Writings

“If we let ourselves, we shall always be waiting for some distraction or other to end before we can really get down to our work. The only people who achieve much are those who want knowledge so badly that they seek it while the conditions are still unfavorable. Favorable conditions never come.” ~ C.S. Lewis in his 1939 sermon, Learning in War-Time

“For myself, I am an optimist. It does not seem to be much use to be anything else.” ~ Winston Churchill, 1954

I’m not a big fan of WhatsApp. While it does indeed work well as a messaging app, it also feeds into Facebook/Meta’s technological hegemony, isn’t open source, tracks who you message and what you do on your phone, and does some other creepy stuff that I’m not a fan of. But, WhatsApp is also currently the most popular messaging platform in the world, 1 and a majority of people I contact regularly are only reachable through there. As such, even though I’ve purged the vast majority of Attention Extraction services from my life, I still have kept WhatsApp around (though, I prefer and recommend Signal or Matrix/Element). ...

We all have todo lists — commitments, tasks, obligations — things we’ve given our YES to. And often that list is overwhelming. In times like that, clarifying our NOs may be even more important than trying to power through our YESs. We can’t be everywhere, and we can’t do everything, as much as we might aspire to. But, we can strengthen and honor that which has our YES by getting clear on what we have said NO to, and not letting ourselves feel obligated or distracted by those NOs. ...

Nutritionally, the idea is fairly intuitive: Eat junk, and our bodies reflect that we’ve been eating junk. Eat clean, and our bodies eventually look more lean. Too rarely do we let that idea jump from body to mind, but that’s an apt and important jump. Cognatively, we are what we consume: what we watch, read, listen to, and think. Is your informational diet helping you become who you want to be? ...

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. ...

When I was a kid, I hated history class. To me, it was nothing more than a list of names, dates, and facts about wars and dead people that I was required to memorize. I never saw how it actually applied to my life. But in last few years, I’ve started to LOVE history — largely because I’ve come across amazing stories and nuggets of history that I think are really worth talking about, but which we largely don’t. Some of these stories I’ve found to be especially hopefilled. Since I don’t think these stories get told enough, I wanted to retell some of my favorites. Below is one of them. ...

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? ...

Lately, every time someone shows me a YouTube video on their computer or phone, I find myself freaking out just a little. The ads, the list of recommended videos, the endless comments… there’s just so much going on on the screen, and I find myself easily distracted and maybe a bit overwhelmed. In contrast, if you watch a YouTube video on my laptop, you’ll find it to be a much different experience. What you will see is the video and its description, and basically nothing else. If you want to see the comments or the recommended videos, you can scroll to see a “Show More” button. But, other than that, you just get the video you came to see. ...