Society

Are you part of the solution?

September 1, 2019

If you’re not the customer, you’re the product.

~ Seth Godin, from https://seths.blog/2017/02/nextstep/

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This rant from Seth is a couple years old, but it remains as important as ever.

I talk often about the problems with social networks. But what I’m particularly interested in is what, (if anything,) actually works to change people’s minds. I bet you can guess what works: Basically, nothing works.

I wasted a lot of time trying to explain the problems with social networks using facts and rational arguments. You know how far I got with that. One day, I stopped trying to educate and explain, and started trying to plant seeds. Little seeds of inquisition. Little seeds of self-awareness.

How do you feel when you are not on that social network?

And how do you feel after it ate your face for 2 hours?

Do you like the way you look, all hunched over with spine twisted and your face completely facing the ground?

Could you make progress on your dream if you could just find 10 hours of time a week? (As if you only spent 10 hours on social networks this week.)

Hold your phone facing you at arms length. Look just to one side and notice the actual amount of your immediate world which it occupies. How do you feel about only living within that small fraction of your world?

Visualize your death bed. (Go ahead. I’ll wait.) Now begin to list your imagined regrets as you lay dying. (Seriously. I’ll wait.) Which items on your list were related, in any way, to online social networks?

You have Seth’s thoughts. You now have my thoughts. Do you have any thoughts of your own?

Are you part of the problem, or part of the solution?

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Change is not a commodity

August 26, 2019

[C]hange does not take technology, it takes courage. And, this is why change is not a commodity. Change is not easy nor is it formulaic. But I can say this with the utmost conviction, change is inevitable and it is yours to define.

~ Brian Solis, from https://www.gapingvoid.com/blog/2012/03/28/it-takes-courage/

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If you want to affect change you must first understand which sorts of changes are difficult and why.

On the one hand, things change all the time. A great definition of “old age” is when you begin to lament the inevitable changes to the specific things you prefer in your supermarket. On the other hand, affecting a change that you desire feels extremely difficult. (Go try to bring back your favorite brand of mustard after the manufacturer has discontinued it.)

On the one hand, there’s a huge array of things I can change easily: My shirt, the book I’m reading, and the lane I’m driving in. On the other hand I quite honestly struggle changing my physical body, my bad habits, and my addictions.

On the one hand, changing thousands of minds at once is easy: Give me a few orange cones and I can make everyone change their mind about always driving on the correct side of the road. On the other hand, it seems impossible to get people to do the correct thing, when they are waiting to turn left at a two-way stop sign, and I arrive opposite them intending to go straight.

On the one hand, millions of people have been convinced to spend their time on social networks. On the other hand, try convincing just one of them to disconnect.

Sometimes a piece of technology is enough to change everything and everyone. Sometimes no piece of technology seems powerful enough to get it done. Sometimes a tiny idea spreads like wildfire, and sometimes the mindless mob wins. Sometimes people are swayed by emotion, and sometimes they make choices based on logic. Sometimes change is objectively good, sometimes it’s objectively bad, and sometimes it seems too complicated to decide.

The important question is: What sort of change do you want to attempt?

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§22 – The forty-eight other guys

August 25, 2019

(Part 34 of 37 in series, Study inspired by Pakour & Art du Déplacement by V. Thibault)

Understanding community has always been a challenge for me. The first key understanding was that “community” is just an abstract concept; A community does not exist in the world as a concrete thing I can point to, touch or clearly delineate. Instead, when asked to explain community, I list things which I feel identify a community: its persistence, members’ unifying or common interests, having a focus in a specific physical or online space, etc. But when I really start digging in, it’s all simply interpersonal connections, behavior, communication, expected norms, shared identity, etc.. If that’s true, then functional interpersonal communication is necessary for the creation and continued existence of a healthy community.

My question these days is: What is sufficient for the creation and continued existence of a community?

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The journey

August 12, 2019

I’m fond of the old adage, what was once your workout will eventually be your warmup. It captures the inevitability of progress if you simply put in your time. In the beginning, the time spent seems to surface an endless sequence of unknown-unknowns. Bottomless, rabbit holes appear and you have to go far too far down the first few to learn an important lesson about depth versus breadth of knowledge. Soon you begin to realize the beginner’s journey is more or less the same for everyone. You get a few wins under your belt. Someone ahead of you compliments your work. You help one of your peers. Then you help one of those farther ahead of you, and realize the distance you’ve come is farther than the distance between you. You feed increasingly off of the energy of your peer group, bouncing ideas and challenges around like a seasoned practitioner. You look around only to realize there are now a large number of newer people on the journey who are behind you. You’re struck by a deeply pleasant emotional vertigo. You remember running in the halls with your brand new friends full of energy, and you feel recharged and invigorated; You might no longer run in the halls—age appropriateness and all that—but the energy from those who do is absolutely contagious every time. You struggle to refrain from proclaiming, “wait until you see what’s next!” Instead, you redouble your efforts by dashing ahead, behind the scenes, around the next corner, or over the next hill, to help with the preparations. You realize—you apprehend—that you’ve gotten as much out of giving back to help with the process, than you did from going through the process that first time. The cycle repeats. The learning, the friendships, the accomplishments—and quite frankly the advancement of the entire human race—builds with each iteration.

So, when is the last time you started something as a beginner?

When is the last time you showed up a bright eyed and bushy tailed neophyte?

When is the last time you helped the others? Those behind you, those ahead of you, and those around you?

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In real life

August 1, 2019

Yet many modern-day Westerners — who will live their whole lives with freedom of speech and the means to talk to almost anyone about anything — remain convinced they are essentially powerless to improve human life around the world, and use their internet access primarily to share pictures of cats.

~ David Cain, from http://www.raptitude.com/2014/11/the-gift/

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I recently deleted my Facebook account; Not, “deleted the app from my phone,” but deleted my account so I am no longer on Facebook. That was the last of the social networks I was on.

My life is measurably better now without social networks. I still have this inconceivably amazing tool in my pocket which I use regularly to leverage the hard-won advantages of the human race in 2019. I still use that tool, (and other tools, including my feet and a bicycle,) to collapse the distance between me and those I want to communicate with.

I look forward to seeing you in the big room with the ceiling that’s sometimes blue and sometimes black!

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Intentional about people

July 30, 2019

People who cultivate an inward orientation on purpose are still relegated to the “alternative” fringes for the most part. Only a minority of people I know seem to have any interest in mindfulness and meditation, which are really just ways of practicing inwardness so that we can stay receptive in ordinary moments — which probably don’t contain hot tubs or ice cream or cocktails or anything else that’s exceptionally agreeable.

~ David Cain from, http://www.raptitude.com/2014/06/two-ways-viewing-world/

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I’ve said this before, and I’m sure I’ll say it again: I’m lucky to be surrounded by a network of people who are exceptional.

Where by “lucky” I mean: The harder I work, the luckier I seem to be. I’m intentional about the people I spend time with. Time is short, and there are countless people. By choosing who I spend time with, I’m controlling one facet of the experiences to which I’m exposed, and that’s one part of actively guiding who I become.

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Social network or social media?

July 5, 2019

The Lesson: This first insight is in truly learning that social media is much more of a mindless habit — and a very strongly ingrained one — than a pleasurable or fulfilling activity. We do it out of compulsion rather than intention.

~ Brett McKay from, https://www.artofmanliness.com/articles/4-lessons-from-a-4-week-social-media-fast/

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Back when we invented all this online bru-ha-ha, they were called “social networks.” I think we should still be using the word network rather than media, because then it would remain clear: A healthy community necessarily has a network of people, but a network of people is not sufficient to create a healthy community.

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Silence is sedition

June 30, 2019

… I wasn’t surprised to read that nationwide survey by the Chicago Tribune in which half of the respondents said there should have been some kind of press restraint on reporting about the prison abuse and just as many said they “would embrace government controls of some kind on free speech, especially if it is found unpatriotic.”

Imagine: Free speech as sedition.

Tell your students: Silence is sedition.

~ Bill Moyers from, https://billmoyers.com/2000/03/30/journalism-matters-march-30-2000/

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I am not a journalist.

Having read this article by an actual journalist, I am left wondering:

What did we abandon that seems to have killed—or if you feel inclined to be positive in your assessment—seems to be killing journalism?

I don’t think the journalists are gone. I don’t think real publications are gone. What is gone?

You stopped reading.

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Bootstraps

May 30, 2019

The parents’ duty to their children is not to cram as many social advantages as possible into their first eighteen years. The parents’ duty is to make sure that when it comes time for the child to pull himself up by his bootstraps, he actually has the bootstraps to pull up.

~ Hugh MacLeod

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Ownership

April 7, 2019

Ownership is somewhat of a gray area, both with physical and virtual real estate. I use the term loosely here. Ownership depends on how much control you have over the property, so we have a spectrum of possibilities. For instance, if you want to discover who really owns your home, stop paying your property taxes for a while and see what happens.

~ Steve Pavlina from, https://www.stevepavlina.com/blog/2012/06/virtual-real-estate/

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This pull-quote has little to do with the linked article. It simply made me laugh out loud—for real, in the literal sense. If you’ve not owned a house, you cannot aprehend property taxes. I digress.

Just before this article by Steve, I had read a short piece about adulthood and children. A piece about parents who give children too much choice. It contained a thought or three about:

Why would I want to grow up and have to accept all the responsibility, when I already have all the freedom and luxury?

That is one of the Big Questions. The day on which I understood the answer was the 3rd most important day of my life.

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Burnout

March 24, 2019

The problem with holistic, all-consuming burnout is that there’s no solution to it. You can’t optimize it to make it end faster. You can’t see it coming like a cold and start taking the burnout-prevention version of Airborne. The best way to treat it is to first acknowledge it for what it is — not a passing ailment, but a chronic disease — and to understand its roots and its parameters. That’s why people I talked to felt such relief reading the “mental load” cartoon, and why reading Harris’s book felt so cathartic for me: They don’t excuse why we behave and feel the way we do. They just describe those feelings and behaviors — and the larger systems of capitalism and patriarchy that contribute to them — accurately.

~ Anne Helen Petersen from, https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/annehelenpetersen/millennials-burnout-generation-debt-work

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I was startled (or perhaps proud?) to notice this seems to be the first thing I’ve ever linked to on Buzzfeed. I was also startled to realize this article makes a lot of great points about burnout.

It doesn’t have any suggestions about how to recover. But it does point out the key observation that you cannot optimize your way out of burnout. Been there. Done that. Am there. Doing that.

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Riders on the Earth together

March 15, 2019

For the first time in all of time, men have seen the Earth. Seen it not as continents or oceans from the little distance of a hundred miles or two or three, but seen it from the depths of space; seen it whole and round and beautiful and small… To see the Earth as it truly is, small and blue and beautiful in that eternal silence where it floats, is to see ourselves as riders on the Earth together, brothers on that bright loveliness in the eternal cold—brothers who know that they are truly brothers.

~ Archibald MacLeish from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/02/14/happy-birthday-pale-blue-dot/

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The linked article is about Carl Sagan’s, Pale Blue Dot, but the quote is from a less well-known poet, Archibald MacLeish. He wrote an essay titled, Riders on the Earth, which appeared in The New York Times on Christmas Day, 1968.

I am well aware that this blog is a long sequence of my ideas which are inspired by others’. There’s a reason I lead with the link to the seed from which each idea germinated.

I recall exactly when, and where, I was when I had the idea to restart blogging. (Aside: Another reason I love my long-standing habit of journaling is the ability to look up things like this to audit my memory.) I cannot imagine where I would be today—frankly, there’s no chance I would have gotten to where I am today—if I hadn’t started this place to unpack my thoughts.

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Embarrassment

March 14, 2019

Society changes when we change what we’re embarrassed about.

~ Seth Godin from, https://seths.blog/2012/03/ashamed-to-not-know/

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This is an interesting way to look at societal changes. Since there is no “we”—there is no aggregate, thing which is “the society as a whole” which can feel embarrassed—the only “we” which can be embarrassed is me, the individual.

…and since this blog is about me, I should talk about what embarrasses me. But instead, I’m interested in unpacking the source of my embarrassment:

When my actions and thoughts disagree with what I know is right.

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This explains everything

March 12, 2019

Despite the laudatory efforts of scientists to ferret out patterns in human behavior, I continue to be struck by the impact of single individuals, or of small groups, working against the odds. As scholars, we cannot and should not sweep these instances under the investigative rug. We should bear in mind anthropologist Margaret Mead’s famous injunction: ‘Never doubt that a small group of thoughtful committed citizens can change the world. It is the only thing that ever has.’

~ John Brockman from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/01/22/this-explains-everything-brockman-edge-question/

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There so many ways that you can see this in human societies: The crowd of non-helpers all assuming someone else will help, the herds on social media who are only listening to refute, and the oceans of sarcasm to gain temporary attention.

But there are always a few—surely you’ve spotted them in your life?—who are inspiring. Perk up your ears. Who’s efforts call to you? Are you helping them?

Better yet, what calls to you? Are you thoughtful? Are you committed?

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Making your ideas happen

March 7, 2019

Selling, I’ve grown to understand, is more urgent, more important, and, in its own sweet way, more beautiful than we realize. The ability to move others to exchange what they have for what we have is crucial to our survival and our happiness. It has helped our species evolve, lifted our living standards, and enhanced our daily lives. The capacity to sell isn’t some unnatural adaptation to the merciless world of commerce. It is part of who we are.

~ Daniel Pink from, https://www.brainpickings.org/2013/02/01/dan-pink-to-sell-is-human/

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I believe in a very clear definition of “trade:” An exchange of value in which all parties are left better off; That is to say, trade is not zero-sum.

I believe it’s unnecessary to talk about “good” trade. That “good” is superfluous since any trade that isn’t “good” wouldn’t be trade. (It would be deception, cohersion, etc.)

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