noun : an accumulation of loose stones or rocky debris lying on a slope or at the base of a hill or cliff.
I started in 2008-ish by cutting refined carbs. Intermittent fasting — 16:8 — came later. I’m still over-weight. I’m not selling anything. The pieces below are the ones I keep pointing to when someone asks me what I think.
This thread is sequenced for someone wondering whether to be more intentional about when they eat. None of it answers that question for you. It just tells you what an honest version of the n=1 looks like over a long timeline, and suggests things you might want to try.
(more…)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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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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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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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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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.
(more…)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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A small marked enclosure where a different kind of attention is kept.
A temenos, in ancient Greek, was a piece of ground set apart from ordinary use — bounded, dedicated to something larger than daily life, and respected as such. Not a temple, necessarily; just a marked enclosure where a different kind of attention was kept. People went there to do something they couldn’t quite do anywhere else — pay attention to what was hard to see in the noise of regular life. The marker around the place mattered as much as anything that happened inside it.
Temenos.place is an instance of one. A small daily instance. Each day, one thing appears on a page behind this one — a sentence, a question, a quote. Anyone who’s joined can sit with it. They can leave a short reply, where the others can see it but no one responds to it. Tomorrow the post is gone, the replies are gone, a new one is there. Nothing accumulates; there’s no archive, no body of work being built, no count of anything. People can show up today, or not, and either is fine. There is nothing to fall behind on.
The thing worth taking from this page is the temenos itself, which is yours to mark out wherever you are. A notebook, a chair, a corner of a morning, a daily walk — anywhere you decide that a particular kind of attention will be kept. If reading this gives you the word for something you’ve been doing already, or the permission to start, that’s enough.
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It’s important for us to remember in our own journey to self-improvement: one never arrives. The sage—the perfect Stoic who behaves perfectly in every situation—is an ideal, not an end.
~ Ryan Holiday
For me, the first glimmer of my own access to a temenos (the ancient name and clarity of the place’s meaning and utility came much later) was when I took up a daily reading practice. At first, I selected a physical book designed to be a daily devotional, and later I’ve bent all my daily reading into digital formats. The key point being: I needed to anchor my daily habit in an analog context, away from all the digital addictions I had developed. Later, once the habit was the thing I enjoyed more than the digital distraction, I was able to bend digital tools to my use.
As opposed to how digital tools normally (by their creators’ designs) bend you to their use.
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Revert to what Epictetus described as our “chief task in life”—getting real clear about what’s up to us and what isn’t. Our actions, our thoughts, our feelings—these are up to us. Other people, the weather, external events, these are not. But here’s the thing: our responses to other people, the weather, external events are in our control. To reset your life, the best place to start is with making this distinction and then choosing to focus on the things that are in your control. If only because it concentrates your resources in the places where they matter.
~ Ryan Holiday, from You Slipped Up […]
Bryan Ward wrote a great article How The Hammer Fails You and reading his metaphor about the hammer versus the crowbar was a pivotal moment for me. Later, I realized that Epictetus’s counsel feels like the seed for Ward’s metaphor.
Am I applying my mental or physical effort in the correct place?
Until my answer was consistently coming up yes, that was the most useful question I kept asking.
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