Month: October 2024

Halloween is a great excuse to suspend reality. For one night, we can pretend to be something we are not, forget about all the insufficiencies or shame, and just be something else.

But why must you put on a cape to feel like Superman? We can understand that it is a placebo. And if one is useful, by all means, wear a cape. But perhaps more practical is training ourselves to know when it is time to be a superhero the other 364 days of the year.

You are that special; you just might not realize it yet.

Pasteurization is the simple process of heating something for a specific period of time and temperature and then rapidly cooling it to kill microorganisms. We take for granted pasteurized milk because we are so used to seeing it on every milk carton and the fact people dont die from milk borne illnesses anymore. I would guess most people don’t know what pasteurized milk is and what they are purchasing.

The reality is that until the late 1800s, when Louis Pasteur, milk-borne illnesses were hazardous to children, buying pasteurized milk was at a premium.

We forget how far we come along to make things safer. Seat belts, traffic laws, 9-1-1, vaccines, the extinction of sabertooth tigers…as we continue to make the world physically safer, we think this means we can make the same rapid progress for emotional safety.

But there is no scientific process for overcoming our fears or standing up to injustice. That’s molded and learned over experience and time. Even then, we must have the guts to stand up and say something. Experience is not even a guarantee. But it does help when we realize that most of the time when we find the courage to speak, nothing will physically happen. We can see when the two are separated.

That’s a beauty of a new day, a new chapter, turning a new leaf…

Starting fresh is a fresh start. The wonderful feeling we get to start over after making mistakes.

It can be done with force or numbers. But a transformative experience—something that breaks the patterns and beliefs—can reframe the system itself.

What is power anyway?

Your furnace doesn’t decide to quit working one day. Much like a hammer doesn’t choose to become a tool. Agency and consciousness are the magical gifts only humans possess.

But we can also assume that other things have it, too. For example, AI has the appearance of these human-like gifts. But appearances are indeed deceiving, and we can be more careful, saying the Wizard of Oz must be a wizard only to find a person behind the curtain pulling levers.

Once you lift the hood, you will not find magic but, in fact, engineering.

Goals are useless without process.

You can build a cathedral but it doesn’t make it art.

If you are going to make a prediction, you are saying, “I think the future will look like this.”

Of course, no one knows what will happen. This means that we need to accept that sometimes we are wrong.

But that’s not something that is tolerated well in the culture. Being wrong signals that someone else is right. Being wrong usually results in a loss of status. Being wrong can hurt our internal narrative (and poke at our shame).

So, really, the thing we need to dance with isn’t the prediction itself—it’s what we are going to do with the result. Because if we are going to keep predicting a future that isn’t realized yet, we also need to deal with the tension of when it isn’t how we envisioned it.

The limits that people put on ourselves are false.

The limits we put on ourselves, are often false too.

The ceiling is made of glass. Just break it.

People are paradoxical in nature:

We can’t stand each other. We hurt each other. Capable of so much violence.

And yet…

People is all we got.

The goal isn’t the absence of conflict. The tragedy is when we stop trying to work through it.

The person who destroys a sandcastle isn’t necessarily someone who intends to cause destruction. Accidents happen. What matters is the intent. Bullies, on the other hand, set back the culture—not because of the things they hurt but because they make the rest of us hesitate. How much better could things be if we assumed the best intent? It’s not something we are programmed to do. The few bullies make it harder for the collective to assume the best. At the same time, assuming the worst is a rotten way to live.