constrained creativity

just finished episode #1701 of show about race titled will you be my black friend?. gotta be one of the episodes that has gotten me the most riled up. two thoughts are lingering with me from last night.

we need to change the calculus on oppression for oppressors

one of the key mechanisms oppression is putting the burden of progress on the oppressed group. poc having to teach white people that what they're doing is supremacist. women having to teach men that their ways of talking, thinking, and being are sexist. trans people having to tell cis-folks that their ways of being are transphobic. and on and on.

as a result, it seems that oppressed folks and writers have avowed to not be the teachers of their oppressors. i am 100% on board with that. but that leaves a very obvious logical hole (one which i have not figured out how to fill, but i'm working on it). if it's not in the oppressor's obvious interest to end oppression and it's not up to oppressed people to teach their oppressors that they're being oppressive, but it seems that oppression benefits the oppressors greatly, why would oppressors ever do the work it takes to end their own oppression?

i think at least part of the solution is in a statement someone made during the show: "we have to change the calculus on oppression for oppressors."

it has always bothered me (and i've written about it before somewhere) that oppression is most often framed as hurting one group and benefitting another. i think shifting this frame is a key part of ending oppression. some people do this, but i think we have to make it even clearer that oppression hurts oppressors as much as (if not more than?) the oppressed.*

i've only ever come up with what i think are weak examples, but we need way more. things i've heard of to date in the sexism frame:

toxic masculinity results not only in gun violence, but in an incredibly high rate of suicide for men. case in point: men are dying because they can’t talk

men lose out economically because their identity prevents them from making good economic decisions. case in point: why men don’t want the jobs done mostly by women

conventional western definitions of masculinity prevent men from loving and being loved in ways that they themselves want (bell hooks, all about love)

we need more.

white feelings & reality

another part was this interchange where tanner basically posited that white feelings need to be tended to in order to end oppression. one discussant mentioned quoted someone who believed that most discussions about racism are racist because they center white feelings. i feel that, for sure.

but my friend grant quoted this line in his master's thesis:

"We're an empire now, and when we act, we create reality." - Stephen Duncombe, Dream: Re-imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy

as much as i don't want to center white feelings, it is obvious to me that white feelings create reality. we are an empire and when the people making the decisions up top have feelings, they reverberate. across the entire fucking planet. the president elect is donald trump and a single tweet from him when he was in his feelings almost triggered a nuclear arms race. in fact, it might have and we just don't know it yet.

now, i'm not saying that poc are responsible for managing white feelings. i think there are enough accomplice white folks who can do this work at this point, but the question stands. will white supremacy go away as long as white feelings still revert to wanting to be on top?

earlier this week i completed my third personal reflection retreat. the roadmap for it is over here so i'm not gonna rehash that in this post. this post is just general thoughts, what went well, and what i think would make it better next year.

general thoughts

i love doing this. why don't they teach people to do stuff like this in school or religion or other cultural institutions? maybe they do and i missed it. anyway, having three (mostly) offline days to look back and plan for the year just felt really good.

as always, i was surprised at how much happens in a calendar year. the process of building my 52 weekly summaries highlights from my calendar just how much i did and time i spent. i always see stuff that i forgot happened and i'm continually reminded about the first thing on gretchen rubin's habit manifesto: what you do regularly matters more than what you do once in a while.

this might sound corny, but i feel like a new person with an entirely new set of possibilities after reviewing what happened last year. i think this is because i had no idea what was possible in 2016 when i did my jan 2016 retreat. and then looking back on the year from now it’s like... well if that’s what happened based on what i thought would happen, who knows what could happen this year?

what went well (+s)

free housing (was house-sitting for friends in central square)

prepping agenda beforehand

had company (spencer) visiting from the uk which both helped keep me focused and also made for good breaks

finalizing a draft of my infinite growth vision statement supported my planning for 2017 so much; it’s so crazy that we walk around the world without compasses

marking a whole day to do project launch prep work was great

what could've been better (∆s)

i didn't disconnect from my cell phone; this cost me lots of focus

didn't get to everything

every year i've felt like i want more time and this year was the same; next year (assuming i make it that far) i'll do four days

the other day i checked my friend nene's blog and saw that she had shared this audio interview piece: http://geo.coop/story/poker-chips-and-friendships-babysitting-co-op

i listened to it and was starstruck. i entered grad school with a huge level of excitement about "the new(/sharing/collaborative/solidarity) economy" and have since beent turned off from it as it is increasingly captured by "the old economy" (see jason spicer's piece on why the sharing economy isn't really sharing). this piece reminded me of why i was interested in the alternative economy in the first place.

quick summary in case you don't listen to the piece: a small group (12-15 i think?) of families created and ran a babysitting co-op that used poker chips as currency. when you needed babysitting, you gave chips and when you babysat you earned chips. there were were 15, 30, and 60 minute chips.

now, first of all, this lines up critically with a scale of a project that makes sense. wendell berry talks a lot about the proper scale of community. communities that are too large simply don't function the same, largely because people become unknown to each other. it's much easier to have a functioning economy when you know the people you're connected to in the system. one of the problems with capitalism is that in its search for profits, it seeks increased scale. this means that it's impossible to know everyone to whom you're economically connected. since all of our economic decisions impact each other, it's important to be able to see those impacts. economic systems that are too large make it easy to miss the human consequences of our decisions.

i could go on, but the point i wanted to land on were the following two insights. these are snippets from the transcribed audio:

Josh (interviewer): What you said just there was pretty interesting about how this [...] functioned not only as a system for making sure people had adequate babysitting when they needed it, but maybe also to make sure that couples were getting out and having enough time for themselves that maybe they wouldn’t have been forced to do if they weren’t part of the co-op. Claudia (interviewee): That’s true. That’s right. And I think they forget that they need to do that. You know, you’d find ways to do things without spending money, but just getting away and having some time as a couple together was important. And you forget that sometimes in your busy life. So yeah, it was a way to say, “Hey! you guys need to go, we’ll take your kids. I need chips, you got chips.” Yeah, that happened"when some people had too many chips we made them go out more so we could babysit their kids and get their chips. it ended up creating a system of checks and balances against hoarding. this probably helped some people's relationships.

Josh: So when you took care of somebody else’s kids for an hour they would give you the relevant amount of poker chips for that, and then you could use those poker chips to spend to get babysitting for your own kids? Claudia: That’s right. And the nicest thing about it was you know if you just did it amongst friends with no poker chips or you just, say, had one friend or something, you always felt obligated to that one person, where this way you only felt obligated to the group. So you didn’t have to feel like just because you babysat for Joe and Sue’s kid that they had to babysit back for you. That wasn’t the way it worked. You could call anybody. And you might have kids that you especially liked to take care of, and then you might have a couple that you preferred to take care of your kids. And it didn’t matter, nobody’s feelings were hurt. All you did was, you know, you were working with the group.

how fucking cool is that? this is the scale of economy i'm interested in. these types of things are what we need more imagination around and examples of. gotta get on that.

where and with whom i grew up is a tough thing for me. both of my parents grew up pretty poor. i have no shame about that and i don't think they do either (though i could be wrong; i should ask). but it seemed clear to me growing up that they made every effort they could to put my brother and i on fast tracks to success. we lived in middle-class neighborhoods and even owned a pretty large 3- or 4-bedroom house near the end of my high school days. i still remember our living room being large enough that i could play hacky sack with a friend with no problem.

all that to say, i grew up in pretty white neighborhoods with well resourced, "good schools." i was often one or two or three black students in my class or grade level. i read a lot, was good at math, did martial arts, and played violin and trombone. i was little and a nerd.

i say all this to say, i didn't really fit in. i was a floater (as are many of the people i associate with now, interesting trend...). i had friends at all the lunch tables because i didn't really feel that comfortable identifying with any single group all the time. i was too white for most of the black kids ("well-spoken," "smart," the usual coded supremacist language targeted at nonwhite young people to make them realize that they can't be whatever they are AND things characterists that belong to white people), too little for the sports kids (tae kwon do doesn't count as a real sport), and too nerdy for the cool kids (why did i make such a point of reading all the books on our classroom reading lists?).

i can look at all this stuff now through an oppression analysis and it all makes sense. but those early years of developing a strong relationship with my family and physical home didn't really happen for me. we also didn't visit my parent's families that often. maybe a couple of times a year and i remember not having fun most of the time (most of my extended family still lives around where my parents grew up).

it’s also really hard to be home for me because my dad is a pastor and the black church is still mostly homophobic. case in point: this happened literally days ago: kim burrell goes on a pulpit tirade against homosexuality.

as a result, i have very weak ties to physical home and family and left florida as soon as possible (freshman year of college). i shipped off to boston, oh oh oh...

but now, largely as a result of my deepening analysis, i know that i need to connect to my family and my history/past. my work through infinite growth has also reminded me that family can be a mutually beneficial resource if you put the work in. i didn't do that when i was young, but it's never too late.

anyways, all of this is a lead up to say that when i went home for this past winter break, i heard some things from my dad and aunt and grandma that remind me that who i am is shaped by people in my family, even if i'm unaware of it.

examples:

i whistle a lot (and pretty well). when whistling around my dad's house, he said, "wow boy, you whistle just like your grandma ruth. she loved to whistle." i never wished my grandma was still alive more than that moment. i wonder if i got that from her during the days we spent with her when i was young.

i love eating double-stuf oreos before bed. one night before bed while standing in the kitchen, i watched my dad pull down a package of golden oreos and dunk some in water (he's lactose-intolerant) before bed.

i stay busy and i travel a lot. mama brown (my play grandma) said on the phone to me, "dang you and yo daddy are just alike. can't nobody hold y'all down."

i didn't drink til i was 21 but now i drink maybe 4 drinks a week. i had forgotten this (even though it shaped why i didn't drink til i was 21), but my dad has two siblings who died in alcohol-related incidents. the more brutal of the two cases was my uncle. he was drunk one night, picked a bar fight with the wrong people, was followed out of the bar by them, and then beaten up and thrown onto some railroad tracks to be hit by a train. one of my dad's other brothers had to i.d. the body and hasn't really been the same since.

so yea. family and home are tough for me, but i think i need to change that. when and how quickly i don't know, but i'll figure that out as it goes.

ps - this is the most public i've been about this ever. i hope it doesn't blow up in my face or backfire somehow. i also didn't really go back and edit this one at all (need to get going to work!). hopefully it's coherent. or not. whatever. done better than perfect.

near the middle of this episode, the two interviewees and krista are talking through why anger is so bad. 

"I think, physically as well as emotionally, we instinctively — I can certainly speak for myself in this — recoil from the reality of feeling vulnerable or afraid, right? And so we layer — I mean, anger gets layered on top of that because it feels like a more powerful response. But then we stop being able to tell the difference ourselves, right? You stop knowing, “I’m scared.” You say, “I’m angry.”i think the way krista said it is dead on. anger that isn't dealt with properly masks our other emotions. anger often makes us unable to see what we're actually feeling. our anger can hide something more fundamental like fear or confusion." - krista tippet, on being: meeting our enemies and our suffering (with sharon salzberg and robert thurman)

anger is a natural response; maybe an outdated evolutionary one, but natural nonetheless. sharon salzberg mentioned just a little earlier that anger does have use. it's a strong reaction and, if harnessed, can be used very productively. audre lorde's essay on the uses of anger is a great thought piece for that.

but in today's world, what i'm wondering is about how to deal with anger in the day to day. somewhere later in the episode, one of the three offers mindfulness as a solution to mindless anger. mindfulness can help us slow down enough to identify exactly what we're feeling and why. anger tends to not be spontaneous so being mindful creates the ability to slow down enough to identify the cause of the anger. then we can respond to the real issue instead of the anger and maybe even find a way to harness that hot heat of anger that lorde discusses and use it as an engine for productive action.

"And so I go to Augustine’s concept of “disordered loves” which is we all love a lot of things, and we all know some loves are higher than others. Our love of truth should be higher than our love of money, but because of some screw-up in our nature, we get our loves out of order all the time. So if a friend blabs to you a secret and you tell it at a dinner party, you’re putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship, and that’s a sin. And I think, in this world, which doesn’t like to peer darkly into brokenness, it’s easier to swallow the concept of two positive things that are out of order." — david brooks, on being: sinfulness, hopefulness, and the possibility of politics

unsurprisingly (because i love st. augustine and was once torn between an augustinian and franciscan monk), i love this idea of "disordered loves." i grew up in a religious household and the idea of sin was everywhere. but because of how the american progressives (older white people and younger poc & white people alike) have, by and large, rejected religion, sin isn't really a useful construct.

however, disordered love seems very useful. it's a concept that helps explain why things are broken. examples brooks gave: love for money over love for people. love of popularity over love of friendship. another one i see often is love of comfort over love of planet.

this concept is easier to understand in our society because we struggle to think of things we like as bad. it makes us feel bad. and, unfortunately, feeling bad is a trigger for shutdown of engagement for most of us. of course, that is a problem all its own that needs change, but let's take it as a given for now.

if "putting our loves in order" is a useful frame for making things better, i'm into it. i really like that idea. it even allows for tough love as a mechanism for helping each other put our loves in better order. when we allow tough love or "fierce compassion" as buddhists might say (mentioned by robert thurman in the on being episode called meeting our enemies and our suffering), we get new opportunities for engagement. loving fiercely (in that cornell west "just is what love looks like in public" sort of way) gives us new ways of bringing different people into our work. because as a call to action, who  doesn't want to love more?

and this isn't the watered down version of love fed to us by destructive media sources. this is the type of love that makes us understand and hold each other as we open our eyes and have our world views shattered. this is the type of love that makes us put some skin in the game for each other. this is the type of love that makes us really understand that our liberation is bound up with people different from us.

maybe that'll be my frame for 2017: getting these loves in order...

once again, an app that i heard about, started to use, and fell in love with has sold out to a larger, older entity. simple, which used to be a super slick mobile-only banking service, was bought by bbva compass: fluff piece #1 (which mentions “new features” that were announced almost a month earlier) fluff faq. in the process, they've lost the spark that set them apart for me.

while masking the sale in vague, positively-spun language, there were several missteps that have cost them my business.

downgrade in reporting

a huge part of the reason i switched to simple was because of its beautiful data dashboard.

i was previously using mint with my bank of america account. it wasn't terrible, but it was more of a hassle than i wanted. simple seemed to solve the budgeting and banking problem at once, all with beautiful web and phone interfaces. the new dashboard is not only worse, but it's even lower functionality than mint.

not only can i not edit transactions from the new dashboard, the categorization is extremely limited. i have to toggle between 'list' and 'graph' to see data within a category (the old dashboard handled that beautifully) and a bunch of the categorization is wrong. total fucking bullshit.

partial transfer of transaction data.

related to #1, i really loved simple because it held all my data without needing a separate tool. despite language in their transfer documents saying that my transaction history would be intact, it's not. it seems only my income data has transferred; none of my spending numbers seem to appear. how the hell am i supposed to know if i was on target with my budget goals if all i can see is my income?

other feature downgrades

the search functionality and hyperlinked nature of the old dashboard made it super simple to find miscategorized or mislabeled transactions. now almost nothing is hyperlinked and i can't edit individual or group transactions easily. the overall ui has also gotten clunkier and sharper with less functionality in many places. menus that used to be simple are now split into multiple locations on the page, making it hard to see what i need simultaneously. the search bars used to auto-fill and now they don't. and when searching, some the filters that are applied don't even show up. i can't see what my searches are being filtered by nor can i clear them without resetting the whole window. 

so much bullshit. this happens way too often. maybe this is why people stop being interested in new things. i had put my trust in a thing i thought was awesome and that trust has been broken.

this year has seen two deaths in favorite tools of mine. first sunrise, my favorite calendar app, was slowly but brutally dismembered by microsoft. now simple seems to be on the same pathway. with sunrise, they spent lots of time assuring us (the user base) that things were going to stay just as awesome as ever. within months, they announced that weren't going to be doing updates but the service would still be usable. within another few months, they were explaining how the service would be discontinued and "embedded" into microsoft. i'm guessing simple is going to follow a similar, if not identical pathway.

i just wish that the goal of starting something new wasn't to sell it off for big money. this is how capitalism and greed seem to ruin everything. maybe the team that started simple wasn't interested in selling eventually. maybe they were. if they weren't, maybe the people who joined the company over time as it grew were slowly shifting it towards the capitalistic center-of-gravity of the business world. the end result looks like it'll be the same: slow downgrading of services/features to the malaise that marks the old guard's tools and then eventual destruction.

and the destruction is a positive feedback loop trigger by the sale itself. i can already see it happen so i'm pulling my money out. and i will certainly stop recommending it as a good tool to start using. now it offers mediocre tools and basic functionality that other people do much better.

as simple, which marketed itself towards people outside of the banking mainstream (in simple & sunrise cases, the tech-millenial crowd) becomes increasingly mainstream, the early adopters move on. this will leave simple's new corporate parents with a simple financially-measured decision. is this part of our company worth the cost it requires to keep operating? eventually the answer will be no and they will pull the plug (again, i'm guessing here).

to be clear, i'm pretty angry at the loss of my data and sad about the startup world. there has got to be a new normal. if new things just continue to get absorbed into the old power structures, we're never gonna get out of this thing alive.

ps - i get that this is tiny little problem in the scheme of people being oppressed. but if the tech community bills itself as solving problems and yet is continually absorbed by the world that created those problems, it’s actually all a farce. that’s why this is interesting to me.

some person, podcast, or hyperlink in an article told me to listen to this graduation speech by neil gaiman so i did. it was pretty great and this chunk felt pretty relevant to me and also to the work i want to do in the world. 

"…make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do.

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that's not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we've sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you're walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That's the moment you may be starting to get it right.

The things I've done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about until the end of time. They always had that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea.

I still don't. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work?

And sometimes the things I did really didn't work. There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted. Some of them never even left the house. But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that worked." — neil gaiman

at first, my takeaways were personal:

no one else has my voice, mind, story, vision, or experiences. that means that there actually are things that only i can produce.

starting out copying is fine, normal even. we find our own voices by copying others. like, literally that's how we learn to speak. so the fact that it's the same in terms of creating work is actually unsurprising; maybe even obvious.

just put out work. in hindsight, people will call it good, bad, whatever. but people can only call it something if it’s out there. 

this line: “...Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family, who attended Universities, were cured of long ago.”

then i started to connect that first point to the systemic. when i think about the fundamental ways we need to shift our thinking about work, it seems increasingly clear to me that individuality is the solution. automation and overconsumption (both of which are driven by blind capitalism) will destroy us if we don't get out of these crazy hedonistic cycles.

by recognizing that my experiences create a unique vantage point, it's clear that there is work only i can produce. then, if i create or find for myself systems that support my livelihood while also allowing me to do the work that only i can do, i will never be made obsolete. this replicated at societal scale means that all people have value and need to be supported to do their work. the type of work only one person can do is likely to be highly complex, connected, humanity-centered, and experiential. we could then really let the machines do all the boring stuff and be totally freed up to live life well and be fully human.

i'm still not totally sure what it means to be fully human, but it's a question i'm increasingly interested in.

i started this year with a commitment to myself. i called it constrained creativity:

“...everyday. fewer than 200 words. 10 minutes or less (including editing, not including research). whatever is on my mind. public. (mostly) not fact checked.”

i mostly started it to get over my writing anxiety. eventually, i realized it was helpful to have my thoughts in a sharable format. now i spend 20-30 minutes writing and lightly editing posts every day. it's been a journey, but i'm doing it and now it feels strange to not! habit built.

a few weeks ago, my friend miriam told me she used my blog post about the safety pin backlash to have a conversation with a friend. the first thought when i heard that was "wow! this is great and also fucking terrifying."

neither of them agreed (fully) with me, but she said having a piece of content neither of them created helped them walk through each of their issues related to the subject matter. they used it as a foundation on which to discuss about their own thoughts.

honestly (truly), one part of me is freaking out about this. i’ve heard of a few other stories like this from other friends and it's insane. people are reading my thoughts and then sharing them with other friends. what??!?!?!?!!

part of the thinking behind writing in a public place was so that i could share it. but it also means that if other people want to share it and discuss it, they can. at the beginning of this year i couldn't even hit publish more than once a week and now here we are.

monthly post numbers:

jan: 12 feb: 3 mar: 4 apr: 3 may: 9 june: 16 july: 21 aug: 29 sept: 36 oct: 26 nov: 29 dec: 36 (including this post)

i don't really have any plans on stopping and listening to this interview with ezra klein on the podcast longform is really inspiring me (thanks for the tip ac valdez from show about race).

anyway, all that to say... i guess we’re doing this. here's to 2017!

i've seen some pretty harsh critiques of marie kondo's 'life-changing magic of tidying up,' but i really enjoyed it. as 2016 winds down, i'm thinking a lot about one of her more poignant lessons. to paraphrase (longer passage excerpt below): everything you ever own need not be used for its full lifetime. not every item of clothing needs to be worn threadbare by you and not every object you possess needs to be kept until it no longer functions. some things are good for an instant, a season or two, years, or forever. it's important to be able to know when that function has been served and then be able to let that thing go.

in a strange twist, she also applied that general thinking to people in our lives. with people it seems like the "usefulness" is more about teaching lessons. and, just like objects, sometimes the lessons are learned quickly and others they're learned over longer stretches of time.

but with both objects and people, they're good for a time, and then the time comes to move on. in my view, this is natural. in our consumerist society, this truth is paradoxical. on one hand, we have little problem gathering and disposing of things, but on the other we hoard things that are borderline useless and for entirely too long.

i really believe that to truly cherish what's important, you must move on from things that have outlived their purpose. as i'm planning out my personal retreat, i'm carrying this thought in with me and seeing what unfolds. who knows where that'll lead me...

When you come across something that’s hard to discard, consider carefully why you have that specific item in the first place. When did you get it and what meaning did it have for you then? Reassess the role it plays in your life. If, for example, you have some clothes that you bought but never wear, examine them one at a time. Where did you buy that particular outfit and why? If you bought it because you thought it looked cool in the shop, it has fulfilled the function of giving you a thrill when you bought it. Then why did you never wear it? Was it because you realized that it didn’t suit you when you tried it on at home? If so, and if you no longer buy clothes of the same style or color, it has fulfilled another important function—it has taught you what doesn’t suit you. In fact, that particular article of clothing has already completed its role in your life, and you are free to say, “Thank you for giving me joy when I bought you,” or “Thank you for teaching me what doesn’t suit me,” and let it go.

Every object has a different role to play. Not all clothes have come to you to be worn threadbare. It is the same with people. Not every person you meet in life will become a close friend or lover. Some you will find hard to get along with or impossible to like. But these people, too, teach you the precious lesson of who you do like, so that you will appreciate those special people even more.

When you come across something that you cannot part with, think carefully about its true purpose in your life. You’ll be surprised at how many of the things you possess have already fulfilled their role. By acknowledging their contribution and letting them go wth gratitude, you will be able to truly put the things you own, and you life, in order. In the end, all that will remain are the things that you really treasure.

To truly cherish the things that are important to you, you must first discard those that have outlived their purpose. To get rid of what you no longer need is neither wasteful nor shameful. Can you truthfully say that you treasure something buried so deeply in a close or drawer that you have forgotten its existence? … Let them go, with gratitude. Not  only you, but your things as well, will feel clear and refreshed when you are done tidying.

“When the spirit has prepared itself beforehand, it is not so clear just how much real strength it possesses; the surest indications are the ones it gives on the spur of the moment, when it views annoyances in amateur not merely unruffled but serene, when it refrains from flying into a fit of tempter or picking a quarrel with someone, when it sees to everything it requires by refraining from hankering after this and that… Until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. We’ve been using them to cause we need them but because we had them. Look at the number of things we buy because others have bought them or because they’re most people’s houses. One of the causes of the troubles that beset us is the way our lives are guided by the example of others; instead of being set to rights by reason we’re seduced by convention. There are things that we shouldn’t wish to initiate if they were done by only a few, but when a lot of people have started doing them we follow along, as though a practice became more respectable by becoming more common. One they have become general, mistaken ways acquire in our minds the status of correct ones…

These are the people who pass on vices, transmitting them from one character to another. One used to think that the type of person who spreads tales was as bad as any: but there are persons who spread vices. And association with them does a lot of damage. For even if its success is not immediate, it leaves a seed in the mind, and even after we’ve said goodbye to them the evil follows us, to rear its head at some time or other in the future…” — seneca, letter cxxiii (123)

this passage had a lot of gems for me.

the fact that the work of "preparing the spirit beforehand" doesn’t show up immediately just resonated with me for some reason. i think that's related to what i wrote the other day about seneca’s thoughts on how living virtuously takes practice. that type of effort/work doesn't show up instantly like some other work does. but those moments when the effort pays off are important (like refraining to fly off into a temper).

​so much of what we live with these days is unnecessary, but we use it because we have it. until we have begun to go without them, we fail to realize how unnecessary many things are. i'm pretty interested in how consciously choosing to have less can teach us to need less. i wrote the other day about seneca's thoughts on essentials vs luxuries and now i'm thinking of marie kondo's work, too...

​avoid spending time with people who are vice-spreaders. it’s harder to shed the influence of their thoughts than one would think. definitely taking that thinking with me into 2017. and a related point...

one of the causes of our troubles is that we guide our lives based on the lives of others. this is just generally a problematic reality. when few people have done something, we're fine to not follow. but as things grow in popularity we follow along as if things get more respectable the more common they are. but that just isn't always a causal pathway. lots of people can collectively be into some fucked up shit just as easily as they can be into good things. but i always have been and will likely always be someone who tries to be critical of all things in that lane. stopping to ask why and whether or not that thing is good for me is super important. i think about this with television and binge watching series' all the time. do i really need to be caught up on game of thrones because everyone else is?

the big point behind this passage for me, and really all of seneca's writing (this is the last seneca post i think), is this: figure out what you need and shape your life based on that; not what others say they need. the process of defining what you as an individual needs is one that i don't actually see people being supported to do. school doesn't do it and society does it in the worst, back-handed, implicit, and generally oppressive ways. i really like alain de botton's school of life and now i'm wondering if there's some way to have something like that here in the states...

hm!

“That race of men to whom taking care of the body was a straightforward enough matter were, if not philosophers, something very like it. The things that are essential are acquired with little bother; it is the luxuries that call for toil and effort. Follow nature and you will feel no need of craftsmen. It was nature’s desire that we should not be kept occupied thus.”​ — seneca, letter xc (90)

yet again, seneca's thinking bolsters something i've thought but haven't written down. or maybe it's full-on stoic philosophy, but i hesitate to attribute it to stoic philosophy in general because i hear seneca was an edge member of the group. anyways, the older i get and the more people i visit, the more astounded i am at the amount of supplies people have to live. creams and washes and pills and supplements and more.

i hope that someday sooner rather than later, people can see all this stuff we're using and stop it. aging is normal. the marketplace of goods and services designed to slow or prevent aging is superfluous. if you're not getting enough vitamins via your diet, why not change your diet? taking vitamin supplements so you can continue to consume a diet that doesn't meet your needs seems silly.

all this reminds me a little bit of an article i saw the other day about the declining sales of fabric softener. the article, which seemed pretty tongue-in-cheek to me (and decidedly less tongue-in-cheek than the earlier wall street journal article that spawned the media conversation it seems), pinned the declining sales on millenials. and, maybe this is too prideful of me, but i'm 100% happy to take on that blame. i think millenials are rightly seeing the excess that was marketed and sold to our parents and rejecting it. maybe in its heyday fabric softener did something perceived as valuable. but that time is past and we're over it.

of course, there are always exceptions to these things, but seneca's point remains. i think the essentials of survival require little of individuals and society to procure. it's only when we try to get fancy that we (consumerist capitalism?) take shit out of control.

“And there is a world of difference between, on the one hand, choosing not to do what is wrong and, on the other, not knowing how to do it in the first place… virtue only comes to a character which has been thoroughly schooled and trained and brought to a pitch of perfection by unremitting practice. We are born for it, but not with it. And even in the best of people, until you cultivate it there is on the material for virtue, not virtue itself.” —seneca, letter xc (90)

this quote stuck out to me because i appreciate the emphasis it puts on effort. i know that effort isn't equally valuable in all circumstances, but virtue is one area where i think it is. i believe goodness is an inherent capacity, but that doesn't mean that everyone cultivates it. and when you see it in someone, that generally means that they've put in the effort to cultivate it.

i actually do think it's easier to be wicked. i'm not totally sure why, but one way i've thought about it is the second law of thermodynamics. since the universe tends towards chaos, it makes sense that it's easier to do the thing that leads to more chaos as opposed to more order.

that said, i think ability to defy the nature of the individual for the good of the collective is one of the things that makes intelligent life special. there are all sorts of intelligence in life so i'm not just talking about humans here, but i digress. putting in the time and effort to practice being a virtuous person is a difficult, but worthy endeavor. the signs of someone who has put in that work show up in their everyday life, their speech, and their work, too. 

it's tremendously hopeful to remember (or at least believe) that all people have capacity for virtue, whether or not they live into it. in fact, i think if i didn't believe that, i'd have a much more difficult understanding humanity as a whole.

"I have been speaking so far of liberal studies; but think how much superfluous and unpractical matter the philosophers contain! Of their own accord they also have descended to establishing nice divisions of syllables, to determining the true meaning of conjunctions and prepositions; they have been envious of the scholars, envious of the mathematicians. They have taken over into their own art all the superfluities of these other arts; the result is that they know more about careful speaking than about careful living. Let me tell you what evils are due to over-nice exactness, and what an enemy it is of truth!" — seneca, letter LXXXVIII, (88)

i have a love-hate-but-mostly-hate relationship with academia. and i think the longer i'm around it, the longer most of it frustrates me. maybe i'm just young and i'll look back at this and eat my words. but for the time being, i'm just going to continue throwing shade.

the gold for me in the above little passage from seneca is the last line and a half: "...the result is that they know more about careful speaking than about careful living. Let me tell you what evils are due to over-nice exactness, and what an enemy it is of truth!"

i often have the sense that, for want of exactness, academic research misses the forest for the trees. i can't tell you how many people i know who are doing research that they think is pointless. on one hand, i understand that the freedom from proving the impact of one's work is necessary to take long-shots that are risky, but could return really great insights. but i also believe that some things (like academic appointments) really shouldn't be forever. especially if you ain't doing shit. (>_>)

i guess my real issue is when, over time, it seems clear that a particular person or area of work of a particular person isn't showing any promise, things are allowed to continue onward. that's the point at which i think things become more about 'over-nice exactness' and an enemy of truth. it is definitely possible to waste time, energy, and financial resources on things that aren't useful. and that, imo, is when things become the enemy of truth. not because they're bad in and of themselves, but because they're distracting from things that could making the world a better place.

all that said, i think individual academics can bring significant insight to situations. a late favorite professor of mine, alice amsden, has been on point in her predictions about the rise of economies in some countries way more so than any individual, including others in her field, ought to be. i can't help but chalk that up to her decades of research and persistent study.

a couple of weeks ago, i had a conversation with a new mit friend, forrest. somehow we got on the topic of silly things people do. forrest brought up that at one point he worked in a cemetery or morgue or something. and then we got to talking about coffins. forest mentioned that he sometimes saw people buried in coffins that cost upwards of $15,000. to both us this felt like literally burying money in the ground. not that money is everything, but still... forrest even wrote an essay about it with a title too good not to share: "how americans rest in peace."

it's too funny that even in death, americans have still found a way to involve absurd amounts of money. why do we do this? it reminds me of the things the ancient egytians used to bury pharaohs with.

actually, what we do is worse. at least what the egyptians did had some sort of spiritual meaning. just like charon's obols (the coins under the tongue for the greeks to help them make it to the afterlife), egyptians were buried with things believed to be taken with them on the other side. expensive coffins don't even make it to that level of meaning.

why do we do this? $15,000 could do so much good for someone who's alive.

at the bottom of this post are the longer passages from which the immediately following pull quotes are from. they're both from seneca, letter LXXVIII (78), on death:

"My own advice to you – and not only in this present illness but in your whole life as well – is this: refuse to let the thought of death bother you: nothing is grim when we have escaped that fear."

"Illness has actually given many people a new lease of life; the experience of being near to death has been their preservation."

"... the one requirement is that we cease to dread death. And so we shall as soon as we have learnt to distinguish the good things and the bad things in this world."

i'm really feeling these lines right now as i continue to ruminate about death. as a person who has been near to death, i have experienced conscious (and maybe even unconscious) changes in how i live my life. and, though i hesitate to say this, i actually feeling pretty lucky in that regard. knowing how close i was to not existing has, in seneca's words, been my preservation. i have been saved from potentially many years of wandering because i have had my sights focused on making the most of what life i have left (knowing that it could be over in a second).

and not only have i been given focus, i'm also finding myself increasingly unafraid of putting myself out there. to be clear, i'm still pretty afraid of it, but it gets easier to push through every time i remind myself (usually while mediating) that this could be my last day.

and then finally, that last quote about learning how to distinguish between good and bad things. knowing how easily death can come makes it so much easier to know how to "distinguish the good things and the bad things in this world."

reading this particular letter from seneca really helped me crystallize many disparate thoughts. really digging seneca's version of stoic philosophy.

longer quotes:

“My own advice to you – and not only in this present illness but in your whole life as well – is this: refuse to let the thought of death bother you: nothing is grim when we have escaped that fear. There are three upsetting things about any illness: the fear of dying, the physical suffering and the interruption offer pleasures. I have said enough about the first, but will just say this, that the fear is due to the facts of nature, not of illness. Illness has actually given many people a new lease of life; the experience of being near to death has been their preservation. You will die not because you are sick but because you are alive. That end still awaits you when you have been cured. In getting well again you may be escaping some ill health but not death.”