It’s very stressful to be confronted with questions and claims about culture, physics, politics, psychology, health, economics, history, ethics, aesthetics, and philosophy and feel the need to have a clear answer. Especially when answers immediately get interpreted as sides and you’ll get lumped in with some tribal collective blob and be associated with whatever bundle of biases they may have, real or imagined. It’s like behind every possibility lurks a mob shouting, “Are you with us or against us?!”
Tag: media
Don’t Panic: The Retail Apocalypse Isn’t Disaster, It’s Progress
Nearly 30 years after it became widely publicly accessible, the Internet is in the final stages of killing off physical retail as we once knew it. But it’s not killing the economy.
When Will the Media Admit …
Some wishful thinker the other day, on Facebook, wondered in a post “When will the media admit … [blah blah blah]?” The answer is … NEVER. “The media” is not a sentient being. In fact, the media can be relied upon to go for the lowest common denominator.
Childhood Play and Independence Are Disappearing; Let Grow Seeks to Change That
Many of us are old enough to remember how childhood used to be. Our afternoons were spent outside playing with the neighborhood kids—no adults or cell phones in sight. Sometimes we got hurt, with occasional scraped knees or hurt egos, but we worked it out. We always knew we could go home. We had paper routes, mowed lawns, ran errands, and babysat at ages much earlier than we allow our own kids. What happened to childhood in just a generation that now prompts neighbors to call the police when they see an eight-year-old walking her dog?
Starting the Day on My Own Terms
I don’t have a morning routine. Sometimes I experiment with one, other times I alter my mornings based on other larger goals. In some phases of life, I’ve slept in ’till eight or nine. In others I’ve gotten up at five or six. Sometimes I do both from day to day. I’ve done email first…
Does Ideological Dystopia Await Us?
Imagine a world in which the great majority has no respect for facts or for truth of any sort, where ideological convictions rule almost everyone’s understanding of the world, where truth has become an endangered rhetorical species on the brink of extinction. In such a world, facts would still exist, of course, and true propositions would still stand in stark contradiction of false ones, but hardly anyone would care.
One Institution at a Time
I’m not sure when I stopped reading newspapers, but they fell out of my favor when I was a freshman in college. My professor for Advanced Composition used the local papers in every class to present to us examples of horrendously poor writing.
Me and Goals Have a Love Hate Thing
I like really short term goals (“publish a blog post today”), and I like really long term goals (make the world freer when I leave it than it was when I entered). I don’t like mid-term goals. They feel constraining, and unnatural. Why aim for a made-up halfway target instead of just aiming for the true, big giant end target?
Meditating in the Middle of Chaos
Chaos is all around us, and it can stress us out. It causes anxiety, depression, frustration, anger, procrastination, constant distraction, and the seeking of comforts like social media, food, shopping, games and more. But what if we didn’t need to run to comfort or fear the chaos?
Vast Mind: 3 Ways to Open Beyond the Self-Concern of Our Small Mind
Let’s imagine that there’s someone whose family member has said something insulting to them. They immediately get caught up in small mind, thinking about how they don’t deserve to be treated this way, that they’re a good person and that this person is always being inconsiderate. They are worried about themselves, and their world is very small and constricted. What if instead, this person dropped their self-concern, and opened their awareness to something wider than themselves?