A view of life and commercial real estate from Newark and Licking County, Ohio
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
...................................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.”
When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result. Our electronic world now calls for a unified field of global awareness; the kind of private consciousness appropriate to literate man can be viewed as an unbearable kink in the collective consciousness demanded by electronic information movement.
-Marshall McLuhan, as culled from here
All twenty here too. Well, actually on #12, I recorded music from the radio to a reel-to-reel tape recorder, not a cassette. Concerning typewriters - earned beer money in college by typing a friend's twice per week three page psychology papers. Learned some psychology along the way. It was a win-win-win. Concerning maps - still prefer to look at a large scale paper map to get the "lay of the land" before setting off on a new journey. Helps.
Nine hours, twenty-two minutes, and twenty-six seconds of sunlight today. For what it is worth, on New Year's Eve we will have nine hours, twenty-five minutes, forty-six seconds of sunlight. Sunlight chart here.
When experts are wrong, it's often because they're experts on an earlier version of the world.
We don't need to measure our notions of happiness or progress against imagined universal constants for those concepts. They don't exist. Even the typical notions of success change with time, context, and fashion. We do not need to prove that our ideas of identity or purpose are watertight in some objective, evidence-based sense. That isn't how meaning works. Meaning is a story, and act of creation and interpretations, and for human beings meaning is at least as important as fact.
-Jarod K. Anderson, Something In The Woods Loves You
How do we know that change is accelerating? There is, after all, no absolute way to measure change. In the awesome complexity of the universe, even within any given society, a virtually infinite number of steams of change occur simultaneously. All "things"—from the tiniest virus to the greatest galaxy—are, in reality, not things at all, but processes. There is no static point, no nirvana-like un-change, against which to measure change.
-Alvin Toffler, Future Shock
I think this is the most practical way to think about debt: As debt increases, you narrow the range of outcomes you can endure in life.
Living things tend to change unrecognizably as they grow. Who would deduce the dragonfly from the larva, the iris from the bud, the lawyer from the infant? Flora or fauna, we are all shape-shifters and magical reinventors. Life is really a plural noun, a caravan of selves.
........................makes some observations:
When I returned, I looked around, and realized the world I was born into was completely gone. I’d been watching it sluice down some sort of drain for so long, that I wondered if I was some sort of involuntary antichrist, making each tomorrow worse than today, every day since I was born. The whole 200,000,000- way handshake seems to have been totally replaced with nothing but a Balkan competition to see which sect could pull themselves to the top of a greasy pole with nothing but a Netflix login screen at the top. The competition was desultory, because no one wanted any job but greasing the pole. Climbing is a lot of work.
Much of modern society, including our endlessly fragmented media, protects us from having to truly engage with those who don’t share our politics.
That’s why the development of a political rift between the genders is so promising. What’s the most compelling common project of all? Sex - sex and love. Short of a mass conversion to homosexuality, many or most of these people are still going to hook up together and form partnerships and families, caveats about declining birth rates aside. Conservative-leaning young men who only seek out conservative-leaning young women will be fishing in a small pool; liberal women will only diminish the size of their pool if they stick to men who are as liberal as they are. Both sides therefore have a powerful incentive to forge relationships with people who hold political views different to their own. They can then infect each other with their different ideas, generating new syntheses, and moving us all along.
-as culled from this Ian Leslie post
One of the commonest and most generally accepted delusions is that every man can be qualified in some particular way – said to be kind, wicked, stupid, energetic, apathetic, and so on. People are not like that. We may say of a man that he is more often kind than cruel, more often wise than stupid, more often energetic than apathetic or vice versa; but it could never be true to say of one man that he is kind or wise, and of another that he is wicked or stupid. Yet we are always classifying mankind in this way. And it is wrong. Human beings are like rivers; the water is one and the same in all of them but every river is narrow in some places, flows swifter in others; here it is broad, there still, or clear, or cold, or muddy or warm. It is the same with men. Every man bears within him the germs of every human quality, and now manifests one, now another, and frequently is quite unlike himself, while still remaining the same man.
-Leo Tolstoy, Resurrection
Posts
