Author: Craig Constantine

People make the difference

June 11, 2022

The world economy doesn’t behave the way most people would expect. Standard modeling approaches miss the point that economies require adequate supplies of energy products of the right kinds, provided at the right times of day and year, if they are to keep from collapsing.

~ Gail Tverberg from, Is it possible that the world is approaching end times? | Our Finite World

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Since we finished remodeling our home, this is the time of year when I pay a local company to dump two cords of split firewood in my lawn, (a pile about the size of a small car.) On my patio this morning, as the sun climbs above the old, worn-down mountain behind our neighborhood, the world smells like fresh, black coffee and green firewood.

I remain very optimistic about our world, and our economy—local, national and global. Because: People. Heating primarily with wood only works well for us for a few reasons: The housing density is low enough that multiple wood stoves is sane in a neighborhood. But the housing density is also just high enough that the stores are very close by. These trees grew relatively close, were sawn and split by a local company, and traveled not too far to get to my yard. Troy—the firewood guy—and I will both work very hard though, in the entire process of my heating with wood. Meanwhile, street gas (which isn’t even available on my block), propane (which I use to cook with), and electricity (which is my secondary heat source via heat pump and baseboards) are rising steeply in price.

Lumber prices are also crazy-high. (What was once a $2 2×4 is now nearly $10.) And Troy has resumed sawing lumber, something his father used to do with their equipment decades ago. And he’s taken on another person part-time. Yes, he asked me for more money to cover the fuel-cost of delivery, but the firewood is still less than the other fuel (gas, electric) options available to me for next heating season. My point here is that if everyone keeps making manageable decisions sooner rather than later, things will work out. The difficulty that I see for most people is being honest about what things they have to eliminate, in order to be able to keep their personal universes going.

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Poiesis

June 10, 2022

Aristotle talked about three kinds of work, whereas in our modern world we tend to emphasize only two. The first is theoretical work, for which the end goal is truth. The second is practical work, where the objective is action. But there is a third: It is poietical work. The philosopher Martin Heidegger described poiesis as a “bringing-forth.” This third type of work is the Essentialist way of approaching execution: An Essentialist produces more—brings forth more—by removing more instead of doing more.

~ Greg McKeown

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Or soon every day will have gone by

June 10, 2022

… and soon the day has gone by and we wonder what we did with the day.

~ Leo Babauta from, Interstitial Ritual: Finding Focus & Mindfulness in Your Day – Zen Habits Website

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I marked this for “read later” back in December 2021, and am just getting around to reading it. I know that many—most? all?—of the amazing coincidences I find in my life arise from my innate, monkey-brain drive to see patterns and causation where none actually exists. I don’t care. It’s a nice coincidence that I’ve just gotten around to reading this, while in the past couple of weeks I’ve been simplifying and focusing on a small number of things that I want to be working on.

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Personal summit

June 9, 2022

Everybody has their own private Mount Everest they were put on this earth to climb.You may never reach the summit; for that you will be forgiven. But if you don’t make at least one serious attempt to get above the snow-line, years later you will find yourself lying on your deathbed, and all you will feel is emptiness.

~ Hugh MacLeod

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73 years in 5,000 words

June 9, 2022

If you fell asleep in 1945 and woke up in 2018 you would not recognize the world around you. The amount of growth that took place during that period is virtually unprecedented. […] And if you tried to think of a reasonable narrative of how it all happened, my guess is you’d be totally wrong. Because it isn’t intuitive, and it wasn’t foreseeable 73 years ago.

~ Morgan Housel, from How This All Happened

The story this tells is one I’d never seen woven together this clearly. Over many years I’d heard each of the pieces which are included, and this lays out a coherent story that looks like a Chutes and Ladders playing board. (To my astonishment, I just learned that the beloved children’s board game I’ve mentioned is a dumbed-down version of a very old game called Snakes and Ladders.) If history is any teacher—and it is, because history rhymes—I will certainly be unable to imagine the actual story of the coming years writ large. That’s not a bad thing! Be sure you at least scroll to the bottom of that article as the author is optimistic. As am I.

In a completely different vein, as I was adding tags to this post I made an interesting discovery. I always create a tag for the person who wrote whatever-it-is that I’m referencing. I was surprised to find out that I already have a tag for Housel despite my not recognizing the name. Click the tag below, as it turns out there’s another gem from 2018.

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Eleven ways to really screw yourself up

June 8, 2022

Most things in life aren’t black and white. Overly dualistic thinking isn’t true to reality. Life is full of nuance. A goal can be worth pursuing even if it doesn’t garner the highest success; there are worthwhile things in both flawed people and flawed philosophies.

~ Brett McKay from, The 11 Cognitive Distortions That Are Making You a Miserable SOB

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I’m not even sure how to classify this article for you. It’s short enough that you can just go glance at it. You’ll either shrug it off as simplistic (or possibly even offensive), or you’ll find the list of common cognitive mistakes useful. My pull-quote is indicative of the mistake of “splitting” thinking explained, not of the article overall. This mistake was—is still?—my biggest problem.

On the topics of depression and cognitive mistakes, from personal experience I recommend as useful Stoicism in general, and the more modern, (than the one McKay is referencing in the article above,) Cognitive Behavioral Therapy Made Simple. To be fair, David Burns, the author of the book McKay is summarizing, was instrumental in bringing Cognitive Behavioral Therapy into the mainstream.

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Doing discourse better

June 7, 2022

Do conversations have known best practices? How much do they improve the odds of landing on the truth?

~ “Dynomight” from, Talking about sugar

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I hate this terrific article. It’s completely stuffed with great ideas and great questions… and exactly zero answers. It starts talking about the particular type of conversation where two people acting benevolently are trying to find the truth about something under discussion. (Here I snicker at all of humanity, and myself, because we’ve been having conversations for like a gazillion years and we don’t yet know how to do it well.) It then narrows down to discussing just online conversations. Said narrowing feels like a great idea because there are a lot of online conversations and it feels like something we should be able to be good at. (Again here, snickering is warranted.) Anyway, at least some people are trying. Maybe, just maybe this is the epoch we get it sorted out?

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Attachment

June 6, 2022

Worrying is impossible without attachment. No one worries about the weather on Saturn, because no one is counting on the weather to be a certain way. The time we spend worrying is actually time we’re spending trying to control something that is out of our control. Time invested in something that is within our control is called work. That’s where our most productive focus lies.

~ Seth Godin

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Surface area of concern

June 6, 2022

Our “surface area of concern”—the number of events we pay attention to on a regular basis—has expanded alongside technology. This is not an inherently negative thing, but becomes one when it adds chronic stress, leads us to burnout, and affects our mental health.

~ Chris Bailey from, Your surface area of concern

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This is a precise and powerful way to describe something which lies at the root of many other phrases: Information overload, multi-tasking (as a way to fail), and spreading our attention too thin (as another way to fail), are just three examples. I’ve long since decided that I do not need to have an opinion on most things, and that frees me from feeling I need to notice as many things as possible.

For many years—but explicitly I have 3 years of journal entries where this is glaring—I’ve lamented wanting to spend more time on some specific things. And yet my days slip past doing other things. I’m not talking about things which get planned—a day at the beach, dinner at someone’s house, or weekend work in the yard. No, I’m talking about that, “where the hell did today go?” stuff. If you like visuals: The glass jar that I filled slowly all day with the sand of small things, only to realize at day’s end that there’s no way to put these larger rocks in. Ever. Because every tomorrow is like today. Dammit.

About a week ago I decided—memento mori, ya’ know—it’s time to flip that shit over. For several years now, I’ve been starting with pretty consistent morning routine. After that, I have four things that I want to do, and I’ve been doing those next. Sometimes that means I don’t touch anything else—not my phone, not my email, not other people, not bills, not even voicemail from roofers—until 4 in the afternoon. It sounds crazy, I know. Guess what? Every day I look at those four things and go: Shazam! Progress! …and it turns out that I then go on to pour in a ton of sand too—return that call [from yesterday], mow the lawn, run an errand, interact with people, etc..

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You must choose

June 5, 2022

Then there was a moment. A short one. Social media was perfect. The bubble popped, and suddenly there were voices from outside the bubble. But it was still small, still manageable, not yet the all-consuming force it is today.

~ Jacob Kaplan-Moss from, The Moment

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Today, we have asocial media. I’ve not seen anyone else point out we’re still misspelling it, “social” media. I agree with Kaplan-Moss, and I’ll point out that I am happily still living in that moment. I use the Internet, and I use my phone (and tablet, and computer, and my connection of people, etc.) — none of those things use me any longer. That’s the key. Figuring out what sources of interaction and information you find valuable, and then acting to make them a part of your lived experience. What made asocial media’s moment great was that it showed us that the Internet could be useful. Now it’s up to you to make it so for yourself.

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Feelings scare us

June 4, 2022

You don’t know if your idea is any good the moment it’s created. Neither does anyone else. The most you can hope for is a strong gut feeling that it is. And trusting your feelings is not as easy as the optimists say it is. There’s a reason why feelings scare us—because what they tell us and what the rest of the world tells us are often two different things.

~ Hugh MacLeod

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Deep conversation

June 4, 2022

People benefit from deep conversations, but we often stick to small talk with strangers because we underestimate how much they’re interested in our lives, according to new research from The University of Texas at Austin.

~ University of Texas at Austin from, Swapping small talk with strangers for deeper dialogue offers surprising rewards

I didn’t find this at all surprising. None the less, it’s nice to see it demonstrated in a repeatable experiment. I often talk about simply being curious, and how that curiosity generates conversations full of wonder. I’ve had hundreds of conversations now with people I know and total strangers, countless times they’ve expressed delight at the conversations we’ve created. The best part? It’s not a trick I’m performing; I’m genuinely curious.

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It’s the forums

June 3, 2022

Forums are the dark matter of the web, the B-movies of the Internet. But they matter. To this day I regularly get excellent search results on forum pages for stuff I’m interested in. Rarely a day goes by that I don’t end up on some forum, somewhere, looking for some obscure bit of information. And more often than not, I find it there.

~ Jeff Atwood, from Civilized Discourse Construction Kit

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That’s a wonderful unpack by Atwood of why Discourse, (a piece of software that powers forums,) was created. Along the way there’s also a load of great information about discourse, (the concept.) And this article is now 9 years old.

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Always writing

June 2, 2022

I cannot find any patience for those people who believe that you start writing when you sit down at your desk and pick up you pen and finish writing when you put down your pen again; a writer is always writing, seeing everything through a thin mist of words, fitting swift little descriptions to everything he sees, always noticing.

~ Shirley Jackson

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12% battery remaining

June 2, 2022

Productivity hacks are fun, but they don’t always produce the greatest returns on your time. If you care about productivity, be sure to invest in your energy levels.

~ Chris Bailey from, Don’t forget the basics of productivity

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I don’t do productivity “hacks.” I do productivity. My aversion to “hacking” anything runs deep. All of my productivity comes from doing things which return, the way compound interest returns. Whenever I can, I try to do the hard work up front. I am literally trying to pass gifts, (of time, energy, money, sanity,) to my future self.

It’s wise to occasionally erase the whiteboard to see what something could be like if built from scratch. It never ceases to amaze me when absolutely nothing happens nor changes when I entirely stop doing things. I recently removed an entire project—no one has even noticed. I recently was completely unreachable, (by everyone other than my wife,) for four days—no one noticed. If you started from a clean slate today, what would you choose to do?

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Today

June 1, 2022

I don’t complain about the lack of time… what little I have will go far enough. Today—this day—will achieve what no tomorrow will fail to speak about. I will lay seige to the gods and shake up the world.

~ Seneca, Medea, 423-5

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