A sea change in human self-definition was taking place but its significance was beyond those who longed only for things to stay as they were. Instead of trying to understand what was happening and why, they chose to see the social chaos as criminal and to look for the villain on whom to lay the blame. Ah, they had one. It was the incredible, unheard of, never-before-seen selfishness—that is, the self-love—of this generation of reckless, childish people playing at revolution, refusing to grow up and assume its ordained responsibilities. There was your culprit!

Another flip side of narcissism. Vivian Gornick on narcissism’s bad rap, who’s to blame, and the benefits of a little self-love:In Defense of Narcissism

But so much of what used to remain private has become public. And how does that change its purpose? I spent an afternoon on Instagram, looking through selfies. What I saw was a familiar pole dance—women posting hot pictures, men drooling in the comments section. Ur hot. Ur gorgeous. (If nothing else, looking at selfies will leave you despondent over the state of the apostrophe.) And herein lies the magic of selfies: They are an insanely effective delivery system for ego gratification.

Sara Hepolah offers this brilliant and refreshing meditation on the narcissism of selfies and the oft-neglected flip side of that same coin:A Good Angle Is Hard to Find

In the theater on the other hand the flesh-and-blood presence of the actors, good or bad as they may be, creates a sense of reality and immediacy, a heightened state of attention. Having paid for your seat, having promised yourself a special evening, and finding yourself sitting in the middle of a long row beside others who have also paid and promised themselves a special evening, others whom you imagine have similar interests to your own, people willing to spend time and money supporting avant-garde culture, a community almost—in these circumstances you are probably always going to hang on at least thirty minutes, however bewildered and sceptical you may be. And thirty minutes should be enough for Beckett’s enchantments to begin to work. Simply the emotional experience of being in the theater, the sense of occasion, the positive atmosphere of people engaging in an intellectual pursuit together, provides the necessary momentum for tackling the great enigma of Beckett’s work.

Tim Parks on the experimental nature of theater and the thrill of leaving behind an awful show: Six Chairs in Search of an Audience

Making and recognizing progress not only builds up intrinsic motivation, it prevents you from slipping into the hollowness of automatic, forgettable routines. When you think about how you first started out with a skill or working towards a goal like getting fit or learning how to do your job well, it seems like forever ago because you’ve made a lot of progress. There are lots of relevant and remarkable milestones, all along the way.

Beautiful meditation on the iDoneThis blog about the science behind making the most of your time. (via wonderisms)

I won’t ever be able entirely to understand my own work or even my own motivations. It is first of all a gift, but the direction it has taken has been because of the Church in me or the effect of the Church’s teaching, not because of a personal perception or love of God. For you to think this would be possible because of your ignorance of me; for me to think it would be sinful in a high degree. I am not a mystic and I do not lead a holy life. Not that I can claim any interesting or pleasurable sins (my sense of the devil is strong) but I know all about the garden variety, pride, gluttony, envy and sloth, and what is more to the point, my virtues are as timid as my vices. I think sin occasionally brings one closer to God, but not habitual sin and not this petty kind that blocks every small good. A working knowledge of the devil can be very well had from resisting him.

I disagree with O’Connor on many, many points, but that doesn’t stop me from admiring the way she approaches her thoughts on God, the Church, and belief itself. She has a self-awareness about her that makes me wish I could sit down with her and have a chat about all the things we disagree over.Writing for the Godless: Flannery O’Connor on Dogma, Belief, and the Difference Between Religion and Faith

Back when I could not bear pictures of myself, I used to take artsy photos of buildings, of my feet in exotic locations, to show people where I’d been. Is it really less self-involved to take 100 photos of your dog, or your new baby, or your latest meal? Vanity isn’t simply the impulse to turn a camera on yourself. It can be the very intense impulse to get out of the frame.

A Good Angle Is Hard to Find - The Morning News

Walking can provoke these excesses: surfeits of fatigue that make the mind wander, abundances of beauty that turn the soul over, excesses of drunkenness on the peaks, the high passes (where the body explodes). Walking ends by awakening this rebellious, archaic part of us: our appetites become rough and uncompromising, our impulses inspired. Because walking puts us on the vertical axis of life: swept along by the torrent that rushes just beneath us.

A Philosophy of Walking: Thoreau, Nietzsche and Kant on Walking

The novel, of course, is an unequaled medium for the exploration of human social and emotional life. And there is evidence that just as the brain responds to depictions of smells and textures and movements as if they were the real thing, so it treats the interactions among fictional characters as something like real-life social encounters.

This Is Your Brain on Great Literature

All of which prompts a question: Is my dream of a collaborative reading experience merely that, a dream? On the many occasions when I tried to set up a shared Subtext or Readmill reading with a friend, we always ran into endless snags, from an inability to settle on a book we both found appetizing to scheduling and pacing incompatibilities like the ones I had with Liz. Apparently, and despite the ongoing popularity of book groups, we weren’t alone in being flummoxed by the logistics of reading the same book together. After all, if there were a robust demand for a complexly shared reading app, wouldn’t Subtext and Readmill have found more users?

Is reading antisocial?

Thinking without hope might sound rather bleak, but it needn’t be so. I see it rather as embracing an affirmative, even cheerful, realism. Nietzsche admired Epictetus, the former slave turned philosophy teacher, for living without hope. “Yes,” Nietzsche said, “he can smile.” We can, too.

Abandon (Nearly) All Hope

Kleos lay very near the core of the Greek value system. Their value system was at least partly motivated, as perhaps all value systems are partly motivated, by the human need to feel as if our lives matter. A little perspective, which the Greeks certainly had, reveals what brief and feeble things our lives are. As the old Jewish joke has it, the food here is terrible — and such small portions! What can we do to give our lives a moreness that will help withstand the eons of time that will soon cover us over, blotting out the fact that we ever existed at all? Really, why did we bother to show up for our existence in the first place? The Greek speakers were as obsessed with this question as we are.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, thinking about what Plato would Tweet.

If depression is a foul miasma wreathing the brain, elegant sadness is more like a peacock’s tail, coloured in blue-gentian and rich marine greens

Adam Roberts makes the case that I’ve long espoused- that sadness can be one of life’s most profoundly great things. Beautiful, necessary read.The mysterious beauty of sadness

Or does it? The question that Goldstein’s book sets out to consider is what we mean by progress, and also what we mean by meaning. Her goal is to do more than prove how relevant philosophy still is. She aims to reveal how many of our most pressing questions simply aren’t better answered elsewhere. Much of what we take for progress delivers answers that miss the point, distort issues, ignore complications, and may be generated by badly formulated questions in the first place. Goldstein also wants to show us that figuring out how to live a meaningful life is something very different from understanding the meaning of special relativity or evolution. We are deluged with information; we know how to track down facts in seconds; the scientific method produces new discoveries every day. But what does all that mean for us? As the philosopher Søren Kierkegaard observed:

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein’s new book, Plato at the Googleplex, is without a doubt my next read.Playing With Plato

In the United States, research psychologists have shown that narcissism rates, as measured by a standard academic tool known as the Narcissistic Personality Inventory, rose rapidly from the later 1980s, which would appear to track the increases in inequality. The data all point to the fact that as larger differences in material circumstances create greater social distances, feelings of superiority and inferiority increase. In short, growing inequality makes us all more neurotic about “image management” and how we are seen by others.

Inequality has been an abstract political debate for awhile now, but it has real consequences on us as individuals, too.How Inequality Hollows Out the Soul

1. Hiding Your Flaws People fall in love with each other’s rough edges. Paradoxically, it’s our flaws and vulnerabilities that make us unique and endearing towards others. The more we’re willing to reveal where we come up short, the more intimacy and connection we’ll generate in our personal lives, and the happier and healthier we’ll be in the long run.

Mark Manson (one of my favorite writers) lays out 12 things people care too much about. Making the cut: sexual jealousy, politics, being offended. Couldn’t agree more. 12 Stupid Things People Care Way Too Much About - The Good Men Project

Balls and similar gatherings are wont to attract all that is bad and vicious; all the quarrels, envyings, slanders, and indiscreet tendencies of a place will be found collected in the ballroom. While people’s bodily pores are opened by the exercise of dancing, the heart’s pores will be also opened by excitement … while you were dancing, souls were groaning in hell by reason of sins committed when similarly occupied, or in consequence thereof.

I’m not sure I like the patron saint of writers. In Dan Piepenbring’s words, “Buzzkill, Francis!”. Paris Review – The Patron Saint of Writers and Journalists.

Out of all the possible amounts of dark energy that our universe might have, the actual amount lies in the tiny sliver of the range that allows life. There is little argument on this point. It does not depend on assumptions about whether we need liquid water for life or oxygen or particular biochemistries. It depends only on the requirement of atoms. As before, one is compelled to ask the question: Why does such fine-tuning occur? And the answer many physicists now believe: the multiverse. A vast number of universes may exist, with many different values of the amount of dark energy. Our particular universe is one of the universes with a small value, permitting the emergence of life. We are here, so our universe must be such a universe. We are an accident. From the cosmic lottery hat containing zillions of universes, we happened to draw a universe that allowed life. But then again, if we had not drawn such a ticket, we would not be here to ponder the odds.

In light of the recent discovery of gravitational waves that all but prove the Big Bang, and get us closer toward the multiverse, this is all the more appropriate. I’ve always thought we pay too little attention to the mind-boggling implications of the multiverse, which is starting to look (at least to physicists) more and more like reality.

We Are a Cosmic Accident: Alan Lightman on Dark Energy, the Multiverse, and Why We Exist | Brain Pickings

1. “The reader, the booklover, must meet his own needs without paying too much attention to what his neighbors say those needs should be.”

Teddy Roosevelt dispenses advice on reading. I find some of these, especially #4, especially refreshing. I spend so much time trying to figure out what I should read, what would make me better, that sometimes I forget to just read what I want to read.

Teddy Roosevelt’s 10 Rules for Reading

The divergent Greek and Hebrew approaches went into the mix that is Western culture, often clashing but sometimes also tempering one another. Over the centuries, philosophy, perhaps aided by religion, learned to abandon entirely the flawed Greek presumption that only extraordinary lives matter. This was progress of the philosophical variety, subtler than the dazzling triumphs of science, but nevertheless real. Philosophy has laboriously put forth arguments that have ever widened the sphere of mattering. It was natural for the Greeks to exclude their women and slaves, not to mention non-Greeks, whom they dubbed barbarians. Such exclusions are unthinkable to us now. Being inertial creatures, we required rigorous and oft-repeated arguments that spearheaded social movements that resulted, at long last, in the once quixotic declaration of human rights. We’ve come a long way from the kleos of Greeks, with its unexamined presumption that mattering is inequitably distributed among us, with the multireplicated among us mattering more.

Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of Plato at the Googleplex, on the human need to make ourselves heard, and how that need explains the popularity of Twitter: What Would Plato Tweet?

The net is the Promethean substance of this age. It can consume, it can destroy, and it can empower. Like fire, we have to learn to use it and live with it.

Quinn Norton offers some exquisite wisdom on what she’s learned about living on the web: Twitter I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down

He was nervous. “I feel like I love you,” he said. “I know it’s crazy, but I do.” Then he carried me to his bed. At some point during our love fest I borrowed his iPhone, and that’s when I realized he had been using it to send me messages. Everyone knows the mistakes that can lead to. James wasn’t the best speller, but technology wasn’t doing him any favors, either.

A moving story of love, neuroses, and bad spelling: Learning to Silence My Inner Editor

Fragile people and systems seek to eliminate variability, noise, and tension. Because fragile people and systems don’t have built-in responses to stress and variability, they naively try to eliminate it completely from the equation.

But trying to eliminate randomness and variability is a loser’s game. It’s simply not possible. Remember, randomness and variability are the rule, not the exception.

Not only is trying to eliminate stress and variability a lost cause, it ends up making an already fragile person or system even more fragile.

Brett and Kate McKay summarize Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s case for moving beyond resilience to “antifragility,” or becoming stronger in the case of chaos:

Becoming Antifragile: Beyond “Sissy” Resilience

The Significance of Insignificance

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You can’t know how incredible it is in here. The beauty and the majesty, and, at the next corner, the depravity. There are whirlwinds and windows and trees and even the occasional clown. There is misery and triumph and heartbreak and somber reflections.

It’s cozy here, where I live, but it can sometimes feel as if the walls are closing in. It has the effect of making me feel important, and then of snatching that importance away and leaving me to consider my insignificance.

I live inside my mind.

We all do, of course, but for some the concept is comforting, for others, terrifying. Regardless, this is where we live. Even extroverts- who venture far from home and into the physical world much more often than I- return home each night, when their heads hit the pillow.

Humans have between 12,000 and 60,000 thoughts per day. Some of these are concrete notions (”I need to buy some milk while I’m out”), while others are fleeting notions that we recognize only by their effect.

The vast majority of those thoughts will differ from person to person, but my guess is that the degree of similarity would surprise us. Pamela Druckerman said it nicely in a recent piece in which she looks back on what she’s learned in her 40s:

More about you is universal than not universal. My unscientific assessment is that we are 95 percent cohort, 5 percent unique. Knowing this is a bit of a disappointment, and a bit of a relief.

Most would tend to agree with her, after some thought. Our arms and legs and ears and eyes are so very similar- why would our internal makeup be any different?

There’s a lot of room for variance in that five percent, though. Experience, environment, genes- these all play a part in the small percentage of uniqueness in each of us. And not only are the differences many, they’re often stark. Our beliefs, our biases, our aptitudes reach each end of the spectrum. Some believe in small government, some believe in socialism. Some like order, some chaos. Some live to make music, others to run their business. All these characteristics, though, fall within that slim five percent. How can such a slight difference cause such gaping rifts in our thinking?

Nowhere is this difference more evident than in the effect of Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. Sagan’s entire premise hinges on our seeming insignificance in the universe, whether we occupy a privileged position or an inconsequential one. For some, that concept of insignificance—espoused long before Sagan, but perhaps captured most elegantly by him—is a source of wonder. It fills those who contemplate it with a sublime feeling of cosmic order. For others, it inspires dread. For those, insignificance is a dagger to the heart: if we are so insignificant, what’s the point?

There seems to me no greater symbol of the contrast in our ways of life than in our approach to insignificance. But if we are so similar, how does the difference become so stark in the first place? How do creatures with 95 percent similarity come to occupy realms of thought so completely in opposition to each other? If we’re so similar, there must be some fundamental point of departure, some point at which, early on, our thought processes begin to diverge.

Think of two saplings growing side-by-side. At first, the similarities are uncanny- but what if one sapling sprouted from the ground leaning just a bit to the right, while the other leaned a hair to the left? The difference wouldn’t be immediately obvious, but if we could fast-forward to the trees’ maturity, we’d see the difference much more clearly: they’ve grown apart, quite literally, since the point at which the direction of their growth diverged.

So it is with us. The things we experience while young change our direction, and our differences become stark when we reach maturity. It’s easy to see, then, how creatures so similar could have drastically different reactions to Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, and to our insignificance in general.

That begs the question: what is that point of divergence? What is the catalyst that sends one of us off in one direction, and others in another? There are bound to be many such catalysts, of course, but one may rise above the rest. Costica Bradatan provides some insight:

Failure is the sudden irruption of nothingness into the midst of existence. To experience failure is to start seeing the cracks in the fabric of being, and that’s precisely the moment when, properly digested, failure turns out to be a blessing in disguise. For it is this lurking, constant threat that should make us aware of the extraordinariness of our being: the miracle that we exist at all when there is no reason that we should. Knowing that gives us some dignity.

Failure. Is there a better example of the thread that binds us all together? We are all human, we are all fallible, we all make mistakes, we all fail. It’s a fundamental truth of human existence. It would make sense, then, that how we approach failure would have a powerful impact on the way we approach life.

Bradatan goes on:

In this role, failure also possesses a distinct therapeutic function. Most of us (the most self-aware or enlightened excepted) suffer chronically from a poor adjustment to existence; we compulsively fancy ourselves much more important than we are and behave as though the world exists only for our sake; in our worst moments, we place ourselves like infants at the center of everything and expect the rest of the universe to be always at our service. We insatiably devour other species, denude the planet of life and fill it with trash. Failure could be a medicine against such arrogance and hubris, as it often brings humility.

Our capacity to fail is essential to what we are.

Failure is not optional. We all experience it- much more often than success, in fact. But failure doesn’t have to be failure. It need not occupy such a lofty status. We can bring it back down to earth with a simple shift in perspective: we will fail, so we need only be concerned with what we learn from it, and how quickly we move past it. Once we demote failure from feared demigod to everyday citizen—once we get familiar with it— we can look to the stars, and thus to ourselves, with the wonder they and we deserve. Our insignificance need not be so significant.

Truly stunning photography set captures Asia like I’ve never seen it: (via Stunning Photography Features Rich Culture and Scenic Nature of Asia)

In The Comedy of Survival, Joseph Meeker argues that much of Western civilization is modeled after the “tragic mode.” You’ll recognize that mode from the Greek and Renaissance tragedies you read in primary school. In the tragic mode, a larger-than-life character attempts to bend the world to his (and it’s always his) image. He succeeds, in part, by mutilating and murdering and generally dragging a swath of blood behind him. But his success is also his undoing, and at the end of the play, his head is carried off the stage. A eulogy praises his bravery while also issuing a caution against those who would follow in his path.

But Meeker proposes an alternative: the comic mode. As you might suspect, the comic mode takes its cues not from the great tragedies but from comedies. Whereas tragedies follow men who are determined to remake the world to suit them, comic characters remake themselves to fit the world.

Mandy Brown, on adopting a comic approach to life (which I can absolutely get behind).

The Pastry Box Project

austinkleon:

The Happy Writer’s Flowchart

ayjay:

in response to Austin Kleon’s Miserable Artist Flowchart

This is great. Highly recommend Alan’s The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction, btw.

It is sometimes a battle even to be attentive to another person or to take note of them at all. This is not a recent phenomenon. It is not caused by the Internet, social media, or mobile phones just as it was not caused by the Industrial Revolution, telephones, or books. It is the human condition. It is much easier to pay attention to our own needs and desires. We know them more intimately; they are immediately before us. No effort of the will is involved. Being attentive to another person, however, does require an act of the will. It does not come naturally. It involves deliberate effort and sometimes the setting aside of our own desires. It may even be a kind of sacrifice to give our attention to another and to be kind an act of heroism.

It’s Not the Smartphone, It’s You and It’s Me by Michael Sacasas  (via stewartmccoy)

We are led, on the one hand, to deny the fact of death and to run headlong into the watery pleasures of forgetfulness, intoxication and the mindless accumulation of money and possessions. On the other hand, the terror of annihilation leads us blindly into a belief in the magical forms of salvation and promises of immortality offered by certain varieties of traditional religion and many New Age (and some rather older age) sophistries. What we seem to seek is either the transitory consolation of momentary oblivion or a miraculous redemption in the afterlife.

It is in stark contrast to our drunken desire for evasion and escape that the ideal of the philosophical death has such sobering power.

Simon Critchley, in his introduction to The Book of Dead Philosophers

Q&A with a Doystoyevsky expert

RBTH: Why are the characters in his novels always in extreme mental states and on the verge of suicide? Where does all this gloom come from? Bashar Alrustom

L.S.: Dostoevsky believed that in the borderline states a man is better perceived than in everyday life.

When we mythologize ourselves, we tend to amplify the things that turned out okay and try to turn the failures or lack of success into something we learned from. You can do anything to make your life look really grand. It’s a shame that so many people find it difficult to do the things they’d like to do because they feel cowed by seemingly successful people who appear to never do anything wrong, or always learn from their mistakes. That just rings as a lot of B.S. and self-mythology to me.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Merlin Mann (although he is ridiculously funny on Back to Work), but there’s always been something intriguing about his brutal honesty, his refusal to present a rose-colored version of himself.

The Great Discontent

A “hodgepodge,” indeed. But as the reader acclimates to the Zibaldone, it becomes clear that Leopardi’s concerns are far less miscellaneous than they might first appear. The poet and the philosopher, Leopardi writes elsewhere in the notebook, are not as different as we think they are; both types of genius depend on the ability to see connections between unlike things. “In different circumstances,” he insists, “the great poet could have been a great philosopher…. All faculties of a great poet [are] contained in and deriving from the ability to discover relations between things, even the most minimal, and distant, even between things that appear the least analogous, etc. Now this is the philosopher through and through: the faculty of discovering and recognizing relations, of binding particulars together, and of generalizing.”

Giacomo Leopardis is apparently largely unknown to the English-speaking world, thanks to his work having never been translated. That changed with the recent publication of his masterwork Zibaldone, which is a whopping 4,000 pages (and a whopping $47 on Amazon).

He seems a bit too like Rousseau for my tastes, but his is a fascinating mind nonetheless, and the book is written mostly as a journal, which makes for some candid insights.

Giacomo Leopardi’s Zibaldone, reviewed By Adam Kirsch

But our new model also hacked away at the requirement of the huge knowledgebase and skillset a true gentleman needed to deserve his title. The resulting gentleman is far more holographic, an image of refined man, without the required substance: He can own a handgun but need not know how to hunt; he should read a book for a dinner party but knows no more Greek than a few letters; he buys expensive paintings but can’t paint; he reads a list of to-do items in Esquire and does none of them. He probably can’t mount a horse at full gallop, lift a battle axe, or quote the Bible. He just plays the role convincingly.

This is something I’ve thought about a lot lately: what it means to be a man (or, in this case, a gentleman) in the modern age, and I’m not alone, judging by the flood of similar pieces I’ve seen strewn about the net over the past year or so. One particular definition in this piece struck me, though: to be a gentleman is simply to mature.

Gentlemen, Formerly - The Morning News

My other caveat about this time of abundance is that while it’s great for a foreign-news junkie, I’m not sure how well it serves the passive reader. The profusion of unfiltered information can overwhelm without informing. So while it is true that the outside world learned almost instantaneously of the horrific August chemical attack in Syria, the flood of social media was contaminated by misinformation (some of it deliberate) and filled with contradictions — enough to let the regime and its supporters blame the massacre on the rebels with an almost straight face. Even after United Nations inspectors had visited the site and filed a report, they did not resolve the question of culpability. It took an experienced reporter familiar with Syria’s civil war, my colleague C. J. Chivers, to dig into the technical information in the U.N. report and spot the evidence — compass bearings for two chemical rockets — that established the attack was launched from a Damascus redoubt of Assad’s military. “Social media isn’t journalism,” Chivers told the Boston conference. “It’s information. Journalism is what you do with it.”

The concept of citizen journalism has always bothered me. Documenting happenings and keeping people honest is one thing, but it takes a good journalist to put things in perspective, to create the context that allows us to make sense of an event. For that, and for many, many other aspects of real journalism, we need pros, now more than ever.It’s the Golden Age of News - NYTimes.com

It is vital to keep in mind, when applying sceptical techniques, that the point of the exercise is not to win arguments and take down your opponents, but to test beliefs with the aim of determining whether or not it is possible to suspend judgement on them. To live a sceptical life, you should try to suspend judgement as many beliefs as you can. This is how you achieve peace of mind, which the Sceptics called ataraxia: freedom from mental disturbance.

Tim Rayner, explaining his concrete steps towards cultivating a life of skepticism in order to declutter the mind.

Sceptical thinking: the five modes of Agrippa – Philosophy for change

[America] is an experimentalist country. It’s a country the central creed of which is faith in the constructive genius of ordinary men and women. This faith has lived under the burden of an institutional idolatry. The sin of the public culture of the United States is the tendency to believe that the country discovered at the time of its foundation the definitive formula of a free society, and that the rest of humanity must either subscribe to this formula or continue to languish in poverty and despotism.

Roberto Unger

Having my mind blown thanks to this video posted by my friend D.A. earlier today… which you can tell isn’t from American television corporations because the host used the word ameliorate during his introduction. :)

On Politics and Social Media

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Over on Slate is a list of 22 answers for creationists, posted as a response to 22 questions asked by creationists, directed at those who believe in evolution. Each response is thoughtful, kind, and respectful, but forceful in their conviction. Question 9 is a great example:

9) “If God did not create everything, how did the first single-celled organism originate? By chance?”

This is an excellent question. It was partly by chance, but it wasn’t random. Chemistry shows us that atoms and molecules are like puzzle pieces, fitting together a certain way. This means some molecules can have astonishing complexity, including the ability to replicate. It’s not like taking all the pieces of a clock, throwing them in a box, shaking it, and getting a working timepiece. The pieces themselves built up over time, attaining more complexity.

And I might turn the question around. Who created God? If you say He has always been, then why not say the same about the Universe (or more properly, the multiverse)?

I smiled as I read this, and, when I reached the end, clicked the share button.

Then I hesitated. Politically charged content is tricky, especially for someone who lives and works on the web. When I first began a freelance career, I rarely shared this kind of material, afraid that a client (or potential client) would see it and be turned off. Even now, most articles with a political bent go to my Facebook page, where all posts are viewable only by friends. Rarely do I tweet this type of thing, since Twitter is, by nature, a very public forum. When I read Phil Plait's piece on Slate, though, I thought about the consequences of reigning in my political opinions.

This isn't limited to social media, of course. When I first moved to West Virginia (before I was working solely online), I worried about the religiosity of the state. I'm an adamant atheist, after all, and I suspected that that wouldn't go over well if it got out. So I hid it from anyone who might be, now or in the future, considered a colleague or associate. Hiding a part of yourself from the general public gets tiresome quickly, though, and I soon began to put out feelers, asking those I trusted whether they thought my lack of religion would impact me negatively if it were known.

I got varied responses- some thought that it would, in fact, hurt me in the end. Others were offended that I put so little faith in the open-mindedness of West Virginians. Some even proclaimed, in group conversation, that it wouldn't be a problem, then emailed me to tell me that they, too, were closeted atheists, and had the same fears as I.

Here's the thing, though: my atheism affects so much of who I am, how I approach the world, how I tackle problems, how I raise my daughter, how I view sunsets and art and life. To hide that aspect of myself amounts to a colossal misrepresentation of who I am, which, needless to say, isn't fair to me, or to those who, rightly, expect me to represent myself honestly in my dealings with them.

The word "political" comes from the Greek "politikos", meaning "of, for, or relating to citizens." That's an extremely broad categorization. Political discussion involves more than politicians and foreign policy; it centers around the very things that make us individuals- our beliefs. In a piece on decluttering your mind with skeptical thinking, Tim Rayner offers steps to do just that. He has this advice to start:

Select a position or belief that many people accept as true (something worth arguing about, like ‘Abortion is always wrong’, ‘God exists’, ‘Human C02 emissions are warming the planet’, or ‘Capitalism and democracy go hand in hand’).

Every topic listed is, indeed, "something worth thinking about," and also falls into the category of politics. The label gets a bad rap, but few things are more important than those issues which are shaping our world, whether we participate or not, whether we realize or not.

The tragedy here is that those who hold shallow or extreme beliefs are often the loudest (and thus, are shaping the conversation and driving the change)while those of us who measure our beliefs, who weigh and consider them, are hesitant to join the conversation, which results in polarization and highly unfruitful discussion.

We're entering (or have entered) a world in which political leanings are viewed as unnecessary, even harmful, to our relationships, both online and off. But how are we to form meaningful relationships in the absence of so large a part of ourselves? More importantly, how can we honestly claim that we're being true to ourselves in doing so?

It's not all black and white, of course. There are those who simply don't consider these things as central to their existence, and, in that case, there's no harm in abstaining from a conversation which you have no desire to enter into. For those of us that do harbor that desire, though, we do ourselves a disservice by censoring ourselves. For one, hiding your beliefs in the shadows prevents them from being held up to the light of discussion, and an unchallenged belief is no belief at all. We are all mortal, after all, and not one of us is infallible. It would be unreasonable to believe, then, that the beliefs we hold are infallible. Knowing that, it's not a stretch to say that beliefs left unchecked are dangerous to the persons we hold most dear: ourselves.

As for the backlash that comes from sharing such content online, I say bring it. If I've learned anything in my short time on earth, it's that beliefs held in a vacuum foster ignorance and bigotry. Exposure to alternate points of view, almost without exception, breeds a mode of thought necessary to the kind of beliefs that move society forward. It cultivates empathy, that most-heralded of human emotions. If nothing else, it's a gift to ourselves: a challenged belief is one we know and understand more clearly; it allows us to get closer to, not further from them.

Those that would dismiss you out-of-hand as a horrid person for your beliefs, that would end a friendship or a professional relationship over such things, is probably not worth the effort required to put into such a relationship. Might you lose a few friends or colleagues over such a thing? Sure- but so be it. To use my atheism as an example, I'm not in the majority here. The vast majority of my offline friends, and a sizable number of the online ones, are religious, and I see their belief in God in much of what they do. Do I care for or respect them less for it? Of course not, and those that remain view me (I thnk) in the same light. In fact, some of my most fruitful, even delightful conversations are had with the faithful. I feel no differently about them, nor they me, for their beliefs, but I do know that I can better understand opposing points of view by having known them.

Already, so much of who we are is the proverbial glacier hidden beneath the water. Social media, and online life in general, is slowly eroding that paradigm, and we are the better for it. How can we evolve as a people if we're so unaware of what we as a people consist of? We're moving towards a world in which we are becoming less afraid of who we are. Complete transparency, I hope, is an Orwellian future that we'll never know, nor should we. But if we hope to achieve anything more than a shallow online existence, we have to be willing to share, not more, but more deeply.

Let me tell you this: if you meet a loner, no matter what they tell you, it’s not because they enjoy solitude. It’s because they have tried to blend into the world before, and people continue to disappoint them.

Jodi Picoult (via observando)

My new favorite Flickr stream belongs to Paris in Four Months

Curiously, ever since he learned to text, my dad and I have gotten a lot closer. We never used to talk. We didn’t have much to say to each other. My high school friends, who entertained colloquial relationships with other parents, were very scared of him and jokingly refused to call him anything but “sir.” I suppose I was a bit scared of him, too. But through text, my dad has found his medium for communication, and the newspaper for which I work has become a gateway for us to converse about everything from Israel-Palestine relations to the Bears and our yoga practices.

Leah Finnegan on how technology has impacted her relationship with her father. Send, Dad - The Morning News

What could have been an ephemeral and gimmicky work of public service fiction became perhaps the greatest short short story in the history of Swedish letters, for in this tale Dagerman took the simple redressing of a particular social problem as the starting point rather than as an end in itself and out of these mundane materials created a poignant tale of choice, chance, and human loss that rises to the highest levels of art, literary balance, and philosophical concision.

Stig Dagerman was commissioned by the Swedish government to write a piece designed to educate the public about the hazards of speeding, which was becoming a problem for the country in the 1950s. Dagerman delivered. To Kill a Child by Stig Dagerman

In a lot of ways, I actually feel lucky to be able to work all the time. If everything I do is work — all the movies I see, or books I read, or music I listen to, or even whatever thoughts I have — then nothing is work. I just get paid to consume/exist, and then write about it (which I like doing anyway).

Katie Mcdonough on what it means to be a freelance writer in today’s Freelancers are totally screwed: What today’s cultural treadmill means for writers

For me at least, and I think for some others, the hardest part about streamlining or improving my Twitter experience is that I use it for different things at different times. Sometimes it’s about work, and following what people are saying about a topic — and in many cases, I actually like the multitude of responses, even the stupid or funny ones, because they amuse me. At other times, however, I am trying to follow something I think is important, and it becomes very difficult.

Mathew Ingram ponders what’s becoming of Twitter. It’s noisy, yes, but this, I think, is why it’s taken off. It’s ridiculously easy to filter the noise- as easy as clicking the unfollow button. If you want access to more, you organize the signal into lists. The noise, though, is a byproduct of precisely what makes Twitter fantastic- everybody’s there. I can follow the US Department of the Interior, or the New York Giants, or The Atlantic, or an aspiring poet. To find what truly resonates with me, the things that resonate with me have to be there in the first place. Smaller communities may have the benefit of more intimate conversation, but it can’t be molded to the shape of your personality like Twitter can.

There is no one Twitter experience — there is only your Twitter experience — Tech News and Analysis

We are a society of consumers. In any of America’s 4,135 Walmart locations, you may find us observing our grotesque sacrament of consumption, enrobed in Duck Dynasty apparel and attended by trains of resource-gobbling offspring whose ominous chants for Monster Energy Drink and Despicable Me talking figurines can be heard halfway to the parking lot. We buy it; we break it, tire of it, or allow it to spoil; and we discard it. We are hell-bent on destroying the planet, and Black Friday is, as it were, our Black Mass. So, at any rate runs a popular line of self-flagellation — but to what degree is it true? Jonathan Miles’s new novel, Want Not, hopes to make us think long and hard about this question.

I’ve found my next book.

Stefan Beck, “Waste Management: On Jonathan Miles’s Want Not”

(via millionsmillions)

If your TBR list has become a source of stress, get rid of it. If that pile of unread books in your home gives you guilt rather than anticipatory pleasure, spread those suckers out on the floor and yank out the ones you’re no longer interested in. If you really wanted to read that book you’ve had sitting around for a decade, you’d have done it by now. So what that you spent fifteen bucks on it back in the day? Donate it to a shelter or charity, and give yourself the gift of reading freedom.

Throw Away Your TBR List: A Radical Reading (un)Plan (via bookriot)

There’s another, related factor, though: the desire to broadcast the nature of these bonds. “Apes groom each other as a way of maintaining connections and making those connections public,” Sam Gosling, a psychologist at the University of Texas at Austin, told me. “That’s what Facebook does. It’s a way of publicly grooming your friends. Those conversations that happen on people’s walls could just as easily have happened in private. Facebook allows us to meet this very basic social need, and to do that on a broad scale.”

I’ve loathed Facebook for a long time, but that’s largely been a response not to what they’re doing, but how and why they’re doing it. Lately, they’re softening my stance, making moves that tells me that they understand that a shift away from the mindless garbage that pervades the platform is needed. There’s a reason Facebook got as big as it did; it fills a fundamental psychological need. They’d do well to recognize that need and focus on it, rather than trying to be synonymous with the internet as a whole.

Why Are We Still on Facebook? : The New Yorker

Windows 7 theme inspired by Gnome. Gorgeous.by Gnome. Gorgeous.

Poe and the four conditions for happiness:

1. Life in the open air.
2. Love of another human being.
3. Freedom from all ambition.
4. Creation.

Albert Camus, Notebooks 1935-1942
(via kateoplis)

I do not know if we can build a better society. I do not even know if we will survive as a species. But I know these corporate forces have us by the throat. And they have my children by the throat. I do not fight fascists because I will win. I fight fascists because they are fascists. And this is a fight which in the face of the overwhelming forces against us requires us to embrace this sublime madness, to find in acts of rebellion the embers of life, an intrinsic meaning that lies outside of certain success. It is to at once grasp reality and then refuse to allow this reality to paralyze us. It is, and I say this to people of all creeds or no creeds, to make an absurd leap of faith, to believe, despite all empirical evidence around us, that good always draws to it the good, that the fight for life always goes somewhere—we do not know where; the Buddhists call it karma—and in these acts we sustain our belief in a better world, even if we cannot see one emerging around us.

Chris Hedges (via azspot)

To let a little bit of fantasy slip into your reality, or reality into your fantasy, and develop the ability to slide back and forth between the two, seems like a nearly perfect way to live.

I remember feeling like I’d never be able to breathe again. I ran to the den to find my parents, who were settled quietly on the couch, watching television. I can only imagine the alarm they felt—I tried to tell them what happened, but I kept choking on the words, and they assumed I must have been in some kind of physical pain. When I finally sobbed out a story about a girl stoning her bird to death, it took them a good while longer to understand that I was talking about something I’d read in a book.

Paris Review – Notes from a Bookshop: Early Autumn, or Winter’s Coming, Kelly Mcmasters

This is not just a geek thing. Everywhere lately, the here and now is the place to be. George Stephanopoulos, 50 Cent and Lena Dunham have all been talking up their meditation regimens. “I come from a long line of neurotic Jewish women who need it more than anyone,” Ms. Dunham, who’s been meditating since she was 9, told a capacity crowd last month at the David Lynch Foundation for Conscious Based Education and World Peace in New York. Then there was the tweet last April from @rupertmurdoch, who announced: “Trying to learn transcendental meditation. Everyone recommends, not that easy to get started, but said to improve everything!”

Mindfulness: Getting Its Share of Attention

Any act of writing creates conditions for the author’s possible mortification. There is, I think, a trace of shame in the very enterprise of tweeting, a certain low-level ignominy to asking a question that receives no response, to offering up a witticism that fails to make its way in the world, that never receives the blessing of being retweeted or favorited. The stupidity and triviality of this worsens, rather than alleviates, the shame, adding to the experience a kind of second-order shame: a shame about the shame. My point, I suppose, is that the possibility of embarrassment is ever-present with Twitter—it inheres in the form itself unless you’re the kind of charmed (or cursed) soul for whom embarrassment is never a possibility to begin with.

Twitter Regret: First Thought, Worst Thought : The New Yorker

You don’t need experiments to understand how this works; everyday life is full of it. In his Treatise on Elegant Living, Honoré de Balzac wrote a series of maxims for men of style, number 40 of which states: “Clothing is how society expresses itself.” Men’s clothing of the moment reveals a deep contradiction: Strength means weakness and weakness means strength. Everywhere you look, the weak look hard and the hard look weak. The man in the salmon-colored shirt fires the man in overalls. A face covered with Nazi prison tattoos is the face of a man as powerless as it is possible to be, while the face of Mark Zuckerberg, emanating gentle geekiness, projects his world-encircling billions. The amazing thing is that we live in a world filled with alpha males—most of the world’s billionaires are male, about 80 percent of American political offices are held by men, and 83 percent of all board seats of Fortune 500 companies are held by men. But our culture, at this point, seemingly has no way to express male strength outside of a camouflaged jokiness.

Gentlemen, What the Hell Has Become of Us? - Esquire

The Value of Work

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When I was eighteen, my car (a monstrous and monstrously large 1978 Lincoln Continental Mark V) broke down, its gigantic rear axle having refused to endure any more of the torture of propelling that beast down the highways of southeast Ohio.

At the time, I'd been seeing the girl I was dating for just shy of two months. One fine Sunday, we went to see her parents, who lived about an hour and a half north of us in a magnificent log cabin in the middle of nowhere. We hadn't been there long when I found myself on the front porch with my girlfriend's father, Bill, who maintained the 65-acre ranch, took care of the horses, the land, the family, in addition to holding down a full-time job in the city as an electrician.

We stood on the porch, he sipping his coffee and I marveling at the surrounding acreage and the cabin behind me, which Bill had built, as they say, with his own bare hands. At some point in the conversation, Bill pointed to a nearly new 1992 Cadillac in the driveway, and said "I want you to take it home."

The man (who'd known me but a few weeks, mind you) was offering me the use of his car while I figured out what to do with mine (a process, it turned out, that would take weeks). I was flabbergasted, and I'm sure it showed in my reaction. I politely declined, assuring him that I would figure something out (he was only worried about his daughter, after all), and after dinner, we left.

In the car we'd borrowed from another friend earlier in the day, we made our way home. I told my girlfriend about the offer, mentioning the two things that had struck me about the conversation. First, of course, was the offer itself. He was looking out for his daughter, yes, but to offer a Cadillac for an indefinite amount of time to the boy who was dating your daughter (a boy who, mind you, was eighteen years old- statistically, and realistically, the worst category of driver on the planet) was a level of generosity I'd not yet encountered in my young life.

What struck me most, though, was Bill's reaction when I declined: he looked hurt. What he said next has remained seared in my memory: It's just a possession, Rob.

I think I offended him, I told my girlfriend.

She confirmed. That's the type of man he is, she said.

I grew up in a small town, but I hadn't encountered this type of person yet. To me, Bill was straight out of a John Wayne movie- the kindest, gentlest soul you'd ever meet, but who wouldn't hesitate to tear your throat out if you crossed one of his three daughters. He built a cabin with his bare hands, was, I think, the original horse whisperer, and held honor to be the highest human virtue. Frankly, I adored the man.

Why do I mention this? Because this is the memory that came to mind when I read Miya Tokumitsu's piece in Slate on doing what you love. Some interesting points are made in the piece, like the fact that the realization of Steve Jobs' vision took countless workers on the other side of the world countless hours to bring to fruition. We'd all do well to remember those countless others typically behind any endeavor, let alone those of such monstrous scale.

The well-made points in the piece, though, are frustratingly rare. The main takeaway is this:

If we believe that working as a Silicon Valley entrepreneur or a museum publicist or a think-tank acolyte is essential to being true to ourselves, what do we believe about the inner lives and hopes of those who clean hotel rooms and stock shelves at big-box stores? The answer is: nothing.

The doing what you love mantra, Tokumitsu argues, is offensive to those who do "regular" work. We would all do better to shut our traps and stop desecrating the sanctity of hard work. That Tokumitsu presumes to know the inner thoughts of everyone who does what they love is laughable.

No one in their right mind would ever tell Bill that what he does, as the head maintenance supervisor of a sizable building complex in Columbus, didn't matter, but the work itself had little to do with its value. Rather, it was Bill himself who made the work valuable. He approached it with the same dedication and sense of pride with which he approached everything, and it was that dedication that made the world better. It wasn't the work, it was the man behind the work.

At the same time, if Bill's dream had been to breed horses, who in their right mind would tell him that to follow that dream would be detrimental to society, that it would be offensive to those who weren't fortunate enough to follow their own dreams? I've been on the unfortunate side of this exchange, and I feel safe in saying that if I were offended by the notion of someone else doing what they love, simply because I could not, I would turn my gaze inward. It's a small person that begrudges others the right to do work they love.

The type of work that betters society has nothing to do with the job being done; rather, it's the approach to the work that matters. In condemning those of us who've chosen to do something we enjoy, Tokumitsu has missed the point entirely. Whether you're a stenographer or a cashier or a politician or a ditch digger is of no import. What matters is the pride you take in your work. Were a designer to quit his job and start freelancing to do what he loves, we'd know too little based on that fact alone to judge his decision. If we could see the work ethic he applies to his job, we'd be in a slightly better position to judge. If we could see the work ethic he applies to a more traditional job, like paving roads or installing windows, so much the better. Show me a man or woman who applies the same level of principle and pride to all these jobs equally, and I'll show you someone the world is better off for having been home to... regardless of what particular job they've chosen to do.

The latest cover story in The New Statesman, the British weekly that The New Republic shares content with, is a controversial article by Cristina Odone, a former editor at the magazine. Titled ‘The New Intolerance,’ Odone’s piece argues that Western liberalism has become intolerant of other points of views, specifically religious points of view, on issues like homosexuality. The article is incoherently argued, and ultimately confusing, but it also manages to highlight an annoying trend that Americans used to the so-called ‘War on Christmas’ have become accustomed to: the self-pity of religious majorities. Be proud, Americans: the phenomenon has gone global.

Atheist Intolerence Not Dominating Western Societyc

So this is the most fundamental challenge we face in the attention economy: how do we pin down the wandering mind? How do we override the natural tendency for a mind to skip away from whatever we are showing it? By telling stories. In normal life, we spin about one-hundred daydreams per waking hour. But when absorbed in a good story—when we watch a show like Breaking Bad or read a novel like The Hunger Games—we experience approximately zero daydreams per hour. Our hyper minds go still and they pay close attention, often for hours on end. This is really very impressive. What it means is that story acts like a drug that reliably lulls us into an altered state of consciousness.

The Science Of Storytelling: How Narrative Cuts Through Distraction Like Nothing Else | Co.Create | creativity culture commerce

What these two world views, pop psychology and religion, have in common is a deep-seated need for meaning and order, for a system or a narrative that makes sense of the world. The idea that maybe nothing happens for a reason is deeply unsettling to many people. For the rationalist, regretting past events or actions is tantamount to admitting to the terrifying possibility that failing is as easy as knocking over a glass. Goal-based decision-making gives structure to what would otherwise be a series of random events, and accomplishing those goals gives the illusion of meaning. The idea that it’s always preferable to keep your eyes trained on the future, to look on the bright side, and to let go and let God take over is deeply ingrained in both rational and religious world views.

Why regret is essential to the good life – Carina Chocano – Aeon

I make myself rich by making my wants few.

Henry David Thoreau (via karrinainoregon)

devoutfashion:

Sienna King

There’s something very powerful about this photo.

If you exist for a long enough time on the Internet, you’ll lead lots of different lives there. You’ll become known first for one thing, and then, if you’re lucky, another. Creative life on the Internet is long, and made up of a bunch of bright intense bursts. Eyeballs all turn your way at once, and then they turn away. This all may add up to a certain kind of fame, but I think a better way of looking at it is that you just become part of the Internet’s furniture. People sit on you, people lie down on you and cry, people let their dogs put muddy paws all over you, people forget you in favor of another couch, people discover you again.

Back in July, Patricia Lockwood lit up the Internet with “Rape Joke,” a harrowing poem. Now, Lauren O’Neal interviews Lockwood, who talks about “Rape Joke,” the subsequent reaction and her 2012 book, Balloon Pop Outlaw Black. You could also read Elisa Gabbert on Lockwood’s Twitter followers. (via millionsmillions)

When I’d reached the end of the star tunnel a few minutes earlier, I’d tried to look into eternity myself. The tunnel aperture is wide up there, as wide as the orbit of Polaris, as viewed from Earth’s surface in 15,000AD. In my mind, I tried to go further than that. I tried to push past the current ‘great year’, the one bound by this specific cycle of precession. After all, Hipparchus might have seen deeper patterns in the sky than his predecessors, but he wasn’t the last link in the chain. Modern astronomers tell us that there are greater years than his, like the sun’s orbit around the black hole at the Milky Way’s heart, which takes nearly a quarter of a billion years to complete. In only a few million, the solar sphere will have blasted its way to a new part of the galaxy, bringing a fresh batch of stars into our sky. The current constellations will have faded from view, even those that sit close to the pole like Polaris. Star Axis will have fallen into ruin by then, but even if not, the aperture at the top of the tunnel will frame blackness. The celestial sphere that once symbolised eternity will have revealed itself to be a slave to larger cycles, immense increments of time that are themselves glimmers in a grander scheme. After all, this universe has rhythms that make the sun’s entire existence look like the flash of a firefly. Some of them are known, like the life cycle of cosmic energy, from big bang to heat death. Others are mysterious, and could forever remain so.

This is the most perfect thing I’ve read in some time. The writing and the subject are—almost literally—timeless.

Star Axis is a profound meditation on the sky – Ross Andersen – Aeon

I experimented with polyphasic sleep a few years ago and from that I have retained the ability to fall asleep quickly pretty much anywhere. My best trick is to pretend to be in REM sleep:P Find a comfortable position to sleep in, close your eyes and squint slightly while looking upwards, basically trying to look at the bridge of your nose. This should not hurt at all.
Forbid all thoughts of words and music.
Look for patterns in the random noise of your eyelids and try to “follow” it. Once you start seeing complete images you’re under way to dreamland. It’s ok to suddenly realize that you’re doing it and thus waking yourself up a little. Try again. Just relax, think about nothing and watch the pretty pictures. Don’t get upset if it takes a while—just keep going. Using this technique I normally fall asleep in 2-7 minutes.
When you’re anxious about something, it’s really hard to stop thinking about it and it would be better to write it down, thinking it through before sleeping.

How Can I Fall Asleep Faster?

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thakate:

wnderlst:

Germany

Wow. Absolutely stunning work. 

How ridiculously perfect is this?

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(1) President Abraham Lincoln, who had depression
(2) Writer Virginia Woolf, who had bipolar disorder
(3) Artist Vincent Van Gogh, who had bipolar disorder
(4) Writer Sylvia Plath, who had depression
(5) Mathematician John Nash (from A Brilliant Mind), who had schizophrenia

Inspired by this post

Roger Ross Williams went to Uganda to interview Christian evangelicals who support (and encourage) the country’s new death penalty for homosexuality. When asked about his approach, Williams said he told the interviewees he just wanted to understand. Mind that the differences in opinion aren’t minor; these are people who believe that Williams himself should be imprisoned for his sexuality. 

We’d all do well to emulate Williams, to seek only to understand our ideological opposites, rather than condemn. 

(Source: http://media.mtvnservices.com/)

The secret life of a Batman figurine. 

Remember — until the mid-seventeenth century, most people in England were either slightly — or very — drunk all of the time. Drink London’s fetid river water at your own peril; most people wisely favoured watered-down ale or beer (“small beer”). The arrival of coffee, then, triggered a dawn of sobriety that laid the foundations for truly spectacular economic growth in the decades that followed as people thought clearly for the first time. The stock exchange, insurance industry, and auctioneering: all burst into life in 17th-century coffeehouses — in Jonathan’s, Lloyd’s, and Garraway’s — spawning the credit, security, and markets that facilitated the dramatic expansion of Britain’s network of global trade in Asia, Africa and America.

It’s hard to overstate how much I loved this little lesson on the history of coffeehouses: The Lost World of the London Coffeehouse

Introverts, in contrast, may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.

Susan Cain (via skeletales)

[Yup, that about sums me up.] (via wordpainting)

There is a language older by far and deeper than words. It is the language of bodies, of body on body, wind on snow, rain on trees, wave on stone. It is the language of dream, gesture, symbol, memory. We have forgotten this language. We do not even remember that it exists.

Derrick Jensen, from A Language Older Than Words.  (via modernhepburn)

Input/ Output

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2013, as every other year, was a year in which many good and many bad things happened. Things were created, and things were destroyed. Hopes were dashed, and hopes were lifted. Many breathed their last, and many breathed their first.

We all witnessed the spectrum of these happenings; they happened to all of us. The only real difference (excepting extreme circumstances) is how we responded.

The problems of the modern world are at once fewer and greater than those of ages past. Fewer because we’ve devised solutions for many of our troubles: our collective health is on the rise; disease on the decline. Access to education is broader than ever before. Journeys, today, take minutes or hours, where they once took days, weeks, or even months.

Some solutions have tackled less ambitious problems. We can order food without leaving our house, and it is delivered to our door. We can now boil water in a matter of minutes. Books, gateways to other worlds, can be had for a trivial amount, and we can see the face of another soul, from halfway around the world, by clicking a couple of buttons on a screen.

And yet. And yet. We criticize. We lament. We complain. We deride.

This derision is popping up more and more on the web.

I get this shit all day. Every day. pic.twitter.com/5WlYw8nhqi

— Lizz Winstead (@lizzwinstead) January 6, 2014

The above tweet is from Lizz Winstead, comedian and founder of The Daily Show. She’s an incredibly smart and funny woman, and I highly recommend you follow her. That said, she has a tendency I find odd, but not unusual. Like anyone with a public persona and a large following, she opens herself up to ridicule (and flat-out dickheadedness) every day. That’s not her fault, of course; it’s the nature of the medium. What I find odd is that Lizz so rarely retweets or in any way publicizes positive interactions on Twitter. Instead, she emphasizes only the mouth-breathing lunatics that try to pick a fight with her.

That tendency, from what I can tell, is not a Lizz tendency, but a human one. I’ve noticed the same behavior in others with large followings. Salmon Rushdie comes to mind, and a few others.

And I get it. This has happened to me, and I understand the compulsion to call these idiots out, to open their hatred to public ridicule. I understand, too, that the problem is not limited to the internet, but is a more underlying feature of human nature- we emphasize the negative far more than the positive. But if Thoreau was right, and the price of anything is the amount of life you exchange for something, Winstead is paying a high price for these trolls.

This phenomenon is also playing out across various media publishers. Mat Honan writes a controversial piece, and Mark Wilson calls bullshit. Biz Stone makes something, and Selena Larson explains why it sucks.

Again, I don’t think this is an anomaly; I think it’s one of the more pernicious aspects of human nature. It’s the same part of us that succumbs to gossip, or writes a snarky tweet to NBC after they cancelled Community, or criticizes someone else’s parenting ability.

It’s a way to make us feel superior.

That is the only thing that’s accomplished by criticism of this kind. The other kind of criticism—invited, constructive, helpful—is another thing entirely. It’s not only welcome, it’s necessary to a healthy relationship, to a functioning society. It lifts, it corrects, it inspires, it changes.

And that change is central to life. It’s not the exception, it’s the rule. Every organism, in fact, maintains a sense of constancy only through its openness to being modified by its environment, as David Barash recently explained:

Paradoxically, maintaining a state of apparent constancy (i.e., life) requires continual openness to change, in this case exchange with an organism’s environment. When that exchange ceases, so does life; although even then, every body continues to change, whether via decomposition, incorporation into another body, or incineration.

We regularly underestimate the relationship we have with our environment, with what we expose ourselves to, and what we expose others to. That relationship may, in fact, extend further than we ever thought possible. In the documentary film I Am, Rollin McCraty of Heartmath electronically links filmmaker Tom Shadyac with a small amount of yogurt, the composition of which is monitored for the duration of the connection. When Shadyac refers to (and consequently thinks about) things such as his lawyer, the actual composition of the yogurt changes to reflect Shadyac’s state of mind. It's not some abstract emotional impact we have on our environment, and consequently, others- we actuallly create physical changes in the people and things around us (perhaps that's why misery loves company, and why laughter is contagious).

The purest essence of what it means to live well is being conscious of both what we let in (to our minds, to our bodies, to our psyche) and what we emit (through facial expressions, status updates, deeds, work, and even attitude). And while we can control our consumption to a certain degree, we are not an effective filter. Try as we might, we still let in harmful things, and that’s not about to change. What can change, however, is the process by which we synthesize the input once it’s already inside of us. Just as a healthy person will better digest a meal than an unhealthy person, so a healthy mind will more effectively recognize and filter those thoughts, dreams, and emotions that compose our mental state at any given time.

That means that, though we can’t control the input to a great degree, we can control the output, which, in turn, affects the next input. When Lizz chooses to put more emphasis on the hateful backlash to her own thoughts, she recycles, albeit unwittingly, that hatred, telling the world that ignorance and hatred are welcome here; I will nourish it. And the cycle continues.

If all of this sounds complicated, thorny, even muddy, that’s because it is. There is no one great insight I can give, no one sentence I can write that will fully encompass the strength that emotional and mental muscles need to combat hatred, or ignorance, or resistance to change. It is, as they say, a process. It’s not knowledge that strengthens those muscles, it’s the very process by which knowledge is acquired. That process begins with the simple, deliberate intention to be more aware of our relationship to our environment, be it the birds overhead or the keyboards at our fingertips.