Reflections on Aphorisms #85

Today was kind of a weird day because I got a lot done, but not by my usual metrics.

Tomorrow I really need to get into shape on working on those, because they do tend to reflect how I’m making money currently.

Aphorism 123

We are never so happy or so unhappy as we suppose. (Maxim 49)

François de La Rochefoucauld

Interpretation

There’s a long way down, and there’s a long way up.

I like the notion that there’s a metaphysical heaven and hell that reside below the depths and above the peaks of what the world can hold. Because there is the sacred, we cannot know true hell, and because there is the profane we cannot know true heaven.

The one way to alter this would be if one or the other were to vanish from the world, and neither seems like a likely outcome.

At the same time, we are limited by our history and our context in how we perceive the world around us.

I think that this comes up a lot in modern politics; we see the world around us and think that it’s really awful, but the whole situation is really not all that worse than what people have been used to a long time. In fact, we live in a blessed golden age compared to not just some but probably any of our predecessors.

There are examples I could give here that would be more politically charged than they need to be to make my point, so I’ll focus on the idea of nuclear war bringing an end to humanity.

First, the estimates are apocalyptic in their scope, but overlook the fact that a lot of the dangerous of a nuclear war are centralized in particular zones. We’d possibly see a return to a dark age, but probably not the end of the species.

This is not good, but when you look at it in context it’s immediately obvious that there are far worse things that have happened throughout history. Think of the plagues and wars that spanned continents, famines that took out massive portions of the population.

Humanity has always faced existential threats, and always will. They take on new forms because we’ve been fortunate enough to transcend the old ones, and our means of doing so have been imperfect and driven by base motivations.

We also overestimate our prosperity.

I don’t want to diminish our accomplishments, since they’re almost always a reflection of what happens when virtues are practiced consistently and sacrifices are made to improve our condition over a long period of time, but at the same time it is important to realize that our current state of being is one of a potential multitudes.

If we were serious with ourselves and pursued virtue with the same dogmatic obsession that we tend to pursue the things that we want, we would see outcomes we can only dream of.

Resolution

Never settle.

Don’t obsess over the pain of the day. It is a reminder of imperfection, of virtue unfulfilled. Nothing more.

Don’t presume that there is something fundamentally different between now and the collected past.

Reflections on Aphorisms #70

I had a productive day, but kind of lost track near the end so we’re in another situation where we’ll have just one aphorism tonight.

I’ve been thinking a lot about speech and freedom. I’m a bit ashamed to say that I don’t like to say what I really think because I don’t want people to respond in a negative way.

It’s not that I’m particularly controversial. I’m fairly moderate in almost every way, and those few ways in which I am not are all derived from moral foundations.

Still, we live in scary times. There’s something that Jordan Peterson once said about the matter of freedom of speech: “It is not safe to speak, and it never will be. But the thing you’ve gotta keep in mind is that it’s even less safe not to speak. It’s a balance of risks: do you want to pay the price for being who you are and stating your mode of being in the world, or do you want to pay the price for being a bloody serf, and one that’s enslaved him-or-herself?”

I like to think that these explorations of aphorisms are my attempt to say what I think without stepping on toes, but even then I sometimes worry that I’m setting myself up for trouble down the road.

Aphorism 108

You have not converted a man because you have silenced him.

John Morley

Interpretation

One of the things that I find interesting about the modern day is that speech has become something that is a measure of who we are.

We revere speech when it’s done in the ways we approve of.

When people say things we don’t like, they’re apostates.

It’s one of the few bipartisan issues, and the great thing is that there are always people who say things for which they should be condemned, which muddies the water quite handily.

The problem is that we wear our alliances on our sleeves and they have increasingly become our identity.

Of course, this isn’t to say that similar situations have never happened in history, though I shudder to recall some of the other instances (what comes to mind first in my knowledge of history is the late 1850’s in the US, which is not a good place to be drawing comparisons to), but I think that we’re in a very different place for a simple reason.

We’ve lost our foundations, so the superficial displays are all we’ve got.

One of the things that I think is leading people toward destruction and perdition is losing the ability to talk normally and freely.

I read a lot. That’s not a boast, it’s just a statement. I started this year with a goal of reading a book a week, and I’m running closer to two. I’m keeping my readings eclectic as much as possible to avoid getting into a rut.

One of the fields that I’ve spent a lot of time on is psychoanalysis.

I’m something of a devotee of Jung and the field of depth psychology, though I generally disagree with Jung on many of his final conclusions I think that he’s correct 90% of the time.

One of the things that we see in psychology is that you wind up with complexes that are a result of certain situations and phenomena within the psyche.

I think that a lot of our ills in our society are coming from this desire to eradicate evil not only in ourselves but also in others (in fact, it seems predominantly directed toward others and sometimes ignores the self).

It’s a flawed goal. The methods needed will themselves corrupt us, and that’s if we are correct in our assumptions. Our aim tends to be pretty bad.

What we wind up with are two complexes.

The first is projection of guilt. People who demand moral perfection in themselves but don’t reach their goals will often begin to see their flaws in other people. When one remains unaware of their tendency to do this, it becomes destructive.

The remedy to this is fairly simple. You need to learn to let go of other people.

I had to work out of this complex myself, and I think I often still see it function in my mind. I blame a genetic propensity, or maybe familial acculturation, because I see it a lot in my family (or, if you want to get spiritual, you could say it’s generational sin).

The things that helped me get over this were three-fold:

  1. I realized I was pretty awful, objectively speaking. I’ve gotten better, but I’m still not what I’d consider good. I use the term “good” in a moral sense only on choice occasions, so I’ll extend this to say that I’m somewhere between mediocre and slightly-better-than-mediocre, depending on the day.
  2. I realized that everyone has their own agency and responsibility, and if I turned my attention to others I’d never fix myself, and I definitely needed fixing first. There’s a biblical injunction about “looking first to the log in your own eye” before you help your neighbor with simple problems and judge them. As a judgmental personality type (to such a degree that personality types exist, which is a complex matter), I definitely needed to awaken to this.
  3. I realized that anything I did to condemn other people only hurt them. The result: Forgive everything, forget what one can safely forget. I don’t have control over other people, and odds are they don’t really have control over themselves, because I don’t always have control over myself (through my own moral weakness). I let go.

The other complex that forms from a society that creates an untouchable class is that of the exile-in-society.

These are the people who become dangerous and bitter. They gravitate toward nihilism and destruction because there is no other path left.

And why should they have another path? They have given us our best, and we rejected it out of hand.

Of course, it’s not that we shouldn’t reject things. Rejection is the best method that society has to direct people, since it’s less coercive than the alternatives.

But the problem is that we reject people, rather than their actions or ideas.

We silence them without converting them, and do so at our peril.

Resolution

Don’t silence those I don’t like.

Remember that judgement needs to come from the right spirit.

Put the cure before the anodyne.

Reflections on Aphorisms #45

Today was just a struggle for everything. Not sure why. Fortunately, tomorrow will probably be easier, and even if it’s not it wasn’t like today was insurmountable. Just had to work for it.

Aphorism 71

Ladies and gentlemen are permitted to have friends in the kennel, but not in the kitchen.

Shaw

Interpretation

I’m going to take this in a different way than I think Shaw wanted me to, but first I’m going to respond directly.

I think we’ve made great progress in the past century about moving beyond social distinctions. Of course, a lot of this is because we’ve done away with the concept of the upper class as being anything special (at least in the literary world, and eventually Gatsby will work his magic on everyone), but there’s also been a more conscious distinction of that.

Now, that’s not to say we’re perfect. A lot of people still go for fairly isolated bubbles. I’m not one of those people (though my social circles tend to be pretty outlier-friendly because they’re small), but the only thing that I think it is still socially acceptable to exclude people for is education, and that’s something that you can fake and get past pretty well.

Mind you, society is not necessarily so universal that the rule applies to everyone.

However, I think we’ve compensated for this by trending toward being antisocial. I actually think the digital age makes us better about this (I regularly correspond with people on three continents, and those are just the people whose locations I am certain of!), but the problem is that we’re shut off in our daily lives.

It’s a luxury and a leisure just to talk to people as we go about our days, but we rarely extend that courtesy to others. Rather, our interactions with everyone but those we consider our friends are mechanical. We’ve turned everyone into the nameless and faceless servants of the past age.

Now it’s time to rant.

One of the things that I get worked up over is the way that people treat their pets.

Now, I have nothing against pets as a concept, but they’re not people.

My cat passed away a month or two ago (my perception of time is flawed, not my recollection of the events; it was on Mother’s Day here in the US).

It forced me to confront something that I was not hoping to confront, namely loss, but it also was a reminder of something else. We invest a lot in creatures that are around us, and it’s right to do so.

However, we can’t let our love for animals become an escape from the love we ought to have for the people around us.

Resolution

Talk to strangers.

Associate value with each individual.

Don’t let anodyne numbness be mistaken for good health.

Aphorism 72

One can always be kind to people about whom one cares nothing.

Wilde

Interpretation

I’m sure Wilde means something other than how I’m going to take this, but the written word has no inflection and I’m not going and looking up the context, nobody can stop me.

Kindness is a funny thing. The etymology of the word nice is often cited as being derived from the Latin word nescius, which we would translate as “unknowing” in modern English (actually, that’s the nice neutral connotation; we might better use the word “ignorant”).

Being nice sucks for the people you’re nice to.

Nobody improves when you praise what they always do.

They might improve when you praise their new achievements.

They might improve when you let them know they’re wrong.

They won’t improve if you just say they did well.

This is something that I learned through experience as a teacher; the greatest thing you can do to disadvantage a student you dislike is to tell them that their work is good and you have no comment.

At least the notion that their work is bad may let them know that they have to get their act together. False praise, on the other hand, lets you lead them down the road to perdition.

Aside: It has often been the case that the students who I personally dislike actually do phenomenal work, and I have a personality that leads me to find fault in things and be over-critical, so the above fault is not one I fell into frequently.

An important corollary to this is that people who are abrasive and rough on you often have your best interests at heart. Part of learning discernment is to form a schema with which to judge your critics.

Some will be bitter people who destroy others because it advances them, while others will be trying to save you from your own failings by pointing them out.

The secret that I’ve found is to look for emotion in places it shouldn’t be. Obviously if you offend someone or betray them, they will criticize you emotionally. This is not necessarily the mark of a bitter person, and you must figure out whether their response is proportionate (remember that many disagreements stem from different values, so this is an exercise in empathy rather than rationalization).

If you differ in methodology and they view this as a personal offense, they are of the worse sort. They may still have something valuable to add. I actually wrote about taking criticism as a game designer just a few weeks ago, and a lot of people like this give thoughtful suggestions that may at first look like anger. They’re still bad critics in the sense that their emotion overpowers their better faculties, but a sufficiently talented or skilled person is fine either way.

Resolution

Don’t be willfully ignorant (or blindly ignorant, for that matter, but you can’t always help the latter).

Beware those whose offense is earned easily, but be willing to admit your fault.

The cruelest acts are often those which seem kind; never spare anyone the truth and cripple their ability to grow.

Aphorism 73

You will not become a saint through other people’s sins.

Chekov

Interpretation

There was an expression I once heard: “There are no winners in the race to the bottom.”

It was meant as a sort of jest about lazy adolescents comparing how much time they wasted, but it’s also true in a deeper sense (I believe this is why it stuck with me).

Justification and rationalization often fails to justify and provide reason for our actions.

The greatest flaw here is when one uses a comparison for exculpation. Not only does it serve as a conscious judgment of the other (after all, they must be deemed to be less than the judge), which runs the danger of hubris, cruelty and dehumanization, but also as a way to ignore personal flaws that ought instead to be excised.

Image from the Wikimedia Commons.

We like ourselves (at least if we are considered healthy), but we often like ourselves at the expense of being objective about ourselves.

To speak honestly, my vices probably outweigh my virtues. That isn’t to say that nothing I do is worth it, but I contribute less than I should to society and I rarely make the sacrifices that I should to make that better.

As something of a moral legalist by nature, I often find myself with the temptation to look at other people and say things like “Well, at least I don’t smoke/cuss/drink/wear crocs (though admittedly probably more as a result of impulses against wearing shoes that have holes than any fashion superiority).”

However, that overlooks the fact that for every vice I find in others which is not in myself, they may use the same lens that I examine them with to find vices in me.

The solution is not to look outward, but inward. Discover your vices. Then figure out how to fix them. Move toward being a better you, not better than someone else.

Resolution

Let he who is without sin cast the first stone.

Judge only with the realization that you bear the same guilt.

Embrace the pursuit of morality.

Reflections on Aphorisms #24

Tried to push myself harder today. Fell back into a rut with my same order versus chaos schtick that I need to get away from; I believe it’s very accurate, but it’s also not enough by itself to fully explain things and to delve deeper I will need to break out of the rut.

Aphorism 40

Art is a one-sided conversation with the unobserved.

Nicholas Nassim Taleb, from The Bed of Procrustes

Interpretation

This is not my first attempt to reflect on this aphorism, put previously I have never been satisfied by the conclusions that I reach.

There’s a question of what is the “unobserved” subject of art. This is what has always been the sticking point for me when I try and think about this. Is the unobserved that which does not fit neatly into an empirical understanding of the universe? Is it that thing peculiar to the artist which they cannot fully explain? Is Taleb just blowing hot air?

There’s also another question of the unobserved. Is the unobserved that thing which we are striving to move toward? Is it that interstitial space between order and chaos that we spend much of our lives in? Personally, I like this as my interpretation, though I don’t think it’s the original point.

When I was in college, I study studied Romantic literature. No, that doesn’t mean literature about people falling in love with each other, though such events often happened in Romanticism’s key works. Rather, it was a sort of protomodern movement. It focused heavily on experience as the basis for understanding, but in an emotional sense. It wasn’t about being rational and calculating, but always focused on what people felt.

One of the great things emphasized in Romanticism is the notion of the sublime. The sublime can be beautiful, but it would be better described as terrible. Not in the sense that has a negative value for people, but rather in the sense that it defies our comfort. It should scare us. There’s a great painting of a man standing looking out over a valley from the top of the cliff, painted by Caspar David Friedrich. This is often used as the examplar of romantic art.

Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, from Wikimedia Commons. In public domain.

In this painting, the foggy valley represents an encounter with the sublime; anything could exist within the clouds, and the potential excites the mind. There is danger, too, in the potential to be lost in the fog.

The biblical commandment to “fear God” is possibly an injunction to view Him as a sublime being; to remember that there is not only beauty but also unlimited power contained within.

I think this is the sort of thing that Taleb is referring to. More earnestly than others of art (the Romantics valued honesty, even if they did not care about certainty), they represented the notion that their goal was the pursuit of the unknown. They never sought to hide this, indeed they professed it with great vigor.

The predominant difference between the Romantics and the modern is that what they sought to do with emotion, we do with reason.

My Life

I consider myself in some ways an artist. Much of my work is what I would describe as technical, in the sense that I am not pursuing anything outside what has already been done, but that I am merely trying to do it slightly better than the other guy.

However, I do try and pursue art as well. I don’t write prolifically in what we would call an artistic sense. I have written some poetry, I sometimes write stories, though not as much as I say I will (bringing my action in line with my word is a key priority for me), but I do often work on games that focus on storytelling.

I think that storytelling can lead to the greatest expressions of art. Some of that comes from the fact that it’s the form I do most, so I have perhaps a subtle bias in that direction. However, I think that storytelling doesn’t just refer to writing stories. It’s any creative endeavor which has as its purpose the act of communicating information.

This active communication extends Beyond what one does without intent. If someone asks me how my day was, I seldom tell them a story.

Resolution

Embrace art as heroic.

See the act of creation as the act of discovery.

Don’t ignore the mysteries of life.

Aphorism 47

How good bad music and bad reasons sound when we march against an enemy.

Friedrich Nietzsche, quoted in the Viking Book of Aphorisms.

Interpretation

There is a concept of the other that is often talked about in humanities. I think that sometimes it is taken to a platonic ideal and not fully appreciated for its nuance, but the basic notion is this:

People consider others to be either part of the in-group, and therefore friends, or part of the out-group, and therefore enemies.

Nietzsche is keenly aware of this. He faced no small amount of ostracism in his personal life, in part because he was willing to challenge accepted norms.

I had to read some Nietzsche when I was in college, and it was some of this work that focused on moral development, that is, how morality developed in societies. I do not know how well did Nietzsche’s work actually follows what happened. At the time, I thought that he sounded quite bitter. I don’t think I understood anything of his biography, nor did I really understand what’s this work.

One of the interesting things that I read then that stuck with me was the idea of resentment.

I was familiar with the notion of resentment on a very basic level, but I never understood it philosophically. I believe that resentment is a fundamental part of human nature. That doesn’t make it good, and I think that if everyone were able to suppress their resentments we would live in a much better world.

The thing about an encounter with the other is that it is easy to tally up resentment when chances for civil contact are limited. People are already predisposed to fear that which is unfamiliar, so a mixture of resentment and fear can quickly create hatred.

We identify this process with chaos. I’m a believer in the idea that there is an association between order and chaos as parts of a diametrically opposed process. People don’t consciously appreciate this balance unless they have been made aware of it.

The other creates the sort of existential chaos, they are constant reminder of the unknown. Order is represented by that which is known as the in-group.

It is this that makes up Nietzsche’s bad music and bad reasons. Something which a rational person would reject may seem necessary when chaos intrudes on order.

This is not solely responsible for the totalitarianism that nearly killed us all in the 20th century, but I believe that it’s at least closely related. Both extremes breed fear, but in chaos this is associated with the unknown and in order this is associated with oppression.

The unexamined response is to pursue the opposite extreme. If everything seems chaotic, then surely more lot and Order must be the solution. Of course, this is a failure of reasoning. It is actually an induction into more chaos, as now further changes are being pursued instead of a better understanding of what is here already.

Governance does not make society.

In some ways, a totalitarian government creates more chaos with its arbitrary concentration of power into an individual. It may be dressed in the language and styles of tradition, but it creates no more certainty.

It is the society that swings dangerously back toward order. On an individual level, in countless day-to-day interactions, people begin to lose their tolerance for the unknown. It is as if there is a balance of order & chaos that must be preserved, and the centralization of power into one arbitrary figure or institution makes it so that no other uncertainty can be permitted.

Because people cannot trust their governance to provide order, they return to the trappings of order. Arguments that worked well for the past, the styles and social conventions that served that predecessors well, return to visit the sins of the fathers upon their children. These are representations of archetypal order, and the best tangible manifestation of order you can find if others are denied to you. They are also outdated, at least some of the time.

There’s also a second point here to be made entirely independent from the question of order and chaos. It is the question of “mine”. If there is one trait that humanity has perfected over the years, it is greed. We have managed to find an infinite capacity within ourselves for desire.

Desire is good at a fundamental level. Without it, we would never dream. Even a certain amount of self-serving greed can be helpful when channeled through the right lens. It is a balance against completely losing oneself in the collective or in apathetic nihilism.

The problem is that desire leads us to immorality. What we want to take is elevated to a higher value then our moral values. I call this the “mine” question. We’ve all seen children who will attach themselves to a particular object and fixate on it. Even if it belongs to someone else, they will consider it their personal property.

This is not necessarily worrying when they are at a young age, because it is a part of the process of psychological development to realize that such things are not true and would bear disastrous consequences.

The problem is that we grow up still believing that we know the answer to the “mine” question, and our preferred answer is that it’s all ours.

All that we need is a better pretense to satisfy our desire. If we are socialized to the point that we are willing to pretend to behave, but we do not really have the virtues that lead us to see the danger in our actions and desires, we will cling to anything that seems like it justifies our actions.

I think there are also ties to Hannah Arendt’s statement about acting in place of thinking here, but I already covered them just yesterday, so I’m not going to retread the same ground.

My life

It sounds petty in light of the greater scope I’ve covered, but this topic makes me think about my diet.

I have a serious problem with willpower. Admittedly, I’m currently in a state for my diet is actually being followed, or at least mostly so. I’ve lost a few pounds I found in the previous few months, but not yet so far back on the routine that I am not tempted by every little thing.

Often, I will justify my decisions that I make to pursue what brings me the most pleasure immediately instead of follow the plan that I know the dogs to the best outcome. This generalizes all the way up, so my tendency to argue that going to the gym means that I can sneak a few chocolates throughout the day is mirrored by a similar tendency toward rationalizing decision-making in the big picture.

I think that it’s important that people lead examined lives as a defense against this. Of course, there’s always the danger that people who believe they are philosophizing are instead rationalizing. However, I believe that we’re better off striving than falling into laziness. Besides, failure is a common experience. To argue against trying to think may actually just be thinly-veiled rationalizations assuming that people cannot become more skilled at the process of thinking.

It is also important to consider what is good. I don’t just mean what we like, but rather what is good for us.

To continue the example, I only rarely feel any particular concern about my weight, since I don’t usually have any health issues or feel like I can’t accomplish what I want to accomplish because of my weight. However, I know that if I am disciplined about diet and exercise I will achieve a better potential than I can otherwise.

The seed which has sprouted into much rationalization is that I cannot be entirely certain about this.

As such, when I am out of breath or tired, I will say “but I am suffering from allergies” or “but I didn’t sleep well last night” to mask the symptoms of a less than ideal lifestyle. That’s a rationalization.

When I’m disciplined and at the top of my game, I am not out of breath or tired. It simply requires seeing beyond what I can immediately conceive as desirable and thinking to the second order consequences of things.

What are the consequences of what I am doing?

That is the question we should ask.

Resolution

Learn to despise bad music when it comes has a comforter.

Never rationalize things that cannot stand on their own merit.

Don’t be afraid of others because they are different.

Reflections on Aphorisms #20

I’ve been doing these reflections on aphorisms for what is now two-thirds of a month, and I’m really enjoying them quite a bit.

I’m not sure if they’re good reading, but posting them helps to keep me accountable for actually it, and I’ve found that they bring me some happiness. There’s a sort of satisfaction in quiet contemplation that I don’t think you can get anywhere else.

Aphorism 32

“You can’t go from books to problems, but the reverse: from problems to books.”

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable

Note that I got this quote from the audiobook edition of The Black Swan (Amazon affiliate link), so I probably have a different style and punctuation than the printed version.

Interpretation

One of the things that is interesting about education is that we have a concept of reverse design.

The idea is that you start with your objective and then you decide on the actual methods you use to achieve that goal.

I think this is a good way to write a book as well.

When you start writing for the sake of writing, it’s very difficult. As someone who has written daily posts for months at a time, I can say that it is tremendously difficult to keep up with such a schedule.

It really shows when you don’t have a problem that you’re solving.

Another thing is that books and writing are of limited value. There are very few people who can actually take a concept and then apply it from a book.

People often believe they can do this when they can’t. As English (and I’m sure other language teachers notice this as well) teachers worldwide know, students struggle with generalizing information.

What this means is that you can read something and not get its meaning in a concrete sense. If you start with a book in lieu of any worldly experience you end with a lack of deeper understanding. The ability to generalize, or apply information in a context other than it was first received, is one that requires a certain amount of cognitive development. Frustratingly, it is very easy to listen or read and then immediately fail to apply what has been learned. In education, there is a theory that something must be taught five or six different times before it is truly learned. Otherwise, limitations on memory and failures to generalize make the teaching much less effective.

Mind you, this is with practice. Text itself is more difficult by itself. Fortunately many of the people who are reading books will have better generalization and memory techniques than children.

All the same, books work best as reference if someone knows what the problem is that they need to solve. Then the information in a book is fantastic. Trying to learn from a book in the sense of acquiring wholly new skills is not an easy task.

My Life

I am working on a book on game design. I do not have a whole lot of on paper qualifications for this (though I do actually have more than I sometimes give myself credit for), but I have tinkered with games for more or less my entire life.

One of the challenges here is how to make the book valuable to people. I have faith that my skill is sufficient to make it worth reading, but transferring that skill in book form is the difficult endeavor. Since I write a blog on game design both here previously and now elsewhere, I have written about the subject and done research to such a point that I have gotten my process down well enough to translate to a full-length book.

My plan is to use techniques that one would use while teaching more than using techniques that one would use while writing a traditional book. I’ve noticed that I learned poorly from textbooks, but very well from books written by people with an intuitive grasp of human knowledge. My plan is to use anecdotes, case studies, and other methods including including both basic and deep overviews of various concepts.

There’s also something more personal about the book. When I wrote a Blog, I found it there were things that I wanted to include but could not because of time and length restrictions. If you go too long in a Blog, it’s really easy to lose readers. My average length is something between 1000 and 2000 words, which falls on the longer side for most blogs. I’ve given some thought to the best structure for the book and my plan is to have it be nonlinear.

Concepts will be explained in a simple overview, long-form analysis, and case studies. I will probably not do an individual case study for each concept, but rather for each of the overarching ideas since there will be a couple overarching categories into which the concept will be assigned.

Resolution

Don’t write a meaningless book.

Craft learning objectives for each chapter I write.

Remember the limits of human learning.

Aphorism 33

The three most harmful addictions are heroin, carbohydrates, and a monthly salary.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb, from The Bed of Procrustes

Interpretation

A problem with modern life is that it is difficult to even be sure what is a factor in any particular part of our overly complex lives. It is an artificial life that we live. Lest I sound overly alarmist, I don’t think this is necessarily a bad thing. It’s just something we need to be aware of.

Modern life requires caution. With so much of our life being defined by metrics that have been created and designed, rather than naturally occurring, we run the risk of compounding errors in judgment.

Our prevailing social mode is one of preventing change, or at least that change which we perceive to be undesirable. In doing so, we have created systems that govern our lives and embraced over-dependence on them, knowing that we will resist change tooth and nail.

The problem is that these things will inevitably change.

Our comfort has become an addiction. The salary is a good example of this because it stopped actually useful work instead tried to abstract the value. the danger in this is that at some point we may lose our value not our wage.

At first, this sounds almost reassuring. After all, it is certainty. The problem is that it’s false certainty.

Because salaries blind us to our actual product, we don’t see the value of what we create. At best, we provide better value than we receive in return. Even if this goes unrewarded, at least it generally assures some level of appreciation and job security.

If the value in one’s work falls, and the situation is not remedied, they’re actively destroying their own sense of security and may not realize it. This can happen regardless of an individual’s merits, salaried workers are unlike an artisan who could see that there is less demand for their work they may not have their ear to the ground.

Heroin I do not feel much of a need to talk about. Especially in the modern day, there is such an epidemic of drug abuse that it’s dangers are clearly known. Not using drugs and being a teetotaler, I haven’t had any significant personal experiences in this field.

My Life

My own relationship with carbohydrates is complex. I went on a diet where I consume less than 20% of my calories as carbohydrates and I lost more than 10% of my body weight. Since then I’ve lost discipline to keep up with it, and I’m a little ashamed to say that I may simply not have the willpower (until I get back into it; I’ve been trying to get better about it).

There is something to be said for an addictive quality in the things that we eat. When I was more focused on eating meat and nuts and other high protein foods, I found it I was much less hungry. Many of my favorite unhealthy foods are high in sugar, so cutting out sugar meant that I stopped indulging some of my more Dangerous tastes.

I think the real danger isn’t the fact that all of these tend to be associated with unexamined lives. Strong painkillers take us out of our own minds.

Resolution

Stick to a diet that builds my well-being.

Recognize when I have become dependent on something that does not provide value.

Bring value, rather than seeking rent.

Learning from Man’s Search for Meaning

I’ve been reading Victor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning (affiliate link) recently and I’ve been struck by how powerful his account is. I was turned off by the foreword of my edition, which I found fairly stuffy and difficult to process.

Once you get into Frankl’s work, however, the power of it is incredible. He is honest, open, and incredibly transparent in what he felt. He does nothing to diminish his own guilt or paint himself as a hero, but instead acknowledges with clinical precision how he acted and felt during the Holocaust and the horrors that had enveloped him. Although a prisoner, he refuses to be a victim.

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Breathing Life in Characters Part 1: Politics and Society

One of the things that makes or breaks any story are the characters involved in it, but creating great characters goes beyond individual personalities and delves into the experiences and social contexts of the world that they live in. In short, your characters should be opinionated.

Creating a living world is necessary for characters to be truly vibrant, and one of the best ways to do that is to look at current events and issues that characters are likely to engage themselves with. It is important to remember that in places where there is total agreement there is also little interest to be found: everyone agrees that the invasion of orcs is going to be problematic for the stability and sovereignty of the kingdom in the long run.

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