Tag: change
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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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OPW: “Our Actions Create Our World”
I haven’t done this in a while, but I’ve been thinking about bringing it back. OPW stands for “Other People’s Words,” and since I moth-balled Link Banana I’ve been sharing most things I would have previously put there on Twitter. But this mini graduation/commencement/life speech from Hank Green, in the form of a YouTube video, […]
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You’re Either Make the World Closer to Your Ideal, or You’re Not
There are two things about categorical statements: all of them are wrong, but some of them are useful. And so at one level, I think this piece’s title is clearly wrong: some actions don’t quite make the world better or not, they just kind of happen. But that being said, it’s clarifying to realize that fundamentally […]
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Things Don’t Change Unless Something Changes Them
It’s one of those things that seems so obvious that we don’t think about it. But it’s also true: things don’t change unless something changes them. The rock that you see today will be the same forever, unless (as is likely to happen) wind, water, people, and other entropic forces eventually change that rock. This is […]
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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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Seeing Through Nouns
Nouns are a part of speech most people understand, and they’re common across all human languages. And yet we know of very fews nouns that aren’t simply an aggregate of a number of other nouns. Further, those aggregates of other nouns are, by the very nature of their compound-ness, temporary. Recently someone presented an idea that […]
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The Hidden Power of Acceptance
Most people think of power as assertive and domineering. That power rides up to the world and forcefully changes the way that it flows. Sometimes, power does look like this. And it’s undeniable that this kind of power is the most visible and compelling. But as many martial artists know, there’s a lot of power […]
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On Dreaming Your Dreams
One of the hardest things I’ve learned in my life is that dreaming doesn’t make it so. This sounds so self-evidently true that you’d think I never needed to learn it. But I knew it, and sometimes still know it, only intellectually. What’s needed to really grow and mature and become the person you want […]
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Boiling the Frog, Resolutionism, and Exercise
When it comes to changing your life, people always get a critical things wrong: they overvalue aspiration and undervalue planning. It’s understandable: apiration is easy and planning is work with the promise of ever more work to come. But the other, perhaps more powerful part of change that people get chronically wrong about life-change is […]
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Grit & Doing the Change
You care, you’ve got a plan, now you’ve just got to do it. Great! You’re going to change your life. This is the easy part! You just need to get up every day for a year, and go for a five mile run first thing in the morning, no exceptions. The hard part of doing […]