Charles Eisenstein: Today I saw a monarch butterfly. It was the only one I have seen this summer, and I am sad. I have been preserving all the milkweed that has been coming up as a weed in my gardens. An insignificant gesture, but for me it is a little prayer. I’ve loved these butterflies ever since I was a boy and my father told me about their migratory journey.
Sallie McFague, Blessed are the Consumers: Everything is interconnected. Philosopher Bruno Latour has imagined such a world. Its primary characteristic is that there is no “environment,” no external world that is our playfield. Rather, there is “one world,” a cosmos, a totality of things, all of which are “insiders,” members of the collective who have voice. Hence, “we must connect the question of the common world to the question of the common good.
A reference post, to define what I mean by God. As to the ontological status of God, I’m undecided – or perhaps more precisely, indifferent. Paul Tillich, The Essential Tillich: God is the answer to the question implied in man’s finitude; he is the name for that which concerns man ultimately. This does not mean that first there is a being called God and then the demand that man should be concerned about him.
And let’s not forget what everyone brings up when they talk about why “return to office” is so important. “Oh, it’s about collaboration! We have such a great office culture!” What “office culture?” Fluorescent lighting and no privacy? A pizza party in lieu of a proper raise?
Let’s not mince words when it comes to discussing the return to the office and what it’s really about: capitalism. The banks have threatened to devalue office properties if the companies leasing them don’t use them. Apple spent billions on a brand new campus and it’ll be damned if people aren’t going to walk its sterile, glass hallways each day.
Spot on. You should be suspicious whenever certain buzzwords–like “culture”–start getting repeated. That’s a sure sign of ideology and the first thing to ask when you’ve found an ideology is “who does this benefit?” In this case, it benefits those who stand to lose asset value on their balance sheets due to property value markdowns.
The speed with which Twitter recedes in your mind will shock you. Like a demon from a folktale, the kind that only gains power when you invite it into your home, the platform melts like mist when that invitation is rescinded.
This is most certainly true.
The mosses remember that this is not the first time the glaciers have melted. If time is a line, as western thinking presumes, we might think this is a unique moment for which we have to devise a solution that enables that line to continue. If time is a circle, as the Indigenous worldview presumes, the knowledge we need is already within the circle; we just have to remember it to find it again and let it teach us.
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.
Self-imposed rules aren’t constraints, they’re good decisions made in batches.
That is a smart line.
Oliver Burkeman on the reality distorting effects of the attention economy:
As you surface from an hour inadvertently frittered away on Facebook, you’d be forgiven for assuming that the damage, in terms of wasted time, was limited to that single misspent hour. But you’d be wrong. Because the attention economy is designed to prioritize whatever’s most compelling - instead of whatever’s most true, or most useful - it systematically distorts the picture of the world we carry in our heads at all times. It influences our sense of what matters, what kinds of threats we face, how venal our political opponents are, and thousands of other things - and all of these distorted judgments then influence how we allocate our offline time as well. If social media convinces you, for example, that violent crime is a far bigger problem in your city than it really is, you might find yourself walking the streets with unwarranted fear, staying home instead of venturing out, and avoiding interactions with strangers - and voting for a demagogue with a tough-on-crime platform. If all you ever see of your ideological opponents online is their very worst behavior, you’re liable to assume that even family members who differ from your politically must be similarly, irredeemably bad, making relationships with them hard to maintain. So it’s not simply that our devices distract us from more important matters. It’s that they change how we’re defining “important matters” in the first place. In the words of philosopher Harry Frankfurt, the sabotage our capacity to “want what we want to want.”
Four Thousand Weeks p. 96-97
Boredom is everything, man. I think our loss of boredom in contemporary society is one of the greatest, weirdest, ambient losses. It is one of these things that’s hard to quantify the value of. And we’ve lost it so completely and totally that we very rarely have moments to even re-experience it, unless you do so intentionally. And so for me, yeah the boredom of these walks is, I would say, 50% of the value of it. It’s forcing yourself into a place where you’re not teleporting mentally.