Wait, what.............................?

 

No item sold on Amazon has the ability to perform a life transplant.

-Eric Barker, from this episode, delving into wantingness and lifeitsownself.

charmed..................

 

To be truly happy is a question of how we begin and not of how we end, of what we want and not of what we have.  An aspiration is a joy forever, a possession as solid as a landed estate, a fortune which we can never exhaust and which gives us year by year a revenue of pleasurable activity.  To have many of these is to be spiritually rich.  Life is only a very dull and ill-directed theatre unless we have some interests in the piece; and to those who have neither art nor science, the world is a mere arrangement of colours, or a rough footway where they may very well break their shins.  It is in virtue of his own desires and curiosities that any man continues to exist with even patience, that he is charmed by the look of things and people, and that he wakens every morning with a renewed appetite for work and pleasure.

-Robert Louis Stevenson, from his essay El Dorado

On wanting.....................

 

If intelligence is getting what you want, wisdom is wanting what’s worth getting in the first place.

-Shane Parrish, from this episode

Eric Barker.........................

 

...................thinks about Arthur Schopenhauer:

“You’re comparing Taylor Swift to a 19th century German philosopher who thought life was an unquenchable spiral of desire?”

Yes. And you can’t stop me, but more importantly, you can’t tell me why I’m wrong, which is the part that should bother you.

On Generative AI.................

 

Most people don’t care that GPT 5.5, released late last week, underperformed Opus 4.7 on SWE-Bench Pro. They want the AI companies to let them know when they have a product that will actually and notably improve their lives, and until then, they want these companies to leave them alone and try their best not to ​crash the economy​.

As Lopatto concludes: “At some point, our Silicon Valley overlords forgot that in order for their vision of the future to be adopted, people had to want it.” They still have a lot of work to do.

Cal Newport, from this essay

Ultimately.....................

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

To fear..............................

 

......................................AI—or not.

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes wrote “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” predicting that productivity growth would be so powerful that by the early twenty-first century the workweek would fall to fifteen hours. He was directionally correct about productivity growth, but profoundly wrong about labor market implications. Rather than working dramatically less, societies consumed dramatically more. Why? Because rising productivity lowered costs and expanded the consumption frontier. Preferences shifted toward higher quality goods, new services, and previously unimaginable forms of expenditure. Leisure increased modestly, but material aspiration expanded far more. History suggests productivity gains do not automatically translate into labor withdrawal or demand collapse as they alter the composition of demand, expand real incomes and generate new industries. Keynes underestimated the elasticity of human wants.

via

Vital needs......................

 

Freedom is a vital food for the human soul.  In the concrete sense of the word, freedom means the possibility of choice. . . . Those who lack good will or remain infantile are never free in any state of society.

---------------

Initiative and responsibility, the feeling of being useful and even indispensable, are vital needs of the human soul.

-----------------

Equality is a vital need of the human soul.  It consists of public, general, and effective recognition, concretely expressed through institutions and practices, that every human being is owed the same amount of respect and consideration because respect is due to every human being as such and has no degrees.

...................

Hierarchy is a vital need of the human soul.  It comprises a certain veneration, a certain devotion, to superiors considered not in their person or for the powers they exercise, but as symbols.

-------------

Honour is a vital need of the human soul.

-------------

Punishment is a vital need of the human soul.  There are two kinds, disciplinary and penal.

.................

Security is an essential need of the soul.  Security means that the soul is not hampered by fear or terror, except as a result of a combination of accidental circumstances and for rare and short periods.

-------------

Risk is an essential need of the soul.  The absence of risk creates a kind of boredom that numbs in a different way from fear, but almost as much.

---------------

Private property is a vital need of the soul.  The soul is isolated, lost, when not surrounded by objects that feel like an extension of the body's limbs.

----------------

Participation in collective goods does not consist of material enjoyment but in a sense of ownership, is just as important a need.  It is a state of mind rather than a legal provision.

-----------------

-Simone Weil, excerpted from The Need for Roots

warned......................

 

But a value system which glorifies wealth and accumulation, which builds itself on a platform of want, which inflames and creates more of it daily through a marketing machine that colonizes the human mind—this is what every spiritual tradition in history has warned against, and with good reason.

-Paul Kingsnorth, Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

voids.................

 

Everyone in business wants to know, "What's new?"  But a better question for creating new market opportunities is to ask, "What's missing?"

     One of the major voids we see across demographics . . . is people's need and desire to make good friends, feel less isolated and lonely, and belong to something more meaningful.

-Kevin Ervin Kelly, Irreplaceable

likely true.....................

 I'm crazy enough to believe that the happiest man on earth is the man with the fewest needs.

-Henry Miller

a potion.......................

 

I will reveal to you a love potion, without medicine, without herbs, without any witch's magic; if you want to be loved, then love.

-attributed to Hecato of Rhodes

Can I get an Amen.........................?

 

            via

independence..........................

      Munger and Buffett had something else in common.  "Like Warren, I had a considerable passion to get rich," said Charlie, who early on earned his living as a lawyer. "Not because I wanted Ferraris—I wanted the independence.  I desperately wanted it.  I thought it was undignified to have to send invoices to other people.  I don't know where I get that notion from, but I had it.

-Janet Lowe, Damn Right! Behind the Scenes With Berkshire Hathaway Billionaire Charlie Munger

Obviously................

 Admitting the obvious is to take a scary leap. It is to make decisions that bring your life into alignment with what you truly want—rather than what you think you should want or what others want from you. It is to risk taking the low-status meandering path, instead of the high-status linear one. 

. . . Sometimes the obvious truth is hidden from you for a reason, and it takes great care and lots of time to see it. 

Spiders weave webs across gaps that cannot be crossed by crawling or jumping. Instead, when a tiny spider wants to weave a web across a large distance, it produces a fine adhesive thread that it allows to catch and drift along the wind. It can feel by the sensitive vibrations passed along the thread when it catches and adheres on the other side of the gap. Then, it carefully walks across that first strand like a tightrope walker, laying another thread down as it goes.

It weaves back and forth like this—carefully, one step at a time—until a web is formed out of thin air. 

I think this is the way to admit the obvious. Loose a single thread in the direction of what you want. When it catches—follow it, and strengthen it. Eventually, you’ll be ready to cross the gap with confidence and spin a web of your own.

-Dan Shipper, from this essay

via

A father writes to a son.................

 You might think you want an expensive car, a fancy watch, and a huge house. But I’m telling you, you don’t. What you want is respect and admiration from other people, and you think having expensive stuff will bring it. It almost never does – especially from the people you want to respect and admire you.

-Morgan Housel

Be wary..........................

 

.................................of the moving goalposts.

Wait . . . what?

 For example: You can be a successful professional without spending time on social media.

-Seth Godin, from here

The secret.........................

"The secret . . . is in the awareness that when we seek to give instead of to get, all of our own needs are automatically fulfilled."

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

Worth their salt......................

     Today, thousands of years of coveting, fighting over, hoarding, taxing, and searching for salt appear picturesque and slightly foolish.  The seventeenth-century British leaders who spoke with urgency about the dangerous national dependence on French sea salt seem somehow more comic than contemporary leaders concerned with a dependence of foreign oil.  In every age, people are certain that only the things they have deemed valuable have true value.
     The search for love and the search for wealth are always the two best stories.  But while a love story is timeless, the story of a quest for wealth, given enough time, will always seem like the vain pursuit of a mirage.

-Mark Kurlansky,  Salt:  A World History