Ludwig van....................

 

      Talking with a nice lady on the phone.  She has a case of the midwinter spiritual rot.  And a terminal cold she's had since September 1.

     "Well," rasps she, "you don't ever get depressed, do you?"

     "Listen," says I, "I get lows it takes extension ladders to get out of."

     "So what do you do?" asks she.  "I mean, what DO YOU DO?"

     Nobody ever pinned me down quite like that before.  They usually ask wat I think they should do.

     My solace is not religion or yoga or rum or even deep sleep.  It's Beethoven.  As in Ludwig van.  He's my ace in the hole.  I put his Ninth Symphony on the stereo, pull the earphones down tight, and lie down on the floor.  The music comes on like the first day of creation.

     And I think about old Mr. B.  He knew a whole lot about depression and unhappiness.  He moved around from place to place trying to find the right place.   His was a lousy love life, and he quarreled with his friends all the time.  A rotten nephew worried him deeply—a nephew he really loved.  Mr. B. wanted to be a virtuoso pianist.  He wanted to sing well, too.  But when he was still quite young, he began losing his hearing.  Which is usually bad news for pianists and singers.  By 1818, when he was forty-eight, he was stone-cold deaf.  Which makes it all the more amazing that he finished his Ninth Symphony five years later.  He never really heard it!  He just thought it!

-Robert Fulghum,  All I Really Need To Know I Learned in Kindergarten

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It may be as impossible to understand the human person by exploring the evolution of the human animal as it is to discover the significance of a Beethoven symphony be tracing the process of its creation.

-Roger Scruton, On Human Nature

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London Symphony Orchestra.....Beethoven's 9th

True even for non-low stakes.............

 

When stakes are low, possibility is our playground. Curiosity is our guide. Mistakes are data. And the real reward is in watching yourself evolve.

-Tanmay Vora, from here

On the importance of pondering......

 

...........the hard realities of human nature.

a name of mystery..........

 

Most modern histories of mankind begin with the word evolution, and with a rather wordy exposition of evolution. . . . There is something slow and soothing and gradual about the word and even about the idea.

     As a matter of fact, it is not, touching these primary things, a very practical word or a very profitable idea.  Nobody can imagine how nothing could turn into something.  Nobody can get an inch nearer to it by explaining how something could turn into something else.  It is really far more logical to start by saying "In the beginning God created heaven and earth" even if you only mean "In the beginning some unthinkable power began some unthinkable process."
For [the name of] God is by its nature a name of mystery, and nobody ever supposed that man could imagine how a world was created any more than he could create one.

-G. K. Chesterton, from here

bred...........................

 

      There were many specific events that pushed Franklin across the line to rebellion: personal slights, dashed hopes, betrayals, and the accretion of hostile British acts.  But it is also important to take note of the core causes of Franklin's evolution and, but extension, that of a people he had come to exemplify.

      When Englishmen such as his father had immigrated to a new land, they had bred a new type of people.  As Franklin repeatedly stressed in his letters to his son, America should not replicate the rigid ruling hierarchies of the Old World, the aristocratic structures and feudal social orders based on birth rather than merit.  Instead, its strength would be its creation of a proud middling people, a class of frugal and industrious shopkeepers and tradesmen who were assertive of their rights and proud of their status.

     Like many of these new Americans, Franklin chafed at authority, which is why he had run away from his brother's print shop in Boston.  He was not awed by establishment elites, whether they be the Mathers or the Penns or the peers in the House of Lords.  He was cheeky in his writings and rebellious in his manner.  And he had imbibed the philosophy of the new Enlightenment thinkers, who believed that liberty and tolerance were the foundation for a civil society.

     For a long time he had cherished vision of imperial harmony in which Britain and America could both flourish in one great expanding empire.  But he felt that it would work only if Britain stopped subjugating Americans through mercantile trading rules and taxes imposed from afar.  Once it was clear that Britain remained intent of subordinating its colonies, the only course left was independence.

-Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

your innate humanness...................

 

There's a common illusion that spiritually evolved, loving people never have any negativity, as though they are already angelic.  They get annoyed that they still have negative feelings, and then it's compounded by their guilt and self-frustration.  They have to realize that feelings are transitory, whereas their intention to evolve remains constant.  Let go of feeling guilty that you are still just an ordinary human despite your angelic ambitions!  Having compassion towards your innate humanness, its nervous system, and the brain function that goes with it allows for greater equanimity.  Heavenly ambitions do not necessarily make us angels!

-David R. Hawkins, Letting Go: The Pathway of Surrender

hardwired................

 

Our elders tell us, "Don't judge a book by its cover."  Though well-intentioned advice, it doesn't entirely reflect the primitive parts of our brains that have had to make snap judgments for thousands of years to survive and thrive in our habitats.  We're hardwired to judge things by their covers because, in previous eras of lions, wolves, and marauding tribes, that's how our ancestors stayed alive.

     As evolved as we might seem today, this split-second context scanning and decision-making process never left us.  It's still a core part of our environmental awareness and innate survival system.  While we're not conscious of it, we prefer the world around us to be stable and predictable because it gives us a sense of control over our environment.  But deep down, we know stability isn't always possible.  So no matter where we are, we're constantly on the lookout for contextual clues and the slightest changes in our environment.

-Kevin Ervin Kelly, Irreplaceable:  How to Create Extraordinary Places That Bring People Together

enmeshed...........................

 

We do ourselves a disservice when we think of human beings as exclusively logic—or knowledge—driven,  and fail to pay attention to the role of emotions.  The two systems are enmeshed because that is the way our brain and our organism have been put together by evolution. . . .

Emotions and feelings are not a luxury; they are a means of communicating our states of mind to others.  But they are also a way of guiding our own judgments and decisions.  Emotions bring the body into the loop of reason.

-Antonio R. Damasio, Descartes' Error: Emotion, Reason, and the Human Brain

up for grabs..................

 

A wave of revolutionary change emanating from the human/AI mind is about to crash into the institutions, inaugurating a cycle of demolition and reconfiguration. The experience will feel excruciating, like open-heart surgery without anesthetics. The objective will be in part nihilistic—wrecking the hated hierarchies—and in part utopian—democratizing and rehumanizing the ruling structures. The actual outcome remains in doubt, but we know that the whole of society, as it has functioned during the “long 20th century,” is up for grabs.

-Martin Gurri, as excerpted from here

filling in........................

We don't live in objective reality, we function in a model of our own construction.  Our brains generate mental outlines, continually filling in missing information to create a 360-degree world within which we operate.  This useful evolutionary trait has allowed the human species to thrive in a world that his hostile to us soft, chewy creatures lacking claws, fangs, or armor.

-Barry Ritholtz, How Not To Invest

Got that right...............

 

Unlike his contemporaries, he did not consider the human animal the pinnacle of nature’s imagination. “Never say higher or lower,” he scribbled in the margin of a book, arguing with the author. “Say more complicated.” 

-Maria Popova on Darwin

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

Evolution.............................

 

..............................can be messy and painful:

The world rewards those who can best adapt to change. Legacy companies struggle to adapt because their businesses are organized to dominate a market that no longer exists. The game has changed, but media is far from dead.

Evolution and micro-impairments..........

 

.....add this to the list of stuff I never thought of before.

Who is not in favor....................

..........................of Type 2 growth? 

In English there is a curious and unhelpful conflation of the two meanings of the word “growth.”  The most immediate meaning is to increase in size, or increase in girth, to gain in weight, to add numbers, to get bigger. In short, growth means “more.” More dollars, more people, more land, more stuff. More is fundamentally what biological, economic, and technological systems want to do: dandelions and parking lots tend to fill all available empty places. If that is all they did, we’d be well to worry. But there is another equally valid and common use of the word “growth” to mean develop, as in to mature, to ripen, to evolve.  We talk about growing up, or our own personal growth. This kind of growth is not about added pounds, but about betterment. It is what we might call evolutionary or developmental, or type 2 growth. It’s about using the same ingredients in better ways. Over time evolution arranges the same number of atoms in more complex patterns to yield more complex organisms, for instance producing an agile lemur the same size and weight as a jelly fish. We seek the same shift in the technium. Standard economic growth aims to get consumers to drink more wine. Type 2 growth aims to get them to not drink more wine, but better wine. 

-Kevin Kelly

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

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

Evolution is ruthless and unforgiving—it doesn't just teach by showing you what works but by destroying what doesn't.

Success has its own gravity. . . .being right instills confidence that you can't be wrong, which is a devastating characteristic in a world where outlier success has a target on its back.

Every industry and career is different, but there's universal value in accepting hassle when reality demands it.

the truth is, everything comes with overhead.  That's reality. Everything comes with pieces you don't like.

The most efficient calendar in the world—one where every minute is packed with productivity—comes at the expense of curious wandering and uninterrupted thinking, which eventually become the greatest contributors to success.

Not maximizing your potential is actually the sweet spot in the world where perfecting one skill compromises another.

The best financial plan is to save like a pessimist and invest like an optimist.

The trick in any field—from finance to careers to relationships—is to be able to survive the short-run problems so you can stick around long enough to enjoy the long term growth.

A pretty good lesson from history is that the long run is usually pretty good and the short run is usually pretty bad.  It takes effort to reconcile those two and learn how to manage them with what seem like conflicting skills.  Those who can't usually end up either bitter pessimists or bankrupt optimists.

-all are excerpts taken from Same as Ever: A Guide to What Never Changes

Remember..........................

     Wanting and fearing are natural energies, part of evolution's design to protect us and help us thrive.  But when they become the core of our identity, we lose sight of the fullness of our being.  We become identified with, at best, only a sliver of our natural being—a sliver that perceives itself as incomplete, at risk and separate from the rest of the world.  If our sense of who we are is defined by feelings of neediness and insecurity, we forget that we are also curious, humorous, and caring.  We forget about the breath that is nourishing us, the love that unites us, the enormous beauty and fragility that is our shared experience in being alive.  Most basically, we forget the pure awareness, the radiant wakefulness that is our Buddha nature.

-Tara Brach, Radical Acceptance: Embracing Your Life with the Heart of a Buddha

On 'life support systems'...........................

      Today, almost the entire capacity of the Earth's 'life-support system for humans' has been provided not for us but by us, using our ability to create new knowledge.  There are people in the Great Rift Valley today who live far more comfortably than early humans did, and in far greater numbers, through knowledge of things like tools, farming and hygiene.  The Earth did provide the raw materials for our survival—just as the sun has provided the energy, and supernovae provided the elements, and so on.  But a heap of raw materials is not the same thing as a life-support system.  It takes knowledge to convert the one into the other, and biological evolution never provided us with enough knowledge to survive, let alone thrive.  In this respect we differ from almost all other species.  They do have all the knowledge that they need, genetically encoded in their brains.  And that knowledge was indeed provided for them by evolution—and so on, in the relevant sense, 'by the biosphere.'  So their home environments do have the appearance of having been designed as life-support systems for them, albeit only in the desperately limited sense the I have described.  But the biosphere no more provides humans with a life-support system than it provides us with radio telescopes.

-David Deutsch, The Beginning of Infinity: Explanations that Transform the World

intuit.........................

 All species struggle to survive and strive to reproduce.  A chance mutation about 200,000 years ago made early Homo sapiens more sensitive to social information.  This mutation increased the number of oxytocin receptors in the brain's frontal lobe, enabling out ancestors to not only understand what others were doing cognitively, but also experience the emotions of others.  This helped early humans survive by enabling them to draw on social resources more effectively.

Over time the mutation spread.  Rather than being limited to living in small bands of kin-based groups as our genus had for millions of years, Homo sapiens could live in increasingly larger and more complex societies because they could intuit others' intentions.  The most basic social information is the intention to help or harm.  As culture flourished, societies developed norms in which helpers were embraced and the selfish and violent were ostracized. . . .

We truly became social creatures when the brain network that oxytocin activates allowed us to determine who to trust.  Knowing when to trust strangers led to large-scale societies.  In these communities, an individual's survival depended on many others.  Cooperation among nonkin provided social insurance against a bad crop or an unsuccessful hunt.  Communities began to function like superorganisms in which each segment nourished the other parts.

Paul J. Zak,  Immersion:  The Science of The Extraordinary and the Source of Happiness

Unfolds..............................

Each year we learn more about the incredible complexity of our universe.  The mind staggers at the intimation of billions of galaxies, each made up of billions of stars, slowly revolving in every direction for unimaginable distances.  And inside each grain of matter supercolliders reveal ever-receding constellations of strange particles streaking along mysterious orbits.  In the midst of this kind of stupendous forces a human life unfolds in what is less than a split second on the cosmic scale.  Yet, as far as we are concerned, it is this, our own short life, filled with its few precious moments, that counts for more than all the galaxies, black holes, and exploding stars put together. 

-Mihaly Csikszentmihali,  The Evolving Self: A Psychology For The Third Millennium