24 Comments
May 9, 2022Liked by Geary Johansen

Finding reasons to see the best in others is a far more rewarding state of mind than finding fault.

My Grandmother would tell it as "If you've got nothing good to say about a person, then say nothing at all."

Deep article Geary. I believe you've captured something very important here and in extremely short supply. It makes me question myself and revaluate my own behaviour. I want to be the person you describe. I know it is me. I want others to know it too.

Excellent writing. Inspirational.

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> This Bad Faith podcast between Professor Glenn Loury and Briahna Joy Gray

Sheesh, I can't handle it. I'm two minutes in and there hasn't been a single insult or stereotype or characterization. This mutual respect and cordiality better stop or soon or I'm not going to be able to watch much more.

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So well said, brilliantly articulated and just what I needed to hear today. 👏 Thank you

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> It’s why I am currently politically homeless- it’s liberated me from the inherent embarrassment of having idiots for leaders.

That's the thing. True, one longs for comrades, united in the good fight, but there is the liberation from tribal loyalties which can, respectively, oblige one to believe that Trump really won the election *or* that men are women.

> Even the past is an illusion- one which we selectively edit to remove all the grist and anxiety.

Dunno, I often find myself going over the bad stuff.

> at the absurdity of it all.

From a dolphin's perspective, life is essentially a joke-on-us, but still there is grace and beauty and truth and virtue and these are not accidents.

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May 9, 2022Liked by Geary Johansen

Not only would the rich not be able to fund government for long, but you'd then have no rich people and no successful new businesses to produce the wages that are taxed and the products that are taxed.

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Good post, Geary.

“ Human’s have a tendency to take our own suffering, angst and unhappiness and use it as a lens to colour the world we live in.”

Spot on. Great line. (Although I’ll note for your benefit that there’s a typo, which I think should be easy for you to correct.)

“ We may have increased life expectancy to unprecedented levels, but we cannot remove the slow diminution which comes from entropy unleashed against our bodies, slowly enfeebling us, subject to worsening aches and pains, left grasping for ever-diminishing intellectual capacities, and ever fearful of a sudden precipitous decline far worse than the minor inconvenience of a now faulty memory or physical inconvenience.”

Yes. But that’s not to say we can do nothing about death or aging. We all age and die. But there are ways we can live that slow or speed up the decline and make it harder or easier on our minds and bodies.

“ It’s why I am currently politically homeless- it’s liberated me from the inherent embarrassment of having idiots for leaders.”

That is a satisfying thing.

“ Unfortunately, despite the fact that in most instances the lump fallacy or zero sum has been proved wrong- when it comes to the attention economy and human relevance the Pareto distribution, much to the chagrin of millennials bemoaning the inherent inequality of music downloads, is very much in evidence- for every star, there are thousands of creatives who will die in obscurity.”

To some extent that’s true. However, I’ll note that digital technology has made it less true and that we now live in a world partially defined by Kevin Kelly’s “1000 True Fans” model, in which more creatives can earn a middle class income than ever before. It’s no longer the old world in which you either made it big time or you were penniless. Much in the same way that the industrial and market revolutions created middle classes in societies that had previously been divided into serfs and nobility.

Also, I’ll point out that there’s a big upside to “irrelevancy:” you have privacy. Celebrity does weird things to people. Fame can make life miserable. Better to have a limited impact on friends and family than a massive cult following.

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> For the past three or four days I've been engaged with a Romanian fan of communism over on Quillette.

Where? I see no such thread.

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