Belly Button Lint

Feeling Lint-y?

Category: Growth

  • Theme:

    Alien Invasion or Live in a 3rd World Country?

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    1–2 minutes

    You must choose.
    The privilege of determination says much: the global vs the local, novelty or poverty?
    (from Beau Smith)

  • Theme:

    Be Less Wrong

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    1–2 minutes

    Even when you are right, you aren’t. We always need more information or consideration.
    Tomorrow, science or philosophy will have a better answer, a novel approach to crack this thorny impasse. Or tomorrow, we will know how we should have responded in that confrontation. But today, we must move forward knowing every step we take is wrong.

    We attempt to make good decisions, but when information fails we are left making choices with instincts shaped by circumstances, or we crowdsource our ethics, or we choose an incomplete data set and make a leap.

    They are all wrong, but some processes of choice have a predictive capacity allowing them to foresee conflict and avoid confusion for better outcomes.
    The goal is not to be correct but to establish a framework of checks and balances to be less wrong.

  • Theme:

    Attempting solidarity, despite architectural divisiveness

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    1–2 minutes

    The authority is in the theatrics of the architecture.

    At the bank, hospital, DMV, receptionist, or supermarket, we are channeled and herded by flimsy partitions, confronted at the moment of interaction by a translucent plexi shield.

    When attempting communication, notice we bow our mouths toward the small money passage. In this posture of obeisance, we petition, propelling our very breath as an envoy of intent.

    Despite the pervasive systemic manipulations, we need our humanity to pass through and compel the empathy that reintegrates the divided into solidarity.

  • Theme:

    not working is work

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    1–2 minutes

    There was a time (before cell phones) when you could sit for 10 minutes doing nothing. Today we convert all time to use: your commute is time to learn, your evening is consuming entertainment to enable communal discourse tomorrow, and your vacation doubles as social media production.
    Similarly, meditating (formally doing nothing) is now a practice requiring discipline: your 10 minutes is sanctioned work for mental health, requiring apps and guides to mitigate your drive to spring into action consuming or producing.

  • Theme:

    Watch a Sunset

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    1–2 minutes

    Watch a sunset. Plan on it and do it. You will thank yourself.

  • Theme:

    Mexico or Canada?

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    1–2 minutes

    You must choose: European progressive values and resultant taxes (social safety and education) or Wild West free market chaos, corruption, and cheap living (with lagging infrastructure and abundant labor).
    Check your political philosophy against the countries that embody it: is this really what you want?

  • Theme:

    Accomplishment Treadmill

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    1–2 minutes

    The compulsion to achieve goals is a self-satisfaction loop.

    Achievement is tangible agency and verifiable proof that your will is manifesting change in the world. And yet, the infatuation with achievement can replace the reason to achieve.

    Once we acquiesce to the “utilitarian treadmill” we create measurable tasks for more manageable, rapid fulfillment, displacing and neglecting the more long-term emotional or relational goals that would make a truly satisfying life.

    (Concepts: Goodhart’s law + reverse hedonic treadmill + memento mori)

  • Theme:

    The vacation void

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    1–2 minutes

    Vacation’s premise of recouperative rest and respite has become work: we manically “add value” to our expensive “free time”.

    We cram novel experiences (and novel foods) into the vacuity we gave to ourselves, attempting to fill it while neglecting to consider that floating in a vacuum, untethered and unencumbered, would be the ultimate novelty.

  • Theme:

    Sharp ideas cut better

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    1–2 minutes

    The development of ideas is the history of the world. Arguing is the sharpening stone, scraping ideas across ideas and discarding irritating protruding shards to the floor of history.

    The benefit is a hardened, razor-sharp idea, perfect for poking someone or severing them a twain. Perfect for domination.

  • Theme:

    Disruption through embodied inversion

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    1–2 minutes

    When you’re fed up and want to break the system, introduce and perform what is lacking.
    Our current capital-driven system praises intelligence and polite compromise.
    To counter it, you can manifest an inversion tactic that embodies disenfranchised values (for instance) by effectuating emotional irrationalities and unwavering integrity.