now that AI makes information consumption and transformation easier than ever I would like to bring back this old banger by Sasha Chapin about how books are not information transfer devices but subjectivity-merging devices
in fact I would say content consumption in general is more about subjectivity-merging than information transfer, which is why I am generally much more interested in writing by humans than by AI
say it out loud! Especially when it feels cringe or utterly unimaginably wrong. When your voice sounds flat and monotone and annoyed. Say it a couple of times. You are attuning to the ways in which it is true
I wrote a piece inspired by the beautiful, unfolding relationship to my now fiancรฉe! I'm quite proud of it. It feels like the first thing I've written that comes from life rather than abstraction
https://t.co/abntWDBiJ2
@RachelZader As a smart personโข I think I need a therapist who can hold a similar level of complexity as me (aka smart). Both to trust that they can understand me and so my shadow can't run circles around them. Although to be fair that second part can be achieved in other ways
Spiritual Self-Defense 101 for citizens born and raised in the Default Culture:
- Reflexive skepticism of frictionless things. There is always a cost to convenience.
- Being lied to is demoralizing --> cut out sources of lies. If it makes you depressed, demoralized, hopeless, weak and disempowered, it is not a good thing to be exposing yourself to. There is no virtue in misery and empathy decoupled from action is just moral narcissism.
- Your body inherently knows itself. If something you are doing is bad for you, the body will tell you.
- Functional intuition requires removing the layers of abstraction between you and it. In other words, if you will only listen to your intuition when you have a comprehensible rational explanation for it, you are neutering it in service of Something Else.
- There are transcendent things and they are not for sale. Anyone selling you transcendence or peace as something that can only be bought is lying.
- The culture you were raised in has its own self-interest. You must identify what those self-interests are if you want to have a chance of figuring out where they are and are not in alignment with your own interests.
- Many people will tell you they know what is best for you ("Advice Is One Size Fits All" supremacists), but these people will evaporate as soon as you are faced with the consequences of following their advice. It is good to listen to and consider the wisdom of others, especially people older than you, but tempered with the reality that the modern world is a rapidly changing environment. At the end of the day, nobody is responsible for the decisions you make in life besides you. You are the person who will live with them. Many people expect you to dance or perform for their own moral approval or sense of importance; most of that kind of person would not ever, in a million billion years, extend recipricocity towards you.
To dance for joy is to be human, to dance for approval is to be puppet.
Think of that which is most evil. The God Emperor atop the pyramid. Ancestral rivers of blood. How would it feel for that being to face itself? To feel remorse? To learn to smile? And ultimatley to be met with grace and forgiveness.