Probably Don’t
Social media is great for some purposes, but much of what the networks (or rather, the people running and managing them) want from me is not aligned with my priorities. I don’t want to post more stuff, more aggressively. I…
Purpose
As a general policy, I try to do things purposefully rather than passively. “Purposeful” can mean different things, though, depending on what aspect of life we’re talking about. Exercising each morning is purposeful in that I hope to remain fit…
Now and Next
In any discussion, there’s a collection of intuitive, shared contextual understandings. If you’re engaged in a conversation about labor rights, it’s typically understood that you’re addressing the topic as it exists within the current economic, social, and geopolitical paradigm. You…
Being Interested
Almost always, people we find interesting come across that way because they’re interested in other things and people. Such interest often starts with a spark. For most of my life, catching these flashes of potential was a luck-laden, periodic thing.…
Who Where How
I’ve got a birthday coming up this weekend: I’ll be 37-years-old. Part of me believes I should mark the occasion with chin-stroking, navel-gazing, and other ponder-related pastimes; that the day should serve as a neon sign and a full-stop on…
Bypassing Blockages
The benefits of traveling are myriad, and I’m an enthusiastic proponent of visiting even the nearby, the perceptually humdrum, the everyday and mundane-seeming because although many of us have been sold on the idea that travel needs to be exotic…
Anatomy of a Project
Projects are encapsulated sequences of tasks, educational undertakings, and practices that I use when making stuff, refining things, and/or shifting from one set of norms to another. I make a project called Brain Lenses for which I write and produce…
Sleep
For a long time, I sucked at sleep. But a handful of years ago I started to wonder if I might be capable of learning to sleep better: I started thinking it might be a skill I could work on…
Rebalancing Inputs
I spend a meaningful amount of time curating what I think of as my “inputs”: data from informational sources (news and nonfiction), but also experiential sorts of things like music and fiction and other aesthetic experiences. My ideal outcome is to maintain…
Mini-Paradigms
A paradigm is a state of being; a status quo for a given moment in time. A paradigm shift is what happens when variables change in such a way that the status quo changes measurably or perceptually. Post-WWII Europe was…