With exceedingly rare exception, you don’t know the full story. How could you? It involved multiple people with highly complex and intricate lives, who have each faced unique challenges and hardships that you’ll never know. You don’t know what drove them, and you don’t know what drives them. There is still a place for anger — injustice rightly catalyzes it. But if we want to see positive change, every drop of anger needs to be tempered with at least 10 drops of empathy. ...
Years ago I came to a conclusion I return to often: People tend to act reasonably in accordance with the world they’ve be presented with. In this age of polarization and anger (and now, war), I find that phrase all the more potent. Who is someone who is doing something you disagree with? It’s important to remember that their worldview generally feels cohesive and sound to them according to their narrative, the things they’ve read, and the experiences they’ve lived. And that, generally speaking, the actions they are taking tend to line up really well with that worldview. ...
James Clear has a quote that I deeply appreciate: “Where you spend your attention is where you spend your life.” 1 I come back to this quote regularly. Attention = life We rightly value life deeply, spending billions of dollars every year on medical treatments to increase health and physical life. What if we started caring about our attention the same way? What if we started being as purposeful about what we let into our ears, eyes, and mind as we are about what food and drink we let into our mouths? ...
Skill and concern mixed together can be powerful, and there are people today with seemingly more of both than ever. In almost any field you can list, you will be able to find someone who is at least 10x more skilled than you, and 10x more concerned than you are. I think it’s worth learning from those people. How does someone 10x as concerned as you approach the problem you’re facing when they have the skills to do something about it? ...
The process of being lead out of deception can be painful and hard. The status quo is the status quo for a reason: it’s more comfortable than the alternative. Lies can make us feel warm and fuzzy; but they are still lies. If we truly want freedom, there’s only one option: Only the Truth sets us free
The lack of a currently viable solution is not a legitimate reason to disregard a problem. See also
So many things in our lives we know are awful for us, but we keep them in our lives anyway. Social media, junk food, most so-called “news”, extreme amounts of internet and screen time, etc. What if we just STOPPED? What if we just got rid of them? What if we stopped being ok with the things we know our making our lives worse and shorter, and replaced them with the things we knew were good for us — good books, lavish amount of time with friends and family, whole food, time outside, real journalism, etc.? ...
You’re wrong about something. I am, too… Likely many things. It’s good for us to ponder that truth once in a while. We are all working with incomplete knowledge, meaning we can’t possibly be right about everything. The universe is too infinite and expansive. The physical, biological, and social systems on our planet are too intricate and incomprehensibly dense. There are assumptions that you and I hold about reality that are assuredly incorrect. ...
Creation works in cycles. Air in, air out. Food in, food out. Day in, day out. Respecting the seasons we’re in — knowing where we are in our personal cycles — can mean the difference between keeping rolling forward, and derailment. Ever try inhaling and exhaling at the same time? So it is with doing the right thing in the wrong season.
Hi! 👋🏻 I’m Josh Müller. I love technology, permaculture, communications, leadership, learning and creating new things, and living a full and beautiful life! This is my Hello page — how I prefer to keep in touch, and why: Email 📧 is the best way to contact me. You can start an email conversation with me from my contact page 📃. Or, if you want to encrypt your email with PGP, you can use my 🔐 Public Key If you want to schedule a chat, you can do it through my Cal.com link 📅. My online identity is primarily connected to this site you’re currently reading. You can see my blog and other writings here 📔, or subscribe here 📰. I also syndicate my posts to Mastodon 🐘, Twitter 🐦, and Bluesky 🦋. I’m a big fan of POSSE, and try to implement it in most of what I do online. For a long while I was pretty fully absent from social media. But, lately I’ve been hopping on a few accounts again. Many of the things I’m wanting to do in the future will be helped by having a more developed audience. So I’m making a few changes to grow that, while still keeping my consumption of Social Media very low (MASSIVELY prefering a feed that I can own over an algorithmically generated feed)