Life its ownself............................

 

...........................grandparenting is pretty great.

dread........................

 

And somewhere C. S. Lewis smiles.........

 

We have the greatest country on earth, the greatest constitution, the greatest economy, the greatest everything, and we’ve ended up fostering a political culture so generally nauseating that even Screwtape must be feeling a little sorry for us.

-John Podhoretz

Congratulations...........................

 

...................................are in order.

The art.....................................

 

.............................................of teaching.

Starting to think that.......................

 

................Bari Weiss is a national treasure:

What's become clear is the crisis of trust is more accurately a crisis of trustworthiness.

In other words, it's not that Americans have randomly stopped trusting the experts while softening toward the conspiracy theorists.  It's that so many experts have been exposed as partisan and unreliable and stopped deserving our trust.

-as culled from here

Ah, the 21st century....................

 But even as we consume more than ever before, big business faces a crisis of legitimacy. The pharmaceutical industry creates life-saving vaccines but has lost the trust of the public. The widening pay gap between executives and employees is destabilising our societies. Facebook and Google have more customers than any companies in history but are widely reviled.

-Sir John Kay suggests we read his newest book

The good life..........................

 

........................................well lived.

astray....................

 

. . . a man unaware of his ignorance will be led astray by his knowledge.

-Rob Firchau

Ah, democracy...................

 

A “democracy” where unelected bureaucrats have effective veto power is not a real democracy. 

-as cut-and-pasted from here

Ed. Note:  The history major in me bristles when I hear people talking about the U.S. as a democracy.  I suspect the Founding Fathers would share my bristles.  They created, and we should still be considered, a constitutional republic, which is a very different animal from a democracy.  Having said that, if you substitute "constitutional republic" for "democracy" in the above quote, the quote is still true.

Ah, history.........................

 

Everything feels unprecedented when you haven’t engaged with history. 

-Kelly Hayes, as culled from Morgan Housel's recent quote collection.

Ed. Note:  Been reading Walter Stahr's biography Salmon P. Chase: Lincoln's Vital Rival and I can tell you for certain that politics in 1840 were just as messy as they are today.  I suspect by the time the author gets around to the late 1850s we will find the politics might have gotten even messier.

Carpe diem...................................

 

all you could possibly want to know is here

And doing a mighty fine job of it..........

 

Only six people in the Galaxy knew that the job of the Galactic President was not to wield power but to attract attention away from it.

- Douglas Adams, via Chris Lynch

avoidance......................

 

It can be difficult to appreciate how much avoiding the standard ways of failing dramatically increases the odds of success.

-from the good folk at Farnam Street

Post-truth....................

 

Truth isn’t the sum of many facts: It works the other way around. We erect frameworks of understanding which the facts must fit into or modify. A healthy society will debate the relationship between a given fact and its role in our understanding of the world. The catastrophic failure of the mediators means that we now debate the frameworks and their meanings among ourselves. In this rolling chaos, interpretations have turned tendentious and partial. Reality has splintered into a million pieces. That’s the post-truth condition. . . .

The 20th century’s illusion of narrative integrity is gone forever. We now stumble along in the dark, plagued by uncertainty—an accurate description, I note, of the human condition.

-Martin Gurri, from this essay

Highly recommended.............

 

. . . if we trace these through the foregoing essay on driving, I think we arrive at a better understanding of the central issue of politics: sovereignty.

     To see a problem that needs fixing often stems from a failure to see that a solution has already been achieved—through the skill and intelligence of ordinary people.

     To drive is to exercise one's skill at being free, and one can't help but feel this when one gets behind the wheel.  It seems a skill worth preserving.

More brutality...............................

 

...........................................from the Babylon Bee.

Ed Note:  I especially liked #6 and #7

A mighty fine............................................

 

.......................................reading list.

A quick look at .............................

 

.................men and women from Matthew Crawford:

The most impressive and successful women, like their male counterparts, seem not to feel burdened with responsibility to advance the arc of History; they just do what they do, and find their satisfaction in meeting the demands of their craft.

But we have wandered off the topic of what makes men strong (answer: women who demand strength).

As Rousseau said, if you want to men to be virtuous, teach women what virtue is. . . . Men will make themselves into whatever women prefer.

. . . working-class women prefer their men to be manly, and in that respect may be said to accept male norms as valid, even crucial.  The standard feminist response is to say that in doing so, they suffer a false consciousness that guarantees their subordination.  But that is hard to square with what one sees.  In fact, working class "patriarchy" can look an awful lot like matriarchy.

The very qualities that are called "toxic" in a man often seem to count as "empowerment" in a woman.

Administrative mandates and therapeutic regimens multiply—speech and behavior are ever more closely monitored—to protect the delicate sensibilities of our empowered young women.

What if.............................

....................there's absolutely nothing standing between you and a kind of ecstatic and unhinged happiness except your need to have it all mapped out before it happens?

The bull market.............................

 

........................................for the U.S.A.

The yard man.................................

...................... Unlike so much in life where results can be invisible for years, a yard files an immediate report on how well you're doing.

On the importance of.............................

 

.....................carrying out responsibilities.

On freedom...........................

 

.............................................and authority.

We have much to celebrate...........

 

Life is good, very good..................

 

In the background.................

Jimmy Buffet............License to Chill album

 

engagement..................

 

Anything that lets us see a clear connection between effort and consequences—and that helps us feel in control of a challenging situation—is a kind of mental vitamin that helps build resilience and provides a buffer against depression. . . . Flourishing—that of rats and humans alike—seems to require an environment with "open problem spaces" that elicit the kinds of bodily and mental engagement bequeathed us by evolution and cultural development.

-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

Pretty sure we aren't there yet.........

      Throughout the past, as successive stages of social evolution unfolded, man's awareness followed rather than preceded the event.  Because change was slow, he could adapt unconsciously, "organically."  Today, unconscious adaptation is no longer adequate.  Faced with the power to alter the gene, to create new species, to populate the planets or depopulate the earth, man must now assume conscious control of evolution itself.  Avoiding future shock as he rides the waves of change, he must master evolution, shaping tomorrow to human need.  Instead of rising in revolt against it, he must, from this historic moment on, anticipate and design the future.

-Alvin Toffler, from his 1970 classic, Future Shock

ten fold...........................

 

The most selfish thing in the world you can do is be generous.  Your generosity will return you ten fold.

-Kevin Kelly

granted....................

 

To you is granted the power of degrading yourself into the lower forms of life, the beasts, and to you is granted the power, contained in your intellect and judgment, to be reborn into the higher forms, the divine.

-Rabbi Jonathan Sacks: The Great Partnership: Science, Religion, and the Search for Meaning

Ed. Note:  Methinks if he had added "heart" to "intellect and judgment", he would have been on to something.

For a stock market guy...................

 

...........he has a pretty good sense of the real estate market:

We won’t be in this situation forever because something unexpected always happens eventually, but for now, we’re in a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don’t housing market.

If anyone tells you low interest rates help buyers, ignore them.  Low interest rates help sellers - because low rates enable a buyer to pay a higher price while maintaining a lower monthly payment.  Much of the "affordability" crisis in housing has been brought on by over a decade of ridiculously low interest rates.  In real estate, low interest rates are inflationary.

You didn't ask, but I'll tell you anyway: any interest rates for borrowers that do not allow financial institutions to pay an interest rate to savers that exceeds the rate of inflation is too low.

Nirvana.........................

 I want to sit here longer, to move unhurried, to glide, to breathe, to be ordered but not scheduled, to release into reverie, to let my mind wander, my shoulders loosen, my being melt and flow with curiosity, delight, warmth, ease.

-Annie Mueller, from here

Aging like a fine wine.......................

 

“Welcome. You’re one of us now. The Wi-Fi password is getoffmylawn.”

-Eric Barker shares the secret to aging gracefully

on setting boundaries............

 

If you’re available and ready for everyone, you’re present for no one.

-Treyton DeVore

     via

Fifty years ago...................................

Roxy Music................................Country Life

 

A classic list.............................

 

............................of the classics.

    via

lazy jugglers.......................

 

That’s because they understand what the work involves, and they don’t confuse effort with results.

-Seth Godin, from here

making the abstract concrete..............

 When liberal policies were simply abstract inanity, average Americans could roll their eyes, hold their tongues, and let their lives go on.  But the radical Left made the abstract concrete for average Americans.  For their part, average Americans have found the radical Left’s policies as unavoidable as they are unendurable.

-J. T. Young, as culled from here

Opening paragraphs.................

 

     With frustration and some regret, she studied murder.  It lay in the quiet room on a sofa the color of good merlot, with heart blood staining a pale gray shirt beneath the silver bolt of a scalpel.  Her eyes, flat and grim, tracked the body, the room, the tray of artfully arranged fruit and cheese on the low table.

-J. D. Robb, Celebrity in Death

playthings.....................

When a situation looks grim, but also you're not sure exactly how things stand, you form theories that are attractive not because they are the most plausible, but because they give you something to do, and doing something is the only way not to be crushed by miasmic uncertainty and despair.  Fetching water had given me a purpose.  As so often happens for mortals like us, it turned out to be pointless purpose.  But string enough of these together and you've got yourself a life, of sorts.  We are playthings of the gods, and to provide amusement is not nothing.

-Matthew Crawford, Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

Working on it.......................

 

Choose rather than react.

-Nicholas Bate, from here

Well, yes......................

 I saw a description of Bitcoin being everything you didn't understand about computers combined with everything you don't understand about money. Now I feel seen.

-Chris Lynch, from here

Fifty years ago.....................

On the TV........Freddie Prinze in Chico and The Man

 

wellness............................

 

image via

                A library is a hospital for the mind

-anonymous (quoted by Toffler)

Life its ownself...........................

 

Change is not merely necessary to life - it is life.

-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock

Let it go...............

Don't cling to a mistake just because you spent a lot of time making it.

-Kevin Kelly, from here

 

nudged.....................

Given how much our daily lives are nudged and steered into channels engineered by tech firms, one can no longer sensibly adopt a conceptual demarcation between "the private sector" and "government."

-Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

Evening wind................

Evening Wind    Edward Hopper     1921

is the title of one of Edward Hopper's
pen-and-ink drawings,
which I spent some time looking at
in a gallery on the far west side of town.

Hopper could have called it

Totally Naked Women Crawling

on All Fours into an Unmade Bed

for she does occupy the foreground fully,

so it was only later that I noticed

the curtains behind her being lifted

by what must be an evening wind.

Then I noticed that the woman appears

to be looking at those curtains,

her face hidden by the dark curtain of her hair.

Or is she looking through the curtains

at the jagged outline of the city buildings,

topped with water tanks in silhouette?

It was not until I closed my eyes and imagined

her gradually falling asleep

after sliding naked under the covers

that I could envision the evening wind,

not just the wind as revealed by the curtains,

but the invisible wind itself blowing

through the room of this ingeniously titled drawing.

-Billy Collins, as published in Whale Day And Other Poems

Fifty years ago.................................

At the cinema.....................The Godfather Part II

 

a reaction to...................

 

There is something new and voracious in the world that feeds on individual agency, and is basically imperialistic in its aspirations. . . . 

. . .the idea of sovereignty has suddenly reemerged as politically salient.  If we take the political anger of populist movements at their word, it is a reaction to the imperiousness of political elites and corporate forces in pressing agendas of progress that seek to delegitimize the concerns of those deemed regressive.

-Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

a bracing concept................

 

. . . in Germany, where on certain roads you are free to drive as fast as you please.  But if you cause a serious accident, you are never allowed to drive again, essentially.  The law grants wide discretion and assigns total responsibility.  That is, it treats citizens as adults.  This is a bracing concept, maybe a little too radical for the United States.

-Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

play spirit.........................

 

To dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty, to endure tension—these are the essence of play spirit.

-Johan Huizinga

advantage.......................

 

I believe that the people who institute our laws are the weak and the many.  So they institute laws and assign praise and blame with themselves and their own advantage in mind.

-Plato, channeling Callicles, from Gorgias

disburdening......................

 

a curious glance..................

Moving about in India...............

 

The third form of traffic rationality is one that comes into view as soon as one recognizes the oddly gratuitous nature of such a project and permits oneself a curious glance backward, as it were, to "less developed" parts of the world.  Rather than try to duplicate the efficiency of their driving practices with computers, we might instead look to such practices to remind ourselves what human beings are capable of, when left to their own devices.  This becomes a meditation on the meaning of self-government.

-Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

a deep necessity.........................

 

A fundamental fact about human beings is that we are homo faber, as Hannah Arendt said.  We make stuff.  Doing so seems to express a deep necessity we have to point to something visible in the world and say, "I did that."

-Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

the most fundamental freedom..............

 

As creatures who are self-moving, freedom of movement would seem to be the most fundamental freedom there is, a minimal condition for that basic animal pleasure that makes life sweet. . . . What is at stake is not simply a legal right, but a disposition to find one's way through the world by the exercise of one's own powers.

-Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

safetyism..........................

 

If one cares about safety (and who doesn't), one does well to take a skeptical look at the safety-industrial complex, and its reliance on moral intimidation to pursue ends other than safety.

. . . if left unchallenged, the pursuit of risk reduction tends to create a society based on an unrealistically low view of human capacities.  Infantilization slips in, under cover of democratic ideals.  I will insist, on the contrary, that democracy remains viable only if we are willing to extend to one another a presumption of individual competence.  This is what social trust is built on.  Together, they are the minimal endowments for a free, responsible, fully awake people.

-Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

My kind of writer...........................

 

"Consistency of tone" is one of those precepts pressed upon writers by writing teachers.  Any reader who expects consistency is likely to be bewildered in what follows, . . .

--Matthew Crawford,  Why We Drive: On Freedom, Risk and Taking Back Control

Summer-reads...............................

 

John Sandford has never let me down.

Fifty years ago...............

Bo Donaldson & The Heywoods....Billy Don't Be A Hero

 

Fifty years ago....................................

On the TV..........James Garner and The Rockford Files

 

Wisdom......................

 

.........................from our friend at Sippican Cottage:

Time marches on. You can never put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can never put Humpty Dumpty back together again. The past is another county. Whatever. But I’m sure glad I didn’t forget to have kids in the first place.

Say it isn't so...................

 

Bad news: the universe is largely indifferent to your lucky socks.

-Eric Barker, from this post on "smart luck"

written in 1970.....................

 The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.

-Alvin Toffler

in the grip............................

 

If your opinions on one subject can be predicted from your opinions on another, you may be in the grip of an ideology.  When you truly think for yourself, your conclusions will not be predictable.

-Kevin Kelly

An understatement...................

 

But I also think that it is important to separate out what is real from what is just a comforting lie that we tell ourselves.

-James O'Malley from his Music Just Changed Forever post

Fifty years ago................................

At the cinema..........................Blazing Saddles

 

The tough housing market...............

 

No matter how you slice it, the home building sector seems strangely slow given our population growth . . .

Brian Wesbury offers a pretty good take on why the housing market is so tight.  He includes governmental hurdles as a major problem.  Maybe.  We think the major problem (that he fails to mention) is the wipe out of the small homebuilder - the company that would build 10-12 houses per year - after the 2008 meltdown.  Those guys never recovered and/or aged out, and have not yet been replaced.  We were so focused on sending all high school graduates to college, we forgot the importance of the building trades.  There is still a screaming need for plumbers, electricians, carpenters, drywallers, etc.  The earning potential for those high school graduates entering those trades now seems significantly higher than college graduates with BA degrees.  Just saying.  As an honorable mention for housing problems, we should not forget the serious inflation of building material costs that the covid/broken-supply-chain-years brought us.  Prices have moderated a bit, but not much.  All in all, no quick fix to the housing problem is on the horizon.

 

The good life....................

 

In fact, good relationships are significant enough that if we had to take all eighty-four years of the Harvard Study and boil it down to a single principle for living, one life investment that is supported by similar findings across a wide variety of other studies, it would be this: Good relationships keep us healthier and happier. Period.

-Robert Waldinger and Marc Schulz

via

Recommended..............................

 

      This one patiently sat in the bookcase for about twenty years, waiting for its turn.  Worth the wait.

lottery winning........................

 

Choose humility and accept the fact the only certainty is uncertainty.

Fortune doesn’t favor the brave. It rewards the realists.

All of us have won the Universe’s equivalent of the Mega-Jackpot Lottery by simply existing.

Don’t squander your good fortune by listening to people spraying a firehose of certitude.

-Tony Isola, from here

An understatement............

 When it came to the economy, the federal government’s framework of understanding had lost touch with the truth.

-Martin Gurri, from here

 

                     via

acceptance.........................

 

Whatever the present moment contains, accept it as if you had chosen it.  Always work with it, not against it.  Make it your friend and ally, not your enemy.  This will miraculously transform your life.

-Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now

Reading..................................

 

.............................................is not "interactive":

But reading is active, an act of attention, of absorbed alertness—not all that different from hunting, in fact, or from gathering. In its silence, a book is a challenge: it can’t lull you with surging music or deafen you with screeching laugh tracks or fire gunshots in your living room; you have to listen to it in your head.

Talking about my hometown...................

 

I really thought........................

 

...........................this book would cost a lot more.  

Recognizing and honoring..................

 

..................................a pioneer:

Checking in...........................

 

..................................with Morgan Housel:

I try to keep in mind that there are two ways to use money. One is as a tool to live a better life. The other is as a yardstick of success to measure yourself against other people. The first is quiet and personal, the second is loud and performative. It’s so obvious which leads to a happier life.

A few words.................................

 

................................from some long shots:

There are but few important events in the affairs of men brought about by their own choice.
-U. S. Grant

A la base de notre civilisation, il y a la liberté de chacun dans sa pensée, ses croyances, ses opinions, son travail, ses loisirs.

(At the root of our civilization, there is the freedom of each person of thought, of belief, of opinion, of work, of leisure.)

-Charles de Gaulle

Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.

-Viktor Frankl

Character cannot be developed in ease and quiet. Only through experience of trial and suffering can the soul be strengthened, vision cleared, ambition inspired, and success achieved.

-Helen Keller

To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker.

-Frederick Douglass

Riding............................

 

................................the gusto jetstream.

Now.....................

 

Gratitude for the present moment and the fullness of life now is true prosperity.

-Eckhart Tolle

acceptance.............................

 

Being an adult involves learning to accept limits imposed by a world that doesn't fully answer to our needs, to fail at this is to remain infantile . . .

-Matthew B. Crawford

In the background...........

 

Pat Metheny..................Road To The Sun album

 

restraint............................

 We do not need to get good laws to restrain bad people. We need to get good people to restrain us from bad laws.

-attributed to Gilbert Keith Chesterton

admit it.............

 

Admitting that "I don't know" at least once a day will make you a better person.

-Kevin Kelly

Some useful............................

 

........................................and overlooked skills.

Never gave this much thought before...........

 

.........................but the difference between tradition and convention is worth pondering.

choices...........................

 Playing your own game in life means understanding what truly matters to you. It’s about self-awareness and knowing your strengths and weaknesses. It’s about recognizing what brings you joy and what drains you.

-Vishal Khandelwal

     via

awash..............................

 We live in a world awash with information and we’re not enamoured with imprecision, less still a clear and certain plan to live out the best of our days (whatever the consequences) and, in the process, we’ve annihilated mystery only to be replaced with (Ye Gads) Artificial Intelligence; or another way to say that is we’d rather let something else do our thinking!

-Julian Summerhayes

awe and mystery....................

 There are no great answers, you could say, but only great questions made greater when their answerers are nobly defeated by the awe and mystery of the way things are.

-Stephen Jenkinson

thanks Julian

Ah, the Internet...........................

 

           more fun here

Finding happiness...............................

 

.....................................in all the right places.

Life is.................................

 

..........................................very, very good.

Get your daily..........................

 

...............................................dosage here.

the "great becoming"..................

 

After wrestling with Crawford's distinction between autonomy and true individuality, Rob Firchau adds to the mix with this quote from Frank Loyd Wright:

Liberty may be granted but freedom cannot be conferred.  Freedom is from within.

-full quote here

In the background..................

The Moody Blues...............the Seventh Sojourn album

 

cotton candy.......................

 

     I was sitting at my desk drinking my third cup of coffee of the morning.  I was doing this guilt-free, having read that two to five cups a day not only prevented a long list of diseases, but also helped you live a longer, if more caffeinated, life.  But then you can always find somewhere on the Internet that tells you what you want to hear, about almost anything.

-Mike Lupica's opening paragraph

 One can only handle so many philosophical-type readings before the brain rebels and wants something lighter and easier.  I've read all of Robert B. Parker's books—my very definition of lighter and easier.  Parker's estate has been using pinch-writers for quite a while now.  Apparently, the character of Spenser (and his sidekicks) is too good to let go.  Anyway, Lupica is roughly my age.  I almost always have enjoyed reading his sports writing.  Good pick by the Estate of Robert B. Parker.  Consider this one recommended.

Highly recommended................

 

Have to admit that it was work finishing this book.  Also believe it was worth the effort.  His argument is subtle, but my takeaway is that Crawford is saying that in our haste to be autonomous, self-sufficient individuals - to be liberated from authority - we have lost connection our heritage, our traditions, our past.  This "isolation" creates a feeling of discomfort or anxiety.  To ease that tension, we take a poll - see what others are thinking.  Helped by the latest in technology (social media) to see what others are thinking, us "rugged individualists" become part of the herd, and in turn that herd gets manipulated by the latest in technology.  Ironically, Crawford seems to be saying that the path to true individuality is to be willing to be "in conflict with the world" and in collaboration with others - past and present - and the world.  Not accepting abstractions or representations but taking the world as it is - warts and all. "Arguably, what it takes to be an individual is to develop a considered evaluative take on the world, and stand behind it. Doing so exposes one to conflict, and in the conversations with others that follow you may revise your take on things.  Such developments can't occur if you're not attached to anything to being with, or never put it forward to others as being choiceworthy."

Wedding................................

...................................sneakers?

 'But casualization has penetrated so far up the chain of formality that it would almost be punk for him to wear leather shoes.'"

Based on activity....................

 

...............in our county, this boom is very real. Real enough that push back has started.

Facebook's data center in western Licking County

Nostalgic....................................

 

......................................for volatility.

Overshooting...............................

 

.....................................longevity estimates:

The financial impact of overshooting longevity estimates isn’t insignificant, the report said. According to one startling calculation, a 65-year-old man who has met his income replacement ratio goal based on age 95, but is then projected to live only up to 86 because of his high cholesterol, may potentially be able to spend an additional $447,000 in retirement.

Seriously?

Emptiness.........................

 America’s elites fear and mistrust the American voter. They have lost faith in democracy, a system that in 2016 delivered the power of the presidency to the monstrous Trump, and they dream of a rising class of Platonic guardians, people exactly like themselves, with the right pedigree, the right opinions, the right manners, who rule not because they have won an electoral lottery but in perpetuity, as a reward for their superior virtue.

-Martin Gurri,  from here

thanks Michael

The lost art..........................

 

......................................of disagreement.

unreliable..............................

 

The values assigned by the marketplace are an unreliable proxy for human excellence.

-Matthew B. Crawford, from here

Paradoxes..................

 

Fast is efficient; but sometimes slow is effective…

What is productivity for you anyway…

-Nicholas Bate, who always asks good questions

choices.................

 That thing you want to accomplish is only going to happen if you are willing to stop doing the thing that isn’t going to help.

-Sean Carpenter, from here  

In the background.................

Michael Hoppe & Tim Wheater: The Dreamer album

   

Well................................

 

.......................................good for them.

Sean Ono Lennon..................

 

.......................seeks refuge in humor.

Considering...................

 

.............................both time and quality of life.

via

If it was truly intelligent..............

 

........................it might choose to ignore us.

Bill Maher talks.......................

 

...........worthy causes and rites of passage.

fragility.........................

 

. . . the dissociative or abstract quality of children's television in general these days—makes it an ideal vehicle for psychological adjustment; for constructing and managing the kind of selves that society requires, without meddling interference from the nature of things. . . . when dumb nature is understood to be threatening to our freedom as rational beings, it becomes attractive to construct a virtual reality that will be less so, . . .With this comes fragility—that of a self that can't tolerate conflict and frustration.  And this fragility, in turn, makes us more pliable to whoever can present the most enthralling representations that save us from direct contact with the world.

-Matthew B. Crawford,  The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming An Individual In An Age Of Distraction

the decadence has been noticed......

 

BMW, a company that until recently was exemplary in preserving the bonds between car and driver, now gives us fake engine sounds, piped into the car's sound system to enhance the driving experience.  I suppose one could call this auditory "information," but it doesn't inform one of anything.  When falsification is offered as a remedy for abstraction, we have the engineering equivalent of the last, desperate days of the Roman Empire.  Powdered mandarins glided about the Senate, ripe for conquest and slaughter.  This decadence did not go unnoticed by the surrounding barbarians, and a new chapter in history began.

-Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

intractable contingencies...............

Managing frustration by sidestepping the intractable contingencies of life is a growth industry; the demand for manufactured experiences is met by a growing economy of "affective capitalism . . . 

-Matthew B. Crawford, The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming An Individual In Age Of Distraction

Ouch.............that stings.....

 

     more ouches here

Restless intelligence.......................

 

...................or whatever you want to call it.