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Monarch →
Prosperity →
Notice a subtle point here: Seneca isn’t saying that prosperity is not worth pursuing. It is, after all, a preferred indifferent. But it is preferred only insofar it doesn’t get in the way of conducting a virtuous life, as one gets the sense Lucilius was worrying about insofar his own pursuits were concerned. Which is why his friend reminds him that he is under no obligation at all to live in the fast lane.
~ Massimo Pigliucci, from Seneca to Lucilius
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Just yesterday, for the first time ever, I considered removing the rear-view mirror from the Jeep. (Instead, I twisted it upwards to view the roof.) Since the Jeep is slow and old, as am I, there is ALWAYS someone tail-gating me. I’ve narrowly avoided accidents, where watching the tail-gater behind me distracted me from the road ahead. I’m so much in the “slow lane”, I am literally being run over. Where, really, are you going?
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How many programmers does it take… →
Having to do everything turned out to be a real benefit later on, I was comfortable with such diverse things as communicating with customers, designing UI, identifying and tracking plans, architecture, and other non-programming tasks. With today’s roles unless you are in a startup environment (sometimes not even there) as a programmer you rarely get to do anything but write code. People even joke about programmers doing other things like designing.
~ Andrew Wulf from, How Many People Does It Take To Write Software
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I certainly didn’t do anywhere near everything. (Notably, it doesn’t seem I got very good at communicating via the years of my early experience.) But I agree with the general sentiment. It’s all the peripheral stuff that I had to sort out, figure out, build, do, etc. which I think turned out to be the keys to my later — dare I say it — “success”.
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The Great Depression was an energy crisis →
When I put together a chart of per capita energy consumption since 1820 for a post back in 2012, there was a strange “flat spot” in the period between 1920 and 1940. When we look at the underlying data, we see that coal production was starting to decline in some of the major coal producing parts of the world at that time. From the point of view of people living at the time, the situation might have looked very much like peak energy consumption, at least on a per capita basis.
~ Gail Tverberg from, The Depression of the 1930s Was an Energy Crisis
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One of my rules-of-thumb is to thoroughly read everything written my Gail Tverberg.
Years ago, I found a web site called The Oil Drum which was a collecton of superlative thinkers all writing about things related to petroleum. Actually, it still IS a superlative collection, because they’ve left it up as-is to be an archive.
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Music in human evolution? Aposematism?! →
… the goal of aposematism is to advertise that, as a piece of prey, you are decidedly unprofitable for the predator. If a predator can easily recognize you (and other members of your species), and remembers getting burned during past encounters, it will quickly learn to stop attacking you in the first place.
~ Kevin Simler from, Music in Human Evolution
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Long [long!] ago humans stood up (makes us easy to see),
moved into the open grasslands (makes us really easy to see),
lost our claws/protective-thick-skin/fangs (makes us soft and easy to kill),
did NOT have tools other than rocks we could pick up (makes us unable to defend ourselves),
started singing ON THE GROUND (makes us easy to hear and find, NO OTHER ANIMAL DOES THIS),
… and then we took over the planet.
AND we are the only animal that uses RHYTHM,
ALSO, all humans dance (ever have the urge to tap your foot or more your head to music?)…
Wait, also, why do we always — every society, every religion, every military — ALWAYS retrieve/prepare/handle/bury our dead?
Intrigued? Click that link… I’m a simple person, with a small brain, and I’m easily amused. This article. BLEW. MY. MIND.
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The cure for boredom →
The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.
~ Dorothy Parker
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Rats? Moloch? →
Like the rats, who gradually lose all values except sheer competition, so companies in an economic environment of sufficiently intense competition are forced to abandon all values except optimizing-for-profit or else be outcompeted by companies that optimized for profit better and so can sell the same service at a lower price.
From a god’s-eye-view, we can contrive a friendly industry where every company pays its workers a living wage. From within the system, there’s no way to enact it.
~ Scott Alexander, from Meditations on Moloch
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I confess to having had only the slightest awareness of Moloch in the biblical or general senses. So just skimming the WikiPedia article and then taking the time to read this piece from Slate Star Codex was like discovering a new window on the world from my mind-palace.
Moloch.
This is the problem. (With everything.) Individually, everyone acts according to their interests and beliefs. The result? …look at the world around you.
How could one go about changing the world? (That’s a rhetorical question.)
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Suffering →
Krishnamurti has this definition of suffering that I really like, “Suffering is that moment when you see reality exactly as it is. When you can no longer run away from it, when you can no longer deny it.”
~ Naval Ravikant, from Naval Ravikant — The Person I Call Most for Startup Advice (#97)
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I don’t know anything about Krishnamurti. But I know a good statement that cuts right through all the day-to-day bullshit; That right there is one.
I’ll save you some digging: Naval is quoting Jiddu Krishnamurti, apparently from The Book of Life: Daily Meditations.
…also, go listen to this entire podcast. It’s insanely long at 2+ hours, but Naval is a real down-to-Earth guy with a lot of useful advice on how to live.
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Intersection of three lines →
The three lines cross in that intersection, and you’re like, “Okay, I think I know where I am.” In the case of your “why,” one great intersection is saying, “Hey, what would I do if I knew I couldn’t fail? What would be the things that I would just love to be doing in my life if I could not fail? Unfortunately, somewhere along the line between high school, college, and maybe even before high school, kids stopped dreaming up crazy ideas, and they start thinking, “Okay, well, this is what society expects.”
~ Alden Mills, from Podcast #130: Become Unstoppable With Alden Mills
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1. What would I do if I couldn’t fail?
2. Whose lifestyle would I like to follow?
3. What am I passionate about, and in what can I find purpose?
The answers to these questions will not tell me what to do, nor how to live my life. Honestly, I’m still trying to figure out what to do and how to live, (and I hope I will always be working on that.) But these three questions are an excellent triplet of tools for picking at the bigger picture.
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Gratitude →
I am left with one thing: my ordinary, present self who is as empty-handed as he was the day before diagnosis — no better equipped for the ensuing battles of life, no better shielded from pain he will yet face. And it is not just heroic pain. It is the hurt of parking tickets, the ache of commuting, the grief of deadening routine — small pains to which I was immune while they were eclipsed by cancer. But that moon has since passed.
~ Philip Garrity, from Gratitude: In Sickness and Health
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