Reality is what pushes back against your agency: the easier it is, the more you belong to someone else.
Tag: productivity
- Theme: Growth
Learning: Dragons or Rockets
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1–2 minutesIs philosophical learning an antiquated folly? Imagine Walter Benjamin or Einstein as Don Quixote, insanely living a noble lie in a brutal world.
Consider the outcomes: Benjamin, a notoriously eclectic reader and philosopher, committed suicide fleeing the Third Reich. Einstein’s learning aided him in escaping by making him valuable to the Allies.
The key difference (for this supposition) is the practical use of Einstein’s mind rather than his philosophical considerations. Practical conversion (utility) may save you in the short-term to continue your musing, while primarily convoluted aesthetic or theological discourse tends to create a tragically celebrated martyr.
However, practical considerations make for a blunt human, and all grand creative endeavors and ideals stem from the philosophical “what if” instead of the sensible “what now.” The folly is to cling to the grand imagining (dream) rather than supplement reality with it. Yet, the fantastic becomes its own inverted form of survival, and it is infinitely more appealing to fight dragons than to design rockets.
- Theme: Growth
Priorities as a marketplace
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1–2 minutesNotice that you can respond immediately, altering your plans, when a priority calls: be a person, value, or object. It is instinctual to jump into action without pondering emotional weight when a pet or friend is in distress or when a glass breaks.
However, when you have time to consider your priorities, they become a marketplace of bidding values linked to emotional states: over time, pleasure beats out responsibility, or guilt wins out over comfort and transforms into duty.The trick, as usual, is balancing between the ‘should’ and ‘must,’ the personal welfare and communal bond.
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– - Theme: Self
Are you micromanaged or monitored?
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1–2 minutesMonitoring and micromanaging goes both ways: the manager’s lack of trust may not be a pathological control issue as much as a means of communication.
If they are insecure, over-communication can be the answer to building trust. Once established, they may cease to interfere and allow growth, perhaps by shifting their focus to a new battleground.
- Theme: Growth
Motivation: The why
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1–2 minutesAnyone, any team, can perform a task. But to do it well repeatedly, they must care, and that comes from belief.
If the leader doesn’t believe in or effectively communicate the strategy, the project will fail, no matter how talented the people.
You must know and believe your “why” to motivate and lead.
from Jocko Willink and Leif Babin, Extreme Ownership
- Theme: Systems
Technological efficiency paradox
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1–2 minutesTechnology creates leisure by streamlining tasks, yet capitalism often repurposes this newfound time as an opportunity for more work, thereby increasing productivity and profit.
This cycle perpetuates an unsustainable drive for efficiency, usually at the cost of genuine leisure. Robots, of course, don’t need leisure, so as we rush forward we either become robots or are displaced by them.
The system logic’s embedded paradoxes imply its collapse, and yet we keep innovating our own survival.
- Theme: Culture
impossibility of stopping
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1–2 minutesWe are the most potent, rapacious animal: we cannot be stopped, even by ourselves.
Disciplined behavior will not suffice, so we are left with two solutions: 1) creating a parent for ourselves, such as God or AI, or 2) creating a new territory into which our drives can expand, such as space or virtual worlds.
- Theme: Growth
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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– - Theme: Self
Computation as position mapping
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1–2 minutesConsider all computations as mapping.
The first computer was developed for astronomy, the Antikythera Mechanism. The 2,000 year old device mapped coordinates to find our position amongst the planets.
Our capacity to cognate is primarily spatial orientation manipulation, and memory derives from mapping. Instead of thinking of computer indexing as static tables, we can see all computations as relative positioning.
Fascinatingly, over time, we inverted the early use of an external positional matrix into a fluctuating internal, personal mapping. (Psychoanalysis + Neurology + Technology) While we will likely never pinpoint the “self” we have become adept at predictive behavior: mapping a person over time.
- Theme: Growth
Swimming in Paradigms
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1–2 minutesWe 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.