Rule of thumb: Confidence is not to be confused with competence.
Rule of thumb: the faster they tell you how good they are, the worse they really are.
Rule of thumb: the amount of verbal justification is proportional to the forthcoming errors and time repairing the errors.
Category: Self
- Theme: Self
The bravado subterfuge
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1–2 minutes - Theme: Self
A better revolution
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1–2 minutesThe problem: Revolutions use the voice of the people to replace one tyranny with another.
Rosa Luxembourg says the revolution is shaped by listening, not insisting. You must serve the revolution, not yourself, Lenin. - Theme: Self
To kill a symbol don’t fight it: trivialize it
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1–2 minutesThe true believer and the blasphemer share the power of the symbol: a reverent or desecrator both act from fervent belief.
While irreverence can be an antidote to weaponized piety, what truly kills the sacred is to make it abundantly commonplace, from whence it is trivialized into the secular.
Watch commerce parasitically affiliate with the sacred until the transcendent transforms to tchotchke. - Theme: Self
Our consciousness is managed by our body.
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1–2 minutesOur feelings spring forth as ideas from our consciousness. Yet, where and why do these arise?
There is a complicated interplay we casually neglect of how our body -an endocrine system of humors- both moderates and produces feeling: it both feeds notions to consciousness and works to dispel wayward ruminations. - Theme: Self
Coming to your senses
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1–2 minutesComing to your senses is literally waking up from thought.
To come back into your physicality is to escape your mind’s incessant ramblings - Theme: Self
Processing is not thinking, belief is not a function
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1–2 minutesA computer is a processing machine. Not a thinking machine.
It subordinates all things into processed information, anything unmeasurable becomes unimportant.
"Belief" is not a function, yet we now consider what you do (measurable action) to be the equivalent of what you believe (ideological stance).This linguistic supplantation through analogy -allowing processing to appear as thinking or belief to become simply a function- separates a complicated set of interwoven connections for simplistic measurables: provable feats aligning us to technology and away from humanity.
- Theme: Self
Distracted from enduring values by pleasure
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1–2 minutesWhen the impulse to purchase or sink into emotional distraction arise, attempt to pause.
The hedonic treadmill of pursuing pleasure means you must always be running faster, because pleasure and desire always requires more. Turning from pleasure, is there a more enduring (less transitory and consuming) goal you may pursue? - Theme: Self
Motivation is simply Avoiding Discomfort
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1–2 minutesWe are bombarded with the imperative mission to seek happiness, but from an evolutionary perspective we are motivated to avoid discomfort.
Anxiety, ambition, and desire are discomforts from which we act: we re-act. There is no “carrot and stick” of reward and punishment. Our only motivating force is avoidance, which is a response., and the challenge is to harness our response as responsibility.
Meanwhile, happiness seems to be a by-product of achievement or participation, not an end to be pursued unto itself.
Merging these notions: “dis-traction” (avoidance) towards happiness will fail to bring it, because you gain no “traction.”
- Theme: Self
Individuals are Unequal
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1–2 minutesKarl Marx, in 1875, critiques seeing workers as only workers, diminishing them through categorization and ignoring their diversity of human beings.
Contradictorily, to be “brought under an equal point of view” is a social form we apply to better measure and account for equality.
“… unequal individuals (and they would not be different individuals if they were not unequal) are measurable only by an equal standard insofar as they are brought under an equal point of view, are taken from one definite side only – for instance, in the present case, are regarded only as workers and nothing more is seen in them, everything else being ignored.”
- Theme: Self
Panic is a form of hubris
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1–2 minutesPanic (fear and irrationality) stems from a loss of control: the world does not operate as we anticipated.
Yuval Noah Harari says upheavals are much better met with bewilderment. At least bewilderment does not emanate from self-assured pride, but is more open to recognizing the fluctuating mystery of reality and our place within it.