What's that perspective like?

What’s that perspective like? →

Published 8 Hours Ago  ·  All posts on May 31  ·  

This little guy was just off to the side as I was perambulating lost in thought (and probably talking to myself.) When I noticed them, I snapped this photo (with some telephoto so as not to completely terrify them.)

And then I was thinking: What must their perspective be?!

They were probably just about to cross that big, barren roadway of the gods (the cinder trail I was on)—that roadway that is different from everything else, and goes unimaginably far in either direction that no turtle knows the start or end of it. And **yikes** here comes one of the towering, impossibly thin—how does it not immediately fall over?!—gods, making those sonorous, booming, incomprehensible noises… “oh, shit! It’s seen me…” **freezes**

My brain is like the Secret Life of Walter Mitty, except I’m imagining the inner world of everyone and every intelligence I encounter.

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Desires, left behind →

Published 22 Hours Ago  ·  All posts on May 30  ·  

Every pleasure saves its greatest delights for its last moments. The most pleasurable time of life is on the downhill side, just before the drop-off. Even the time that stands at the very brink has its own pleasures, I believe. Or if not, then it has this instead: One no longer feels the need of any. How sweet it is to have worn out one’s desires and left them behind.

~ Seneca

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Aiming is the secret →

Published 1 Day Ago  ·  All posts on May 30

You don’t get ready and then aim high. You aim high, and the aiming makes you ready.

~ Nini Nguyen, from The Moon was Never the Point

That’s something which took me many years to understand.

I’m fond of saying that ideas are worthless. What matters is what you do with your ideas. Share them freely. Engage with others. Make a plan and see it through.

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There’s just life time →

Published 2 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 29

Figuring out how to have sustainable, fulfilling existence seems like it should be the goal, no?

~ John Warner, from Produce or Perish?

Somewhere there’s a quote about how we don’t have “work time” and “play time” but rather there is only life time. Warner’s article gets it.

I hope you have gotten it too.

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Dismantling our creative potential →

Published 2 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 28

And then the newest erosion – the AI rabbit hole. Everyone deep in their own individual loop. Getting more productive. Getting more fluent. And getting, incrementally, more disconnected from the people around them. The half-formed question that used to get asked out loud – I’m stuck on this, has anyone dealt with something like this? – now goes to a chatbot. The same technology that was supposed to unlock creative potential is, in its default form, dismantling the sidewalk ballet entirely.

~ Zoe Scaman, from Creative Mycelium

Yes. But, see also Schizoid Kairos for a view of the situations where it’s also a novel new paradigm.

As with every technology—every tool—humankind has ever picked up, it matters what you do with it. Sure, I want to live in that “sidewalk city” where my ideas mix with others’. If only those scenes still existed.

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Perseverance is something larger →

Published 3 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 28  ·  

If persistence is attempting to solve some difficult problem with dogged determination and hammering until the break occurs, then plenty of people can be said to be persistent. But perseverance is something larger. It’s the long game. It’s about what happens not just in round one but in round two and every round after—and then the fight after that and the fight after that, until the end.

~ Ryan Holiday

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This we built with our hands

This we built with our hands →

Published 3 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 27

This is a massive wood crib for stacking and drying firewood.

I have two smaller versions of this at my house where I stack up green, split firewood. A friend of mine wanted one as well. This was such a fun project. I started with a pen and paper sketching what I’d built nearly 20 years ago. Then discussions about the size he wanted. I came up with the buy-list and break-down list, and took all my notes on a long car ride. The next day we headed into town and loaded up on lumber. We carried the materials to the spot, and as we considered the exact layout, he asked, “What if we just made one big crib?” Well, I agreed that was an even better idea.

The best part: Midway I said, “I love this project! I’m not doing anything except helping.”

“That’s funny,” he replied, “all I’m doing is helping you!”

Much later it struck me: That might just be the best definition of a good day’s honest labor.

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Incomplete. Forever. →

Published 4 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 26  ·  

For most of human history, you bought a thing, and it was yours, and it was finished.

That word is nearly extinct.

Nothing you own is finished. Everything exists in a state of permanent incompletion, permanently needing. Your phone needs updates, needs charging, needs storage cleared, needs passwords rotated.

~ Terry Godier, from The Last Quiet Thing

That’s exactly it. I’m often talking about calm technology and that’s one key issue with stuff these days. But this point about finished makes my heart sink.

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What’s actually happening when conversation works? →

Published 5 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 26  ·  ,

I’ve recorded a lot of conversations over the past decade — and started my Open + Curious project to explicitly write down what I think I’ve learned. The advice everyone gets about conversation — be warm, follow up, build rapport — doesn’t fully describe what I’ve actually seen happen in the conversations that worked.

This thread is a path through pieces I’ve written and conversations I’ve distilled, sequenced for someone who’s wondering why so many attempts at meaningful conversation fall flat. As usual for my writing, none of them answer the question. Instead, they name some of the gaps between what we usually mean by good conversation and what’s happening when a conversation is actually good.

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Who controls the terms →

Published 7 Days Ago  ·  All posts on May 24

But the real Luddites weren’t afraid of machines; they were afraid of the social and economic impacts of the new technology on people—and of who controlled the terms of technological change.

~ Courtney C. Radsch, from We should all be Luddites

I don’t see what else I can really add to this…

The more things change, the more they stay the same? History doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes? Do you think your individual choices about current technology trends are going to be enough? At why point do you feel coordinated effort is going to be necessary? Luddites.

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