We alone know that those whom we really resemble are not at all those whom we seem to resemble.Jean Rostand
Updates from January, 2020 Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Doug Belshaw
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Doug Belshaw
In order to live at peace with ourselves, we almost always disguise or impotence or weakness as calculated actions and systems, and so we satisfy that part of us which is observing the other.Benjamin Constant
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Doug Belshaw
Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.W.H. Auden
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Doug Belshaw
If you say that getting the money is the most important thing, you’ll spend your life completely wasting your time. You’ll be doing things you don’t like doing in order to go on living, that is to go on doing thing you don’t like doing, which is stupid.Alan Watts (via Documentally)
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Doug Belshaw
“The beatings will continue until morale improves”
Jocelyn K. Glei: Holding Space for Yourself
This episode of Jocelyn K. Glei’s podcast Hurry Slowly about “holding space” for yourself is absolutely excellent and exactly what I needed to listen to today… in the gym.
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Doug Belshaw
Dan Carlin on being an ‘informed citizen’
I mentioned Dan Carlin’s interview on The Science of Success podcast in my most recent article for Thought Shrapnel.
Dan Carlin: Fake News, Misinformation, and Being an Informed Citizen Above is the audio from 37:37 to 51:23 which is think is the best part of the podcast episode. Highly recommended listening!
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Doug Belshaw
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Doug Belshaw
The underlying problem of course is that any platform that takes some segment of the real world and brings it into software will also bring in all that segment’s problems. Amazon took products and so it has to deal with bad and fake products (whereas one might say that Facebook took people, and so has bad and fake people).
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Doug Belshaw
Culture is the necessary art of perpetuating the disturbing rumor that reality is meaningful. That beneath the pain and the pleasure, the cruelty and the compassion, the estranging and the connecting, the breaking and the making, the ugliness and the beauty, the losing and the winning, the dying and the living, there is Something More.™
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The way you perpetuate the rumor is by making meaning games. These come in many forms, besides the obvious ones like creating a religion or writing a poem. Like being a good middle manager, running for President, or announcing a daring plan to colonize Mars.
All fall into one of two patterns: redistributing meaning and creating new meaning. There is also a third category, accelerating the destruction of rotting meaning. But since rotting meaning self-destructs naturally anyway, there isn’t much demand for accelerating the process.
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To seek meaning is to believe in truth before virtue, virtue before beauty, beauty before creation, creation before victory. This is the honor code of meaning-seeking. If you follow this code perfectly, you will make exactly no money.
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You must stop believing in this code exactly when you are ready to begin immortality. When your own appetite for meaning is satiated, and you are ready to start making meaning games for others. When you’re ready to play god for your own amusement.
Venkatesh Rao -
Doug Belshaw
We need a term for an anti-snowflake. I propose clod.
If you view someone as a precious snowflake, they necessarily view you as a clod. This post is about the clod-snowflake dynamic. All culture arises out of it.
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In general, you are a clod in that area of life where you are something of a professional. The area of life where you remain in control of your emotions and the situation no matter what the world throws at you. Usually, this ability is worth money or some other reward.
You are a snowflake in the area of life that can evoke the most uncontrolled emotions in you, or cause you to freeze up.
Venkatesh Rao
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