Category: Life
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Life Below Your Radar
Obviously, you glibly reply, it’s worth taking an interest in people. Especially the people you see regularly. These are the people who make up your life, and knowing what they like, what they don’t, what they’d love to help us with, what they’d love help with, is all just the way you do it. But…
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Deep Honesty and Machismo
I think that one of the hardest things in the world is to be honest. We all give lip-service to the value of honesty. We all like to think that we don’t lie and that therefore we’re being honest. But there’s a large difference between being honest and refraining from lying. One of the clearest…
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Presence not Presents
My war on gift-giving earns just about as much criticism as it does confusion, so I think it makes sense to lay the argument out here. To start: there is a strong economic case against gift giving. It’s based on things like gift-givers routinely paying more for their present than the receiver values it at,…
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Dissatisfaction and Fate
One thing that’s been dominant in my experience lately is dissatisfaction. To be clear, it’s not the dissatisfaction is a new, or novel, or rare sensation for me, it’s just been really dominant and prominent in my conscious mind lately. Dissatisfaction, to risk stating the blindingly obvious, is wishing that things were other than they…
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My Life’s Purpose
Dusting off this blog, I found this scrap laying around. It says that I started working on it in October 2010, and haven’t touched it since November 11, 2010. But upon rereading it, it was still mostly inline with my thinking today (though I’ve not changed the ways it’s not), and makes a nice statement…
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“Work is More Fun than Fun”
This quotation, whose owner I’ve seen cited repeatedly as Noel Coward, strikes me as largely true. Not completely, always, and unequivocally, but certainly for the right type of work it can be in a way we tend to underestimate. When your wife, friend, or boss commands you “to go have some fun,” they obviously don’t…
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The Action Gap and WWJD
There are things that we say that we want to do and things that we do. There are things we say we believe, and then there are the beliefs that the actions we actually do can clearly be read as meaning. I was talking with a friend recently when I–as far as either of us…
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The Case for Better
My internet pal Justin Wehr recently pushed on a point that I considered so obvious as to be completely incompetent in its defense. This then, is an attempt to build the case for constant improvement. The case for the fact that you should work to be better than you were yesterday every single day of…
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Art as Art
I was a alerted to a new facet of my reality after taking a breather while reading my old review or the documentary Born into Brothels. And it’s essentially this: I have little or no interest in a piece of art as a piece of art. I think this gets to the very core of…
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The Internet’s Role in my Conversation Aversion
I have an uncommon aversion to talking to most people I meet. It is powered by the twin engines of my disinterest in the public contents of their brain, and my inability to get the things that might interest me out of them in a way that doesn’t make either of us uncomfortable. It leads…