bitsofwonder.co·
My favorite thing about getting older
thinking - @visakanv's blog
thinking - @visakanv's blog

Summary: > Thinking is a crucial tool for processing information, making sense of reality, and determining how to act on that information. However, there is often a disconnect between abstract thinking and the practical realities of daily life. Finding a balance and building bridges between the two is key. Over the years, the author's own thinking has evolved from being very abstract and focused on big picture questions in his early 20s, to becoming more grounded and focused on navigating the challenges and responsibilities of adult life, while still retaining a sense of curiosity and desire to contribute positively to the world. Ultimately, examining one's life through thinking is valuable, but it's equally important to live life and not get stuck in one's head.

I don’t believe in the separation between thinking and feeling. I think so, I think of thinking as as an instrument. It’s it’s a it’s like, you know, it’s the intellectual psychological equivalent of like weighing scales and barometers and and rulers. It’s it’s a way of processing information. But most information is actually, like, I mean, emotional information, you know.
what makes a pro a pro and what makes a con a con? If you really dig into it all the way down, it boils down to your feelings about those respective things. And, you know, you might say things that, oh, this is objective because I wanna take that job instead of this job because it pays more. But embedded in that is the fact that you feel that that getting more money is a good thing and you’re you’re choosing to weight(?).
there’s this more abstract kind of big picture, philosophical grand thinking, which is interesting and fun, and there is there’s instrumental thinking, which is very, very functional, very, very, it’s about doing something it’s about getting stuff done basically.
the act of confronting a fear is an act. It’s something that you do. It’s something that, you know, you do with your body effectively. Even if it’s, you know, I’m gonna text my boss, right, and ask for a raise. Like, that’s still an act. It’s something you choose to do. It’s something you have an emotional response to. You feel nervous or you feel scared or, you know, you feel angry. Whatever it is, it is about your feelings and and you think to process your feelings but my cat is here. You think to process your feelings but ultimately you act.
there are quotes like the unexamined life is not worth living and then people flip it and say the unlived life is not worth examining. I think both statements are kinda true
I want the world to have more good thinkers and the way to do that is to, you know, like is to be like Richard Feynman, Feynman, I feel, which is to to enjoy thinking, to show the to show, you know, he described it as I think the the pleasure of finding things out. Right? And the pleasure of really understanding how things work. Because when you really understand how things work, you can manipulate it and how things work.
I am trying to demonstrate my own love for thinking and for processing information and for making sense of reality. And while that’s the case, there’s also a subset of people who may be overrepresented on Twitter and YouTube who kind of take that to to, almost dysfunctional degree where, you know, you decide that thinking is a good thing and then you become obsessive about it and you become kind of it it becomes like your drug. Like, and you think too much about everything.
it doesn’t make sense for me to study everything there is about audio before I start making videos. It’s I should just make a video, keep doing it until and when something goes bad, I will learn by trying to fix it. Right? That’s that’s that is a sort of practical approach to thinking. And it means, you know, being okay not knowing some things so that you can focus on knowing the things that are most consequential, most effective, most powerful.
if you spend all your time thinking, you probably should cut that shit out a little bit. You should you can probably afford to think less. You can probably afford to, you know, do like a weekly review or something and and, you know, like, live your life a little bit.
#philosophy#advice#introspection#knowledge-work#existential#lifestyle#self improvement
·visakanv.com·
thinking - @visakanv's blog
Meaningfulness and the scope of experience
Meaningfulness and the scope of experience

The ideal is to flexibly adjust our scope as needed - drawing it in close when feeling overwhelmed or at risk of neglecting immediate needs, expanding it out when we have the resources to consider the bigger picture. With a larger scope, the challenge is finding ways to emotionally connect and visualize how our current small-scale actions integrate into that vast context to create a sense of meaning.

Related to Alexander Technique

I find that the extent to which I find life meaningful, seems strongly influenced by my scope of experience
our minds will automatically keep looking for actions whose outcomes are discernable and integrated, relative to the current scope of experience. When the scope is close, it is easy to find such actions. Taking a shower, making a cup of tea, going out for a jog; the consequences of these actions will manifest as concrete and enjoyable bodily sensations, clearly discernable both within the temporal and spatial scope. And because the scope is so close, almost everything I do will affect the whole scope, so it will feel tightly integrated.
I imagine getting a taste of tea, and think no farther out in time; thus, getting up from bed, going to the kitchen, preparing the tea, and sitting down to drink it, feels like a tight chain of actions where each step gives rise to the next, culminating in the warmth of the tea cup pressing against my lips, the sensation of taste on my tongue.
When the scope is far, it is much different. What action could one even think of, whose consequences were discernable on a scale spanning entire galaxies? Or whose consequences could be traced out for tens, maybe hundreds of years? It’s hard to imagine anything.
In Rules of Play: Game Design Fundamentals, Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman define meaningful play in a game as emerging when the relationships between actions and outcomes are both discernable and integrated into the larger context of the game. In other words:
The consequences of your actions have to be integrated into the larger context of the game: they need to affect the game experience at some later point in the game. If you move a piece in a game of chess, then that move will directly shape the whole rest of the game, making the moves deeply integrated. But if every game of chess included three opening moves after which the board was reset to the initial position, throwing away everything that happened during those three moves, then those moves would not be integrated to the gameplay. People would just make some moves at random as fast as possible, to get on with the actual opening moves of the game.
Draw it closer when you are feeling overwhelmed, or when you are at risk of neglecting yourself or your loved ones; broaden it out when you have the resources to deal with the larger scope, and its demands. When you are operating in a larger scope, see if you can find ways to visualize your impact in a way that makes your current actions feel more integrated to the whole context, so as to experience their meaningfulness.
#spirituality#philosophy#wellbeing#introspection#meditation
·kajsotala.fi·
Meaningfulness and the scope of experience
Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy on how technology shapes our world | Aeon Essays
Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy on how technology shapes our world | Aeon Essays
technics – the making and use of technology, in the broadest sense – is what makes us human. Our unique way of existing in the world, as distinct from other species, is defined by the experiences and knowledge our tools make possible
The essence of technology, then, is not found in a device, such as the one you are using to read this essay. It is an open-ended creative process, a relationship with our tools and the world.
the more ubiquitous that digital technologies become in our lives, the easier it is to forget that these tools are social products that have been constructed by our fellow humans.
By forgetting, we lose our all-important capacity to imagine alternative ways of living. The future appears limited, even predetermined, by new technology.
#tech#philosophy#future#core-term#existential
·aeon.co·
Bernard Stiegler’s philosophy on how technology shapes our world | Aeon Essays
Accepting Your Potential with ADHD - everyonehasamnesia on Tumblr
Accepting Your Potential with ADHD - everyonehasamnesia on Tumblr
I was so used to hearing from teachers and family that if I just didn’t procrastinate and worked all the time, I could do anything! I had all this potential I wasn’t living up to! And that’s true, as far as it goes, but that’s like saying if Usain Bolt just kept going he could be the fastest marathon runner in the world. Why does he stop at the end of the race??
Now, I’ve found that I do need to work on not procrastinating. Not because the product is better, even, but because it’s better for my mental health and physical health to not have a full, sweating, panicked breakdown over every task even if the task itself turns out excellently. It’s a shitty way to live! You feel bad ALL the time! And I don’t deserve to live like that anymore.
I don’t have an ocean of productivity and accomplishments inside of me that I could easily, effortlessly access if I just sat down 8 hours a day and worked. There’s no fucking way. That’s not real. It’s an illusion. It’s fine not to live up to an illusion.
#philosophy#advice#mental health#attention#work/productivity#adhd
·tumblr.com·
Accepting Your Potential with ADHD - everyonehasamnesia on Tumblr
101 Additional Advices
101 Additional Advices
Forget trying to decide what your life’s destiny is. That’s too grand. Instead, just figure out what you should do in the next 2 years.
Try to define yourself by what you love and embrace, rather than what you hate and refuse.
Where you live—what city, what country—has more impact on your well being than any other factor. Where you live is one of the few things in your life you can choose and change.
Once a month take a different route home, enter your house by a different door, and sit in a different chair at dinner. No ruts.
Every now and then throw a memorable party. The price will be steep, but long afterwards you will remember the party, whereas you won’t remember how much is in your checking account.
Most arguments are not really about the argument, so most arguments can’t be won by arguing.
invent your own definition of success. Shoot your arrows first and then paint a bull’s eye around where they land. You’re the winner!
There should be at least one thing in your life you enjoy despite being no good at it. This is your play time, which will keep you young. Never apologize for it.
You have 5 minutes to act on a new idea before it disappears from your mind.
The patience you need for big things, is developed by your patience with the little things.
When you are stuck or overwhelmed, focus on the smallest possible thing that moves your project forward.
For steady satisfaction, work on improving your worst days, rather than your best days.
Your decisions will become wiser when you consider these three words: “…and then what?” for each choice.
If possible, every room should be constructed to provide light from two sides.  Rooms with light from only one side are used less often, so when you have a choice, go with light from two sides.
There is a profound difference between thinking less of yourself (not useful), and thinking of yourself less (better).
Always ask yourself: what would change my mind?
Becoming one-of-a-kind is not a solo job. Paradoxically you need everyone else in the world to help make you unique.
If you need emergency help from a bystander, command them what to do. By giving them an assignment, you transform them from bewildered bystander to a responsible assistant.
The most common mistake we make is to do a great job on an unimportant task.
Don’t work for a company you would not invest money in, because when you are working you are investing the most valuable thing you have: your time.
Fail forward. Failing is not a disgrace if you keep failing better.
Do not cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.
For small tasks the best way to get ready is to do it immediately.
What others want from you is mostly to be seen. Let others know you see them.
When you try something new, don’t think of it as a matter of success / failure, but as success / learning to succeed.
use your honesty as a gift not as a weapon. Your honesty should benefit others.
A good sign that you are doing the kind of work you should be doing is that you enjoy the tedious parts that other people find tortuous.
Celebrating the success of others costs you nothing, and increases the happiness of everyone, including you.
To tell a good story, you must reveal a surprise; otherwise it is just a report.
a long horizon allows you to compound small advances into quite large achievements.
Often ideas are rejected because of the tone of voice they are wrapped in. Humility covers many blemishes.
When you are right, you are learning nothing.
Very small things accumulate until they define your larger life. Carefully choose your everyday things.
If you are impressed with someone’s work, you should tell them, but even better, tell their boss.
Humility is mostly about being very honest about how much you owe to luck.
#advice#opinion#guides#philosophy#work/productivity#work-life#careers#list
·kk.org·
101 Additional Advices
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis
Yuk Hui's concept of "cosmotechnics" combines technology with morality and cosmology. Inspired by Daoism, it envisions a world where advanced tech exists but cultures favor simpler, purposeful tools that guide people towards contentment by focusing on local, relational, and ironic elements. A Daoist cosmotechnics points to alternative practices and priorities - learning how to live from nature rather than treating it as a resource to be exploited, valuing embodied relation over abstract information
We might think of the shifting relationship of human beings to the natural world in the terms offered by German sociologist Gerd-Günter Voß, who has traced our movement through three different models of the “conduct of life.”
The first, and for much of human history the only conduct of life, is what he calls the traditional. Your actions within the traditional conduct of life proceed from social and familial circumstances, from what is thus handed down to you. In such a world it is reasonable for family names to be associated with trades, trades that will be passed down from father to son: Smith, Carpenter, Miller.
But the rise of the various forces that we call “modernity” led to the emergence of the strategic conduct of life: a life with a plan, with certain goals — to get into law school, to become a cosmetologist, to get a corner office.
thanks largely to totalizing technology’s formation of a world in which, to borrow a phrase from Marx and Engels, “all that is solid melts into air,” the strategic model of conduct is replaced by the situational. Instead of being systematic planners, we become agile improvisers: If the job market is bad for your college major, you turn a side hustle into a business. But because you know that your business may get disrupted by the tech industry, you don’t bother thinking long-term; your current gig might disappear at any time, but another will surely present itself, which you will assess upon its arrival.
The movement through these three forms of conduct, whatever benefits it might have, makes our relations with nature increasingly instrumental. We can see this shift more clearly when looking at our changing experience of time
Within the traditional conduct of life, it is necessary to take stewardly care of the resources required for the exercise of a craft or a profession, as these get passed on from generation to generation.
But in the progression from the traditional to the strategic to the situational conduct of life, continuity of preservation becomes less valuable than immediacy of appropriation: We need more lithium today, and merely hope to find greater reserves — or a suitable replacement — tomorrow. This revaluation has the effect of shifting the place of the natural order from something intrinsic to our practices to something extrinsic. The whole of nature becomes what economists tellingly call an externality.
The basic argument of the SCT goes like this. We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive (to use Franklin’s term) or manipulatory (to use Illich’s). For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule.
all things increasingly present themselves to us as technological: we see them and treat them as what Heidegger calls a “standing reserve,” supplies in a storeroom, as it were, pieces of inventory to be ordered and conscripted, assembled and disassembled, set up and set aside
In his exceptionally ambitious book The Question Concerning Technology in China (2016) and in a series of related essays and interviews, Hui argues, as the title of his book suggests, that we go wrong when we assume that there is one question concerning technology, the question, that is universal in scope and uniform in shape. Perhaps the questions are different in Hong Kong than in the Black Forest. Similarly, the distinction Heidegger draws between ancient and modern technology — where with modern technology everything becomes a mere resource — may not universally hold.
Thesis: Technology is an anthropological universal, understood as an exteriorization of memory and the liberation of organs, as some anthropologists and philosophers of technology have formulated it; Antithesis: Technology is not anthropologically universal; it is enabled and constrained by particular cosmologies, which go beyond mere functionality or utility. Therefore, there is no one single technology, but rather multiple cosmotechnics.
osmotechnics is the integration of a culture's worldview and ethical framework with its technological practices, illustrating that technology is not just about functionality but also embodies a way of life realized through making.
I think Hui’s cosmotechnics, generously leavened with the ironic humor intrinsic to Daoism, provides a genuine Way — pun intended — beyond the limitations of the Standard Critique of Technology. I say this even though I am not a Daoist; I am, rather, a Christian. But it should be noted that Daoism is both daojiao, an organized religion, and daojia, a philosophical tradition. It is daojia that Hui advocates, which makes the wisdom of Daoism accessible and attractive to a Christian like me. Indeed, I believe that elements of daojia are profoundly consonant with Christianity, and yet underdeveloped in the Christian tradition, except in certain modes of Franciscan spirituality, for reasons too complex to get into here.
this technological Daoism as an embodiment of daojia, is accessible to people of any religious tradition or none. It provides a comprehensive and positive account of the world and one’s place in it that makes a different approach to technology more plausible and compelling. The SCT tends only to gesture in the direction of a model of human flourishing, evokes it mainly by implication, whereas Yuk Hui’s Daoist model gives an explicit and quite beautiful account.
The application of Daoist principles is most obvious, as the above exposition suggests, for “users” who would like to graduate to the status of “non-users”: those who quietly turn their attention to more holistic and convivial technologies, or who simply sit or walk contemplatively. But in the interview I quoted from earlier, Hui says, “Some have quipped that what I am speaking about is Daoist robots or organic AI” — and this needs to be more than a quip. Peter Thiel’s longstanding attempt to make everyone a disciple of René Girard is a dead end. What we need is a Daoist culture of coders, and people devoted to “action without acting” making decisions about lithium mining.
Tools that do not contribute to the Way will neither be worshipped nor despised. They will simply be left to gather dust as the people choose the tools that will guide them in the path of contentment and joy: utensils to cook food, devices to make clothes. Of course, the food of one village will differ from that of another, as will the clothing. Those who follow the Way will dwell among the “ten thousand things” of this world — what we call nature — in a certain manner that cannot be specified legally: Verse 18 of the Tao says that when virtue arises only from rules, that is a sure sign that the Way is not present and active. A cosmotechnics is a living thing, always local in the specifics of its emergence in ways that cannot be specified in advance.
It is from the ten thousand things that we learn how to live among the ten thousand things; and our choice of tools will be guided by what we have learned from that prior and foundational set of relations. This is cosmotechnics.
Multiplicity avoids the universalizing, totalizing character of technopoly. The adherents of technopoly, Hui writes, “wishfully believ[e] that the world process will stamp out differences and diversities” and thereby achieve a kind of techno-secular “theodicy,” a justification of the ways of technopoly to its human subjects. But the idea of multiple cosmotechnics is also necessary, Hui believes, in order to avoid the simply delusional attempt to find “a way out of modernity” by focusing on the indigenous or biological “Other.” An aggressive hostility to modernity and a fetishizing of pre-modernity is not the Daoist way.
“I believe that to overcome modernity without falling back into war and fascism, it is necessary to reappropriate modern technology through the renewed framework of a cosmotechnics.” His project “doesn’t refuse modern technology, but rather looks into the possibility of different technological futures.”
“Thinking rooted in the earthy virtue of place is the motor of cosmotechnics. However, for me, this discourse on locality doesn’t mean a refusal of change and of progress, or any kind of homecoming or return to traditionalism; rather, it aims at a re-appropriation of technology from the perspective of the local and a new understanding of history.”
Always Coming Home illustrates cosmotechnics in a hundred ways. Consider, for instance, information storage and retrieval. At one point we meet the archivist of the Library of the Madrone Lodge in the village of Wakwaha-na. A visitor from our world is horrified to learn that while the library gives certain texts and recordings to the City of Mind, some of their documents they simply destroy. “But that’s the point of information storage and retrieval systems! The material is kept for anyone who wants or needs it. Information is passed on — the central act of human culture.” But that is not how the librarian thinks about it. “Tangible or intangible, either you keep a thing or you give it. We find it safer to give it” — to practice “unhoarding.”
It is not information, but relation. This too is cosmotechnics.
The modern technological view treats information as a resource to be stored and optimized. But the archivist in Le Guin's Daoist-inspired society takes a different approach, one where documents can be freely discarded because what matters is not the hoarding of information but the living of life in sustainable relation
a cosmotechnics is the point at which a way of life is realized through making. The point may be illustrated with reference to an ancient tale Hui offers, about an excellent butcher who explains to a duke what he calls the Dao, or “way,” of butchering. The reason he is a good butcher, he says, it not his mastery of a skill, or his reliance on superior tools. He is a good butcher because he understands the Dao: Through experience he has come to rely on his intuition to thrust the knife precisely where it does not cut through tendons or bones, and so his knife always stays sharp. The duke replies: “Now I know how to live.” Hui explains that “it is thus the question of ‘living,’ rather than that of technics, that is at the center of the story.”
#public-life#career#job-titles#jobs#existential#tech#history#trends#philosophy#ethics
·thenewatlantis.com·
From Tech Critique to Ways of Living — The New Atlantis
Hate is the New Sex
Hate is the New Sex
These days hate has roughly the same role in popular culture that original sin has in traditional Christian theology. If you want to slap the worst imaginable label on an organization, you call it a hate group. If you want to push a category of discourse straight into the realm of the utterly unacceptable, you call it hate speech. If you’re speaking in public and you want to be sure that everyone in the crowd will beam approval at you, all you have to do is denounce hate.
At the far end of this sort of rhetoric, you get the meretricious slogan used by Hillary Clinton’s unsuccessful presidential campaign last year: LOVE TRUMPS HATE. I hope that none of my readers are under the illusion that Clinton’s partisans were primarily motivated by love, except in the sense of Clinton’s love for power and the Democrats’ love for the privileges and payouts they could expect from four more years of control of the White House; and of course Trump and the Republicans were head over heels in love with the same things. The fact that Clinton’s marketing flacks and focus groups thought that the slogan just quoted would have an impact on the election, though, shows just how pervasive the assumption I’m discussing has become in our culture.
what happens when people decide that some common human emotion is evil and harmful and wrong, and decide that the way to make a better world is to get rid of it?
The example I have in mind is the attitude, prevalent in the English-speaking world from the middle of the nineteenth century to the middle of the twentieth, that sex was the root of all evil.
I know that comparing current attitudes toward hate with Victorian attitudes toward sex will inspire instant pushback from a good many of my readers. After all, sexual desire is natural and normal and healthy, while hate is evil and harmful and wrong, right? Here again, it’s easy to lose track of the fact that people a century and a quarter ago—most likely including your ancestors, dear reader, if they happened to live in the English-speaking world—saw things the other way around. To them, hate was an ordinary emotion that most people had under certain circumstances, but sexual desire was beyond the pale: beastly, horrid, filthy, and so on through an impressive litany of unpleasant adjectives.
Make something forbidden and you make it desirable. Take a normal human emotional state, one that everyone experiences, and make it forbidden, and you guarantee that the desire to violate the taboo will take on overwhelming power. That’s why, after spending their days subject to the pervasive tone policing of contemporary life, in which every utterance gets scrutinized for the least trace of anything that anyone anywhere could conceivably interpret as hateful, so many people in today’s world don internet aliases and go to online forums where they can blurt out absolutely anything
The opposite of one bad idea, after all, is usually another bad idea; the fact that dying of thirst is bad for you doesn’t make drowning good for you; whether we’re talking about sex or anything else, there’s a space somewhere between “not enough” and “too much,” between pathological repression and equally pathological expression, that’s considerably healthier than either of the extremes. I’m going to risk causing my more sensitive readers to clutch their smelling salts and faint on the nearest sofa, in true Victorian style, by suggesting that the same thing’s true of hate.
Hate is like sex; there are certain times, places, and contexts where it’s appropriate, but there are many, many others where it’s not. You can recognize its place in life without having to act it out on every occasion—and in fact, the more conscious you are of its place in life, the more completely you acknowledge it and give it its due, the less likely you are to get blindsided by it. That’s true of sex, and it’s true of hate: what you refuse to acknowledge controls you; what you acknowledge, you can learn to control.
the blind faith that goodness requires amputation is so unquestioned in our time.
Human beings are never going to be perfect, not if perfection means the amputation of some part of human experience, whether the limb that’s being hacked off is our sexual instincts, our aggressive instincts, or any other part of who and what we are.
We can accept our sexuality, whatever that happens to be, and weave it into the pattern of our individual lives and our relationships with other people in ways that uphold the values we cherish and yield as much joy and as little unnecessary pain for as many people as possible. That doesn’t mean always acting out our desires—in some cases, it can mean never acting them out at all
#philosophy#culture#history#sex#politics#wellbeing#people/Trump
·ecosophia.net·
Hate is the New Sex
Saving the Liberal Arts - David Perell
Saving the Liberal Arts - David Perell
  • The decline of Liberal Arts is driven by both financial and ideological factors.
    • Universities prioritize career-focused majors due to funding cuts and student demand for practical skills.
    • The high cost of college tuition pushes students to focus on getting a high-paying job after graduation.
    • Professional skills become obsolete quickly, while a Liberal Arts education provides a foundation of knowledge that is timeless.
    • Liberal Arts education is considered "fundamental knowledge" that is slow to change and provides a broader perspective.
  • People are sacrificing their well-being for work without questioning why.
  • Obsession with productivity discourages people from pursuing non-income producing knowledge.
  • The decline of leisure time reduces opportunities for contemplation and reflection.
  • The Liberal Arts provide timeless and fundamental knowledge that is applicable across situations.
    • Universities prioritize filtering students for the labor market over nurturing their potential.
    • The tenure system can incentivize research over teaching and responsiveness to student needs.
  • A Liberal Arts education helps people question societal structures and appreciate life beyond materialism.
  • Critique of universities for prioritizing job placement over a well-rounded education.
There’s a trade-off between practicality and timelessness. Knowledge at the top of the chart, such as fashion and commerce, is immediately actionable, but decays the fastest. They’re relevant in everyday life for social and earning an income, but their specifics have a short half-life. Meanwhile, culture and nature are deeper on the chart. They offer fundamental knowledge. Their lessons apply everywhere, even if they’re beyond the scope of conscious thought in most people’s day-to-day lives. The further down the layers you travel, the longer it will take for the knowledge to pay off, but the longer that information will stay relevant and the more widely applicable it will be.
by pushing students to pursue what is immediately profitable instead of what’s ultimately meaningful, they will devalue fundamental knowledge. That’s because the business models for income share agreements and student debt insurance only work if the students make a lot of money after college.
In a study conducted during her time there, three quarters of freshmen said college was essential to developing a meaningful philosophy of life. By contrast, only a third said that it was essential to financial well-being. Today, those fractions have flipped.
You shouldn’t need to attend four years of college to earn a living. Instead, we should make it cheap and expedient for young people to receive a professional education and develop practical skills. After a year of training in the classroom, they can do an apprenticeship where they can get paid to learn instead of paying to learn.
These changes will help young adults achieve financial stability, build economically rewarded skills, and break free from parental dependence. They should study the Liberal Arts when they’re older. Rather than forcing students to slog through Dostoevsky when they are 18 — when they’re all wondering, rightly, how this is going to help them find a job — we should create schools for amateurs of all ages so they can read Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov later, when they have the life experience to appreciate it.
Today, most students are only able to formally study the Liberal Arts between the ages of 18 and 30. They only have four years during their undergraduate degree, and only the most academically ambitious of them continue their studies into graduate school. Of those who pursue a master’s degree, most stay in academia.
But if students could take Liberal Arts classes later in life, a much greater percentage would learn for the joy of it. Once again, the religious metaphor holds. No Church expects its congregants to only study the Bible for four years, with an option to keep studying as long as you plan to become a priest. But that’s what we do with the Liberal Arts.
Plato would have criticized today’s Westerners who compromise an erudite life and salivate over wealth instead, even when they’re swimming in riches.49 In a criticism of his contemporaries, he observed that their love of wealth “leaves them no respite to concern themselves with anything other than their private property. The soul of the citizen today is entirely taken up with getting rich and with making sure that every day brings its share of profit. The citizen is ready to learn any technique, to engage in any kind of activity, so long as it is profitable. He thumbs his nose at the rest.”
To prevent these failure modes, there are three guidelines Liberal Arts schools should follow: Don’t focus on practical skills, prize free thinking over ideology, and target an older audience of professionally established people.
A market-driven curriculum will create McDegree programs where students study the kinds of self-help books you find in the philosophy section of an airport bookstore. Think of already-popular books like Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life, which reduces the great Greek philosopher into a self-help guru.
People who are employed struggle to pursue a Liberal Arts education not just because they have busy schedules, but because the material can feel so disconnected from daily reality.
With the extended focus on Professional Education at the early stage of a career, we should create opportunities for students to receive a Civilized Education throughout their life where they can appreciate life beyond the almighty Dollar.
Wesleyan President Michael Roth, the author of the best book I’ve read on the Liberal Arts, once wrote: “Education is for human development, human freedom, not the molding of an individual into a being who can perform a particular task. That would be slavery.” Up until now, our colleges have followed a philosophy of giving young people freedom early and waiting until the postgraduate years to focus on a profession. Only toward the end of the 20th century did a bachelor’s degree become a prerequisite for most jobs and professional academic study such as a master’s or a PhD. We should return to a world where Civilized Education is not mandatory. Where students can postpone the Liberal Arts to acquire technical skills that are rewarded in the economic marketplace. Students are already asking for the changes, as shown by the changing composition of majors.
College was once a place to explore the True, the Good, and the Beautiful without regard for utility. But today, it’s seen as a means toward the end of finding a job. Ideas that aren’t economically valuable are belittled as useless knowledge. Materialism has become our North Star. As a society, we measure progress in changes to the material world, where we prioritize what we can see and measure. We evaluate ourselves by productivity, our economy by the availability of cheap goods, and our civilization by the rate of technological progress. We’ve forgotten about our human need for wonder, beauty, and contemplation. Today, we worship the Factual, the Useful, and the Monetizable.
Don’t get me wrong. The fruits of clean water and modern medicine are miraculous. But what good is a materialistic utopia if it comes at the cost of a spiritual one? We are more indebted, depressed, and suicidal than ever before. And yet, we continue to worship technological progress and material abundance as if they will elevate the soul. As so, we run and run and run — hoping that all that effort will save us. But if people feel too constrained to pursue wonder and beauty as ends in themselves, are we really making progress?
Mistaking money for cultural well-being is like mistaking a roof for a home. ROI-brain only speaks in the language of materialism, and we should be skeptical of it. Otherwise, our lives will follow the leash of cheap pleasures and distracting dopamine hits. Corporations, too, will continue to sell instant improvements without regard for their long-term effects.
Taken all together, the Liberal Arts is the meta-recognition of our world.
If we cannot question the systems that guide our lives, we will be enslaved to them. Nor will we be saved by comfort, pleasure, or a respectable job that impresses our family at the Thanksgiving table. Only with a Liberal Arts education will we develop the capacity to thrive as conscious adults. By studying the foundations of how we think, who we are, and how we got here, we’ll gain control over our minds and create a more flourishing civilization.
#liberal arts#education#philosophy#career#metrics v humanities
·perell.com·
Saving the Liberal Arts - David Perell
Seeking Calmness: Stop Drifting
Seeking Calmness: Stop Drifting
I think a lot of folks feel like you should be doing these certain things like writing the great American novel or reading the 100 Greatest Movies of All-Time when in actuality these are achievements that have no real guarantee of happiness. Unless you are truly enjoying those journeys, there is no reason to set upon them.
I don't think there is anything wrong with having hopes and dreams, but I do feel that maybe we allow those things to be excuses for not living a content life. I also think at times we hold onto old dreams that no longer serve us, instead of focusing on something new and more applicable to your current situation.
adulthood wasn't full of Ferraris and mansions, and I found out rather quickly that I wasn't going to save anyone, because I was struggling to save myself.
#introspection#career#ambition#self improvement#mindfulness#philosophy#mental health#advice#work/productivity
·brandonwrites.xyz·
Seeking Calmness: Stop Drifting
Choose optimism
Choose optimism
The life of an optimist is hard but exciting. Pessimism is easy because it costs nothing. Optimism is hard because it must be constantly reaffirmed.
Dreams are delicate and easy to destroy. When an idea presents itself, try to imagine the best version of it — what would make this idea great?
Pessimism and optimism share a trait: both are self-fulfilling. Your intention influences the outcome. Call it karma or, simply, effort.
#philosophy#ideals#ambition
·stephango.com·
Choose optimism
Real life
Real life
Summary: "Real life happens now, in everyday tasks and interactions, rather than being something that starts in the future. The author urges the reader to be fully present in each moment and see what it has to teach, rather than always deferring true engagement with life to some later time."
Real life doesn't start tomorrow, or on the weekend. It doesn't start when you graduate, or when you land a job, or when you quit your job. It doesn’t start once you get a handle on your anxiety, or fix your sleep schedule, or finish all the tasks in your to-do list.
Real life is made of moments like this. It’s waking up with dread and clutching at your phone for relief. It’s being mildly frustrated at all your friends for the various ways in which they don’t understand you. Real life is wiping the lint from your dryer, it’s scrubbing the same pan clean for the hundredth time, it’s being surprised that even with all the fun of a friday night, you’re just as sad to say goodbye, just as sad as when you were a child.
We spend most of our time waiting, and very few precious moments feeling like we’ve finally arrived. We defer our willingness to bask in reality to tomorrow, and then the next day, and then the next, until we forget we ever deferred anything.
But what if you don’t need to wait until you’ve meditated for decades, what if you’re closer to that than you think? What if you were more often baffled by the fact that you’re still alive, if you began to ask of this moment, of every moment: what do you have to teach me?
You know that feeling you get when you hear the good news you’ve been waiting for, or when you’re so enthralled in conversation you forget that you haven’t checked your phone for hours, or when the rain has settled and you step into the forest and the freshness of the air wrests your lungs open and everything feels perfectly in place?
You’re inflight, you’re falling through the sky, everything feels half-complete, there is so much more you meant to do, there are so many things you’re behind on, so many things you haven’t said. I’m right there with you. This is it, the madness we were born into and have no choice but to face. Real life is more and more of this and then it’s over.
#introspection#ambition#philosophy#meditation#themes
·bitsofwonder.substack.com·
Real life