Belly Button Lint

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Category: Growth

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    law over social pressure

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    1–2 minutes

    The two primary ways of societal control are law and social pressure.

    Social pressure functions as moral norms, restricting behavior by conformity or compliance for inclusion.

    Generally, norms are better for governance than laws, which must be parsed and ponderously enforced in cold, bureaucratic processes. However, public outcry can overcome sober traditions or common sense wisdom, shifting into hysterical punishment through exclusion and reputational attacks as mob mentality infects once sane citizens.

    This is when the law’s ponderous methodology performs its role: to slow down the fickle mob, doling out justice at a glacial pace.

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    Knowledge vs. truth as failure

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    1–2 minutes

    – often, when we search for knowledge, we are searching for the truth, and when we search for the truth, some people are searching for certainty, the Karl Popper warns us seeking truth is a process of failures disproving our assumptions.

    In our quest for knowledge, we often seek truth, yet this search can morph into a pursuit of certainty for some.

    Karl Popper cautions against viewing "truth" as a straightforward path. He emphasizes that truth is inherently a process of iterative failures, where success lies in disproving our assumptions rather than confirming them.

    This perspective challenges the conventional notion of knowledge acquisition, urging us to embrace complexity and uncertainty as a process toward truth.

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    To be less-than-human

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    1–2 minutes

    Fascinatingly, having no extremes (rebellions) seems less-than-human.

    Being so ideally normalized that you exist without struggle or pathos is an automata parody of humanity, for there is no inner struggle, merely external alignment, a pastiche of the human condition, and yet precisely what many struggle towards. Bland contentment.

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    Stuckness

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    1–2 minutes

    You learn more from stripping the screw than from a straightforward extraction.

    When we can apply our theory or plan and things just work, we don’t really consider what we are doing. Yet when something breaks, reality intrudes, and your plans vanish, you have become stuck.

    The impulse is to get back on track, often with force or money.

    Only after pausing, dropping your plans, and re-encountering reality at its most fundamental aspect do you become open: you become unstuck, which allows us to solve the problem.

    from Robert M. Pirsig’s “Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance“

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    Mystical reversal: empirical empowerment

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    1–2 minutes

    A supernatural realm persists, enacting odd changes while remaining veiled from comprehension. This mysterious realm seems to serve as the underlying foundation of the palpable, natural world we inhabit. With careful attunement and rituals, we can align with the mystery, predicting and anticipating its caprice.

    While embracing empiricism or materialism might seem to disregard this mystical dimension it is not at odds with it, rather it reverses our relationship: by empowering the physical we induce change on our terms for tangible profit or benefit attempting to reduce dependence on "magical" influence.

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    choking on media

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    1–2 minutes

    All forms of new media incorporate old media. (Marshal McLuhan) From the oral tradition to writing, movies, and the Internet, and now to algorithmic search engines that rank an index of personal preference.

    As more media is incorporated, the old is subsumed into the new form: theater may derive from oral tradition and writing, but you did not read or speak while watching it, and yet today, television is watched in tandem with streaming video gamers while talked over and casually reading closed captions.

    As media progresses from fixed entertainment into a distended flood from the index of self, all prioritized by rank, AI will increasingly mold the new media to the individual’s taste. This promotes a gothically incestuous spiraling inward, where algorithmic determination forms an ever-reducing, ever more specifically shallow taste loop.

    As the new form engulfs us and incorporates us, will content be choked out?

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    Swimming in Paradigms

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    1–2 minutes

    We understand the world through epic themes that encapsulate us: epistemes, ideologies, and paradigms are the water in which we swim.

    Most of us are only vaguely aware of the contradictions and motivations that mobilize us, but we are the support system that feeds and maintains the framework. The better we grasp its trajectory, the more efficiently we can empower it through enhancing its programatization or destroying it by posing alternatives.

    Counterintuitively, the systems we serve tend to create impersonal claims for their self-perpetuation instead of our service. We gladly serve, abide, and are contentedly entrapped, furthering our servitude, which provides us a sense of directed agency, empowerment, or survival as it simultaneously endangers us.

    Yet, I doubt it can be avoided: to evade capture by these frameworks would require a complete non-engagement, but to move in the world requires framing. Escaping one of Plato’s caves only creates another, and jumping from one of Magritte’s painted canvases lands you in another.

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    Remote Work: Deleting the third Place

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    1–2 minutes

    The problem with remote work is that it gives us what we want but fails to give us what we need.

    Most people understandably say they want to be away from pestering oversight and politics, be more productive with less hassle, and be allowed some personal indulgences.

    Yet, in collapsing the workplace into the home, we tend to delete the excuse for the “third place,” that social space of regularity between work and home. This additional location provided a social camaraderie without necessity or responsibility. It offered the comfort and novelty missing from work and home, which we didn’t know we needed.

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    Workplace idiocy

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    1–2 minutes

    In the workplace, the common-sense logic of working hard, not taking any vacation days, and not complaining about anything does not get you promoted.

    Instead, consider that you must be just polarizing enough to be noticed (and possibly disliked) by some leaders in order to be championed by one leader. Once this Executive goes to bat for you (defends you), they must not back down in the competitive arena of high-power egos. The champion must then fight for your promotion to further validate his/her stance.

    Fighting for a stable, hyper-productive wallflower is seldom heard of.

    Your best bet is to be a hard-driving idiot: look like you are passionately working hard, saying “yes” to everything, and hurting yourself. Solve problems that don’t exist. Get others to help your silly crusades. This creates a much better emotional spectacle than methodical, logical progress, with the bonus of involving others which looks like leadership.

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    Politics Eating Your Productive Time

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    1–2 minutes

    In the office,, social time is more productive than producing.

    Consider that as you build loyalty and practice likeability, you will not only get into less trouble for being non-productive as you “form” ad-hoc committees for “feedback”, but the most likely way to elevate your career is moving into management, not being more efficient, timely, or productive. Look at your current management.

    Equally sardonically, if you want to achieve anything in life, quit paying attention to politics outside the office, as they occupy your free time and can get you into trouble at work.

    On a deeper level, political engagement accelerates into crisises that replicate and consume humans. Not to advocate for disenfranchisement, but prioritize something that can benefit you longterm, a produtive life, instead of allowing the politics of the moment as a placebo for living.