Scarcity dictates what’s meaningful.
When you are alone, a relationship feels meaningful.
When you’re in a relationship, time to yourself feels meaningful.
When you are overworked, time off feels meaningful.
When you have plenty of downtime, work feels meaningful.
The scarcity never gets solved, it simply changes form.
-Mark Manson, from this episode
"What have you learned from the Grant Study men?" Vaillant's response: "That the only thing that really matters in life are your relationships to other people."
The human mind may be likened to a garden, which may be intelligently cultivated or allowed to run wild. But whether cultivated or neglected, it must and will bring forth. If no useful seeds are put into it, then an abundance of useless weed-seeds will fall, accumulate, and will reproduce their own kind.
Just as the gardener cultivates the plot, keeping it free from weeds and cultivating the flowers and fruits which are required, so may we tend the garden of our mind, weeding out all the wrong, useless, and impure thoughts and cultivating toward perfection the flowers and fruits of right, useful, and pure thoughts.
-James Allen, As A Man Thinketh
In other words, so far, AI is replacing tasks, not jobs.
-Noah Smith, thinking about the future of work
272. One of my goals is to be an ambitious 85-year-old.
273: Life is a series of continuing education classes.
-Michael Wade, Random Thoughts: Brief Reflections and Moments of Clarity
Elias Schwartz repairs shoes. He's short and round and bald and single and middle-aged and Jewish. "An old-fashioned cobbler," says he, nothing more, nothing less. I happen to be convinced that he is really the 145th reincarnation of the Haiho Lama.
See, the Haiho Lama died in 1937, and the monks of the Sa-skya monastery have been searching for forty years for his reincarnation without success. The New York Times carried the story last summer. The article noted that the Lama would be recognized by the fact that he went around saying and doing wise things in small, mysterious ways, and that he would be doing the will of God without understanding why.
Through some unimaginable error in the cosmic switching yards, the Haiho Lama has been reincarnated as Elias Schwartz. I have no doubts about it.
My first clue came when I took my old Bass loafers in for total renewal. The works. Elias Schwartz examined them with intense care. With regret in his voice he pronounced them not worthy of repair. I accepted the unwelcome judgment. Then he took my shoes, disappeared into the back of the shop, and I waited and wondered. He returned with my shoes in a stapled brown bag. For carrying, I thought.
When I opened the bag at home that evening, I found two gifts and a note. In each shoe, a chocolate-chip cookie wrapped in waxed paper. And these words in the note: "Anything not worth doing is worth not doing well. Think about it. Elias Schwartz."
The Haiho Lama strikes again.
And the monks will have to go on looking. Because I'll never tell—we need all the Lamas here we can get.
-Robert Fulghum, All I Really Need To Know I Learned In Kindergarten
Faithfulness is not blind belief; it consists of steadfastly practicing the principle of shunning those things which are not within your control, leaving them to be worked out according to the natural system of responsibilities. Cease trying to anticipate or control events. Instead accept them with grace and intelligence.
-Epictetus, A Manual for Living
Once you understand the backstory, you realize that the New York Times story is not really about flight at all but about how elites and credentialed “experts” mistake their own failures for the boundaries of possibility.
-and the rest of the story is here
God loved the world so much that he gave his son and he gave him to a virgin, the blessed virgin Mary, and she, the moment he came in her life, went in haste to give him to others. And what did she do then? She did the work of the handmaid, just so. Just spread that joy of loving to service. And Jesus Christ loved you and loved me and he gave his life for us, and as if that was not enough for him, he kept on saying: Love as I have loved you, as I love you now, and how do we have to love, to love in the giving. For he gave his life for us. And he keeps on giving, and he keeps on giving right here everywhere in our own lives and in the lives of others.
It was not enough for him to die for us, he wanted that we loved one another, that we see him in each other, that’s why he said: Blessed are the clean of heart, for they shall see God.
-Mother Teresa, from her 1979 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech
Even if all these needs are satisfied, we may still often (if not always) expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.
-Abraham Maslow, as cut-and-pasted from A Theory of Human Motivation
Here's a wonderful way to avoid an argument—simply ask questions. Instead of jumping in and disagreeing before you know any more about the subject under discussion and the other party, ask the person to state his case, specifically, and to define his terms. People who like to argue, and will at the drop of a word on any subject, are people who enjoy ruffling the feelings of others. Willard Sloan once wrote an article entitled, "Arguments Don't Win Friends" in which he points out that arguments are useless and largely ridiculous. They're more a matter of temper than temperate conversation and discussion.
-Earl Nightingale, as excerpted from The Essence of Success
In short, the first duty of a man is to speak; that is his chief business in this world; and talk, which is the harmonious speech of two or more, is by far the most accessible of pleasures. It costs nothing in money; it is all profit; it completes our education, founds and fosters our friendships, and can be enjoyed at any age and in almost any state of health.
-Robert Louis Stevenson, as found here
The essence of God does NOT include human frailties such as partiality, controllingness, duality, judgmentalism, vindictive retaliation, wrath, righteous anger, resentment, vanity, limitation, arbitrariness, revenge, jealousy, vulnerability, or locality.
-David R. Hawkins, Spiritual Power and Integrity
Your economic future is not going to be determined by the economy, but rather your own philosophy.
-Jim Rohn, as culled from Leading an Inspired Life
Already, the global chessboard looks unrecognizable.
And if the winners in this great reshuffling are not yet known, it’s easy to identify the losers.
That would be the national and transnational grandees who had pictured themselves as pillars of a “rules-based world order.”
These are elite types who worship at the altar of process: Every crisis must be papered over with consultations, negotiations and proclamations, until the public’s attention wanders and the trouble is decently shoved offstage.
Trump’s rage for change, for an actual outcome, feels to them threatening and immoral — a trampling on the proprieties.
In the rules-based world order, the point isn’t to defuse lethal situations like a hostile fanatical regime acquiring nuclear bombs — it’s to play-act at doing so, while adroitly turning present difficulties into someone else’s nightmare in the future.
I love that my life is made up of broken edgy frayed magnificent glorious sexy gooey messy amazing life-pieces.
...................................after another:
Or perhaps, “beneficiaries of the accumulated hard work of those who came before them in a way that leaves them able to spend their days solving new problems.”
..............................of Ed Sullivan.
Twelve year old Steve, with sister Kate and our parents (and most of the nation), watched the Beatles first performance on The Ed Sullivan Show in February 1964. We were watching on a 24" Philco black and white set. My overwhelming memory of that night is not really being able to hear the music over the screaming of the girls in the audience.
But he regards government as a means, an instrumentality, neither a grantor of favors and gifts, nor a master or god to be blindly worshipped and served.
-Milton Friedman, as quoted here
‘Old school’ means living by timeless principles. Who does not value punctuality or resourcefulness under pressure? These are never obsolete; they are the foundation of ease of working and ease of living.
-Nicholas Bate, from here
The sun was warm but the wind was chill.
You know how it is with an April day
When the sun is out and the wind is still,
You're one month on in the middle of May.
But if you so much as dare to speak,
A cloud comes over the sunlit arch,
A wind comes off a frozen peak,
And you're two months back in the middle of March.
---------------------------
But yield who will to their separation,
My object in living is to unite
My avocation and my vocation
As my two eyes make one in sight.
Only where love and need are one,
And the work is play for mortal stakes,
Is the deed ever really done
For Heaven and the future's sakes.
-Robert Frost, from Two Tramps in Mud Time
................and I ventured out to the wondrous Midland Theatre in Downtown Newark last evening. George Thorogood and the Destroyers were the headline act. George, at age 76 and aging like a fine bourbon, can still command the stage. Great show.
............a history major would pay off:
By contrast, the invaluable abilities to distinguish fact from opinion, organize a logical argument, think creatively, and express oneself orally and in writing with clarity and verve — all of which a good liberal education bestows — never suffer obsolescence. Rather, these capacities equip liberal-arts graduates for high-paying positions by mid-career in management, law, and other fields, offering students durable advantages in work and in life. They are gained through exposure to a broad and rich curriculum, through the accretion of specific knowledge and concepts from the earliest grades.
As early as 1826, there were proposals to amend the Constitution by members who saw the legislative elections as fraught with corruption and delay. At the start of the twentieth century, William Jennings Bryan and others pushed for direct elections, and many argued that the Senate was " a sort of aristocratic body too far removed from the people, beyond their reach, and with no special interest in their welfare." It was an interesting argument, since that was precisely what it was designed to do. The framers wanted to merge the stability of oligarchic and democratic systems. This marriage was perfectly captured in a House with short terms of popular-election members and a Senate with longe terms of legislatively selected members. That changed in 1913 with the Seventeenth Amendment specifying that senators would be chosen, like House members, in direct elections. While there were clearly good arguments for direct elections to make senators more accountable to the voters, the change removed arguably the most important control of states in Congress. With the expansive interpretation given interstate commerce, states would face increasing federal authority and decreasing political control.
-Jonathan Turley, Rage and the Republic: The Unfinished Story of the American Revolution
................................of schools teaching writing.
Writing for an audience is a completely different cognitive exercise than writing for yourself. When you write for yourself, you can skip the hard parts. You already know what you mean when you say something, you don’t have to explain your logic, and you can be as elliptical and associative as you want. When you write for an audience, you have to think about what they need to understand. You have to structure your argument so it actually lands. You have to use a sentence that communicates, not just a sentence that feels right in your head.
...................................................washing.
(Except when noted, this blog remains AI-free)
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