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I had lots of therapy over the years. By now my therapy is taking notes on what it’s like to be alive. Some notes are book-length, some blog-ength, but many are tweet or wall-post length.
Here’s my week’s harvest of 16 short ones:
I blame it all on this: When I was a kid, they put an untrained mind* in charge of training my mind.
*mine.
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I've wasted my whole life learning things I now already know.
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"Just be yourself" is like the golf pro saying "use a golf club." when the student asks which iron in his bag is right for the shot.
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Stupidity isn't embracing bad ideas. It's failing to replace them when better ideas come along.
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I like likes. They serve the very practical human appetite for affirmation that we haven't lost friends. People err on the side of doubt. When we haven't heard from friends in ages we tend to wonder whether we've lost them. Did we say the wrong thing? Have they decided we're wrong? The occasional like says, "no, I'm still here. I still appreciate your contribution." It frees our minds to wonder about other things.
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The older I get the more I realize that getting along with people depends as much on not caring as on caring. It's about caring about the right things, not the wrong things.
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There are misanthropes (Pessimists).
There are philanthropes (Optimists).
I'm a poignanthrope. I'm into the bittersweetness of us.
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When we wonder, "Should I say I'm sorry? Should I change my mind?" pride weighs in heavily on the "no" side. To counterbalance this bias, we must cultivate strong reasons to be proud of saying "yes."
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Self-contradicting moral principles are not principles we can live by, but dilemmas we must live with. I collect self-contradicting moral principles:
Do NOT be negative.
You SHOULDN'T Judge
COMMIT yourself to flexibility
BE PERSUADED that you can't change anyone.
A new one:
IT PAYS to love unconditionally.
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I embrace the sobering effects of life's interpretation-free accounting. I can rationalize eating whatever I want but my weight will carry whatever I've eaten. It pays no attention to my rationalizations.
We can rationalize whatever we want about how we treat the earth, but the earth will carry the burdens we impose. It pays no attention to our rationalizations.
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The Scorn of Plenty: The scornful "get over it" deflection always available to people with plenty on their plate.
"Get a life! I've got no time to process. Can't you see I'm busy/tired/overworked?"
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May our lives now be deep and cheap
Tragicomical but economical
Travel is but one way to know the world, one we can ill afford just now, caught between profligate burning and alternative means.
We must transport ourselves virtually instead.
May our time on the earth leave deep impressions on us without us leaving deep impressions on the earth.
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Secularism vs. fundamentalism is a question of scale. Secularism says "duke it out in your own head (doubt, skepticism, tentative commitments) and in lively collaborative/competitive debates. Fundamentalism says "duke it out once and for all, the war to end all wars. Let our better dogma prevail for eternity. Let the losers convert or die."
I'm all for micro-conflict and I think in the long run, it will replace macro-conflict, or we'll all die together.
Still, I welcome the current escalating macro-conflict. I wish we all just realized that it's not going to work, but short of that I don't see an alternative to exposing its futility, and the deep common bogusness of these epic dueling dogmas, embraced not for their cosmic content but for the self-certainty and full-coverage insurance against doubt that the suckers who embrace them think they're getting.
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I wouldn't wish depression, discouragement and impostor syndrome on anyone. Still, in small, occasional life-long doses it is the key to humility, curiosity and receptivity.
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We're actually ambivalent about free will and determinism. What we really want is a ratchet, freedom to rise higher; determinism to prevent falling. Libertarianism pretends we aren't ambivalent as though life is best when totally un-constrained. They don't imagine themselves falling, only others.
Freedom comes with the free willies, fear of having to take responsibility for your own failure. Libertarians are glad of that. The poor are at fault. Libertarians don't have the free willies. They're exempt since of course they're destined to succeed like some Ayn Rand hero.
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In debates we often try unsuccessfully to win in the present forgetting that most debates are about predictions in the face of uncertainty. We can often end debates gracefully by placing a firm bet we can remind our opponents of years later.
"Well let it be known. My firm bet is that in five years climate change will be universally accepted and deniers like you will be denying that you ever thought it wasn't real."
"Well let it be known: My firm bet is that in five years it will be inescapably true that Netanyahu made Israel less safe, and you won't want to admit that you thought he would make it safer."
"Well let it be known: In retrospect people will admit that George Bush was a disaster and supporters like you will either claim you never really supported him or you'll avoid talking about him."
