It appears we have ourselves a holy fool skating along the boardwalk in San Diego: “Slomo: The man who skated right off the grid”
Posts in: Praxis
Patrick Rhone: “The first approximation of others is ourselves.” Along these same lines, the most (the only?) profound thing I have ever heard in a corporate training session is that we always, always fail to realize how differently other people see the world.
The Gnostic Road
When the communities around you are policing their borders and in a state of war with other communities, it is madness to preach the need for community. When tech companies are mining our behavior in order to organize us into affinity groups more easily targeted by ads, you cannot trust the algorithm’s recommendations. When the world can only offer you conformity and exploitation, you must refuse them both. You must take the gnostic road.
“How do I live a meaningful life?”
Is there a state of life that is identifiable as “meaningful?” What does that look like? Is the questioner imagining a person who spends their time doing charitable work, or meditating, or finally making their way through their to-read list? But that may not count as “meaningful” for everyone. Those are generally seen as good things, but there are also a lot of other good things, some of which may be in competition with other good things.
An essential question: Who does this benefit?
One of the first questions to ask when you’ve uncovered an ideology is, “who does this benefit?” Let’s take the example from the linked post, that of activism as the only correct way to be an engaged citizen. Who would have an interest in perpetuating the activist model of constant engagement with the news, contacting legislators, attending protests, and voting? The following comes to mind: News organizations and social media companies have a direct, obvious, and well-documented stake in keeping your attention on their firehose of content.
Activism is an ideology
Whenever you bump into an idea that people seem to accept without knowing why and, in fact, bristle when it is questioned, you have uncovered ideology. Ideology is not always bad, but it is always worth investigating. Among American liberals today, there is a certain idea of what it means to be politically engaged: constant engagement with the news (reading news, watching news, doom-scrolling social media1), contacting legislators, attending protests, and voting (this latter takes on the quality of a sacrament and to question its efficacy is heresy).
One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice.
There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale.
But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.
From David Cain:
Self-imposed rules aren’t constraints, they’re good decisions made in batches.
That is a smart line.
This is a great post that I needed to read today. “My point isn’t that we’re not living in a Diet Dystopia, because I believe we are, but that my cynicism isn’t at all helpful. All it does is make me bitter and unpleasant, like a Caffeine Free Diet Coke.”
I Welcome Your Performance hypertext.monster