Category: Uncategorized

If you take offense at someone’s manner or words (“Oh, he was so rude to me”) just consider the possibility that he is not being rude.

He’s being real. It’s your sensitivity that is the problem, not the way in which the message is delivered.

Kindness and thoughtfulness are virtues. Truthfulness. That’s your side of the street.

The people on the other side of the street? The ones who take offense, especially those who take offense on behalf of others? Fuck ‘em. They are lost and it’s not your job to change them—unless they prove to be Seekers.
It’s not in your power to change someone, in any event. Just do what is within your control.

And you know how to filter the Seekers from the Aimless. They reveal themselves.

Looking at my posts here is a bit weird. I see myself as someone who writes well and explains things simply.

Not so much.

It’s time to get simple.

As usual, Epictetus nails it.

Smart fellows they are, he said, who pride themselves on those things that are not within our power. ‘I’m better than you,’ one says, ‘because I own plenty of land while you’re half-dead with hunger.’ Another says, ‘I’m of consular rank,’ and another, ‘I’m a procurator,’ and another, ‘I have good thick hair.’ And yet one horse doesn’t say to another, ‘I’m better than you because I have plenty of fodder, and plenty of barley, and bridles of gold, and richly worked saddles,’ but rather it says, ‘I can run faster than you.’ And every creature is better or worse in so far as it is made so by its own specific virtue or vice. Can it be, then, that man is the only creature to have no specific virtue, so that he has to look instead to his hair, and his clothes, and his forebears?

Epictetus, Fragments, 18

It’s easy to see others doing this. Watch for it in yourself.

That last sentence cuts deeply:

Can it be, then, that man is the only creature to have no specific virtue, so that he has to look instead to his hair, and his clothes, and his forebears?

Stand on your own virtue, on things within your control. On the inside man.

I found myself wrestling with WordPress again. Why would a new site on shared hosting not allow me to upload a blog post from the WordPress app on my phone or iPad?

Realization. There I go again.

Trouble ticket submitted. “Please cancel and refund.”

In the olden days, I would wrestle and conquer. Now I’d rather go to bed. I surrender. The machines win again.

Solve it with money. I will keep writing content and buy hosting that costs more than $1.50/month.

Looking back at the whole thing, buying cheap may have been my problem.

In my control, not in my control. Know the difference.

Epictetus:

One should know that it isn’t easy for a person to arrive at a firm judgement unless, day after day, he states and hears the same principles, and at the same time applies them to his life.

Epictetus, Fragments, 16

Read the same books, or at least read about the same ideas. Keep reading. The author subtly rewrote your favorite book since you last read it, so why don’t you see what the book says now?

Talk about these principles with others. (But don’t be a boring monomaniac about it, because that has its own dangers). The easiest way to do this is what you’re doing right now. Write.

Apply these simple principles in your life, daily. The easiest way to do this, today, is to talk to God. If you find yourself in rehearsal about some past event that you wish turned out differently, or maybe some future event where you imagine you can create a result, stop. Wake up. Turn immediately and talk to God instead of yourself.

“He was wrong and I told him so” is a recipe for pain. The rehearsal of events that didn’t happen (and probably will never happen) is where I do this the most. I’m imagining a future where someone is wrong and I can demonstrate how spiritually advanced I am when I correct that person’s error.

That’s at least four mistakes I make: living in the “when and then“, feeling that it is my job in the universe to correct someone, imagining that my correction is necessary to that person’s life, imagining that I am right about the topic (maybe I’m not that spiritually advanced!), and finally that this whole event, whether imaginary or God forbid it actually happens, is good for me. I know for sure that the imaginary event, in its moment, is poisonous for me.

When I’m doing this, snap awake and say “sorry, God, but I was off on some fantasy, but now I’m back”.

Maybe this is one of the meanings of The Prodigal Son.

A thing attracts or repels you. This force may be subtle or visible, but it exists.

This thought came to mind considering my back yard. It repels me. I don’t like being outside in my yard. Reasons? The dog shit, the hedges and bushes are overgrown, the garden furniture is covered with dust. Stuff like that.

And what am I doing? Complaining in my head about the dog, instead of picking up the shit. Complaining about the gardener, instead of doing something about it.

Is it any wonder that you are repelled? You are not repelled by the back yard. You are repelled by your own actions.

In my control, not in my control. Know the difference. And use this as a way to find the source of my discomfort.

In my control, my opinion of the hedges. In my control, a request to the gardener to trim them. Or do it myself. Out of my control, what the gardener does.

In my control, pick up the dog shit. Out of my control, the fact that we have a dog, the fact that dogs do, in fact, shit.

The Internet brought me this blog post. “What To Do When You Feel Inadequate” is a title that speaks to everyone, I will assert with confidence.

His first point? “Everything I’m good at I used to not be good at”.

Remember that.

When people analyze and critique stuff, what they say is far more informational about them than the things they are talking about. Did you say something about a politician or a book? You are telling me about yourself.

That is something I have been aware of for a while, thanks to Paul Portesi. But it was always an outward-looking tool, not an introspective tool.

It’s time to watch what I say when I analyze and critique stuff. What does my commentary say about me?

My commentary can by definition say nothing about external things because it’s out of my control. My commentary shines a light on my thinking and opinions, and reveals what I am doing with the things under my control.

Being able to see myself in action is the truly useful information.

I want to expand a project on the web, and suddenly I find I have spent three hours messing around with WordPress.

Stop.

I am a slow learner but I am a learner. I do less of this than I used to. That’s progress.

My job? Write, organize my thoughts. I have a story to tell. Do that.

Someone else can build the platform.

I said I would get a thing today at the store. I didn’t.

It is still today. Go get it.

EDIT: I went. (If you want to feel good, just do what you said you would do.)

Interesting side effects. This was a trip to the local Rite-Aid.

First: I went because I wanted to buy a simple, commodity product. They didn’t have it or at least it wasn’t immediately obvious to me that they had it. I bought a substitute. And got a small measure of hell for it when I got home.

Second: inventory is sparse in all departments. I went down one aisle and there was 20 feet of empty steel shelves. That’s expensive to leave commercial shelving empty in a big store. It’s 20 feet of things you will never sell. You miss 100% of the shots you don’t make, etc. Light bulbs? Pathetic selection and quantity.

Is Rite-Aid as a company suffering? Is this store in particular suffering? Is this only a temporary condition? Or is there a deeper problem? I must say that I hate going into this Rite-Aid and always have.

Time to do a bit of research. And maybe some tentative short-selling.

EDIT 2. The message boards say Rite-Aid (ticker RAD) is in trouble. The Rite-Aid website’s newsfeed is full of incoherent prose written by AI. People coming and going at the executive top level. A debt restructuring. Some sort of new mission for the company to be holistic or some bullshit.

Zombies are running Rite-Aid.

Isn’t this interesting is that reality laughs at a publicly-traded company? Well, not at a company as such, but at the people who volunteer to be part of a group that engages in commercial activities.

Lying (by the high-level executives and the Board of Directors) leads to collective ruin. It’s like the young Lieutenant, straight out of the Naval Academy, leading his platoon of Marines to disaster, ignoring the hard-earned, practical wisdom of his men. (Famously, newly-minted Marine officers don’t know how to operate a compass. Check out /r/usmc for a fun read.)

I’m sure there are people working at Rite-Aid who see what is happening and know how to prevent disaster. There’s not a damn thing they can do about it.

Get out, people. Save yourself. When zombies take over you must flee, lest you die or become a zombie yourself. If you’re optimizing to get the best severance package you’re optimizing for the wrong thing.