Belly Button Lint

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Tag: order

  • Theme:

    Supporting the future self shapes you

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    1–2 minutes

    It is impossible to know what your future self will value.

    You will not know this stranger, the same way the younger version of you does not recognize the current you.

    The only actions you can take for this presumed valuable future self are generic goals, such as financial security, a modicum of free time, and meaningful relationships.

    From there, you work backward: find the closest path at hand to support your future. If we see our lives in this way, every decision is structural and expedient, yet will shape the interests and concerns (personality and character) of future you as much as practical stability will.

  • Theme:

    the appeal of certainty, the inoculation of the bizarre

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    1–2 minutes

    The cybernetic system approach (machine-like control) to shaping your world is predicated upon the appeal of certainty. In cybernetics, influences are cataloged and countered, inefficiencies blocked and reduced. This allows for toggling of controls to better predict and influence the future.

    Raised in controlled systems, we seek more certainty, which does the disservice of softening us to the intrusion of reality: the unexpected conundrum is devastating, and we have no resilience upon which to parry it.

    The ripples of this systematized way of thinking, arguably rejects reality and thus our resilience to unexpected conundrums, converting them to catastrophe.

    The opposite, perhaps the antidote, is a surreal fuel logic; for instance, the Hopi would not plaster a certain spot on the wall, so that the unseen, spiritual Otherworld, the shadow world could also have an unfinished piece of plaster on their house, which they could then plaster over, of course, this plaster would remain unseen, but allow the spirit world to complete the house.

    This ritual introduces a complex nonsense that cannot be controlled and instead is folding the bizarre, the insane, into the every day. In such a manner, it is an inoculation against the odd shock.

  • Theme:

    Stability Depends on Prediction

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    1–2 minutes

    If you know the past and the present, your chances of predicting the future are strong.

    However, when you don’t understand the past, and the present is chaotic, why would you -metaphorically- till your fields or build new things? Why make a long-term consistent effort?

    You may be equally well off speculating if no sense can be made of the world: it is all risk and chaos.

    Choosing to labor without high odds of success versus not laboring with an equal likelihood of success proves the creator insane to toil in times of upheaval.

    Some people reduce the world. Logically, their frivolity makes sense, yet the absurdity of the creator will be the ones building our future, even as the gambler leeches from productive men and machines.

    As well, there will be some who do neither: neither risk nor build, but remain frozen, perhaps intellectually dense and action sparse, abiding in the currents.

  • Theme:

    the immanent improvement impulse

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    1–2 minutes

    We have an internal compulsion that comes from the survival imperative: perpetual striving.


    Even periods of sloth end or become obsessive in as sophisticated, ordered, and avoidant compulsions.

    To order our life is a struggle: a persistent fight that burns our energy. Even when there is no witness, which means it is not only a social construct of achievement but an immanent (innate) means of relating to the world.

  • Theme:

    choosing replaces doing

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    1–2 minutes

    In our society, we don’t “do” things in a classical sense of taking action to “make something.”
    We “choose” things in order to become ourselves, we don’t “make” ourselves.

    We don’t discern, so much as decide and then have consumer regret. And then choose anew.

    {from Matthew Crawford}

  • Theme:

    pernicious pressures

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    1–2 minutes

    The pressures surrounding us (work, economics, social, commerce) attempt to “decode” and disintegrate us under the pretense of giving ourselves back to us.

    That is to say: you can’t find yourself by following the system’s logic (as it dissolves you).
    More clearly, you are already “you” without capitulating to pernicious pressures and duplicitous promises.

    More importantly, you already know what you are here to do (your purpose); you are looking to the system because you have not allowed yourself to embrace it.

  • Theme:

    Capitalist contradiction: conservative defense

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    1–2 minutes

    Capitalism is a revolutionary and destabilizing force.
    So why do conservatives defend it? It maintains a sameness (of inequality) that has become traditional.

    To maintain and stabilize power, destabilize everything else.

  • Theme:

    scapegoating requires denying reality

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    1–2 minutes

    When something doesn’t go right, we find somebody/something to pin it on.

    While unfair, condemning an external other provides two vital functions: blaming releases us of responsibility and our deep seated fear of being out of control now has an actionable target.

    Scapegoating is a "regulatory outlet" bleeding off rage by condemning others, which requires staying blind to reality to govern our emotions. All it requires is sacrificing others because of our weaknesses.

  • Theme:

    Confidence reversal

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    1–2 minutes

    There are moments when you are ill-prepared, relying on who you are to carry you through.

    At these moments, you are ill-prepared for attacks: off-balance and responding poorly

    A seeming loss in these moments is still a win: to remain whole without harming yourself or others is more inspiring than reactionary flailing.

  • Theme:

    standards and gauges

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    1–2 minutes

    Once a system has been established, there are "tolerances" that shape the energies and forms that exist within it.
    These normative parameters influence how we move through the world: slowly transforming and deforming under increments of utility and efficiency.
    Said another way, our pathologies are incrementally ratcheted into expressions that can be grasped, that is certain "images" or "normative outcomes" that operate with the most efficiency inside the system.

    These easy-to-grasp conceptual abstractions are recognizable forms -archetypes or stereotypes as well as inches and ounces- which reduce friction by universality: to get the results you desire quickly make it easy for people to grasp your "increment."