Category: Communication
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No One Has Ever Loved Anyone
I love potent little phrases (it’s why I run a quotation-browsing website), and I recently came across a great one. It seems that Mignon McLaughlin once quipped: No one has ever loved anyone the way everyone wants to be loved. It bowled me over. Because it immediately struck me as both true and useful. First,…
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“We All Make Choices”
I’ve caught myself saying something more and more. Though most of the things we say are pretty dumb and banal — this is very much included — the increased frequency is notable and thus must have some meaning. So what, then, leads me to say “We all make choices…” so much? For one, the phrase…
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The Two Currencies of Relationships
Every good relationship contains two things: intimacy and mutual service. I don’t just mean romantic relationships; whenever you find a relationship valuable, it is because you’re getting at least one of those two needs met by that relationship. When you find a relationship hard to sustain, or damaging, it’s because it fails to provide (or provides negative…
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The Case for “Hashtag Activism”
I’ve never seen myself as an activist. I was born on third and spent a lot of my life thinking I’d hit a triple. As I’ve started to learn about privilege — all the benefits I receive in the society I live because I’m a white, able-bodied cis-gender heterosexual male who learned English as his…
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What It Means to Show Up
It means different things to different people to “show up.” One doesn’t need to look hard to find the disparities. The mother “playing with her kids” while she’s frantically typing out emails on her phone. The father who’s at the soccer game but can’t remove the phone from his ear. The friend who makes it to your…
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Why You Must Show Up
One of the most banal but undeniable statements is that you can’t contribute if you aren’t there. That “80% of success is showing up.” It’s one of these stupid truths we think we understand until the days we just want to crawl back into bed and not get out. But you simply must show up.…
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The Slow Revolutions of Love
Nonviolent revolutions aren’t clear and simple and swift; they’re typically exactly the opposite. Slow and halting and frustrating. Violent revolutions have a clarity. A, typically abusive, power structure is forcibly displaced through the expending of material and life energy. This can have a certain effectiveness and speed, and so inspires hope. And there are places…
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“I’m Not Afraid of the Dark”
Dark has an interesting place in human experience. Many children’s first and most enduring fear is of darkness. I, to this day, get a little spooked in completely or unexpectedly dark places. Mythically and metaphorically, though, darkness is a lot more than just the absence of light. Darkness is a synonym for the unknown. For the…
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Talking About the Weather to Gain Trust
When I think back on the things that I believed as a self-assured young twenty-something, one of the more glaringly dumb ideas that comes to mind was my distaste for “small talk.” I even wrote an essay on this site pretty clearly (and aggressively) elaborating my reasons. Surely, there was some merit to it — even…
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Culture Is A Series of Lossy Compression Algorithms
Compression algorithms are all around you in a modern digital life. But you may not actually know what they are, so let me explain: raw data taken from the world is rarely very efficiently packed. So to save file size and computational sanity, most data is compressed. JPEG is an image compression format — it takes…