Turn
I’m excited for everything in my life. Except death.
I’m excited for everything in my life. Accept death.
Boycott Krispy Kreme
Krispy Kreme is giving one free donut for the rest of the year to anybody who shows proof of vaccination. People are celebrating this. But what if Marlboro gave a free pack of cigarettes to anybody who shows proof of vaccination? Would we be concerned then?
The reality is Krispy Kreme is running a marketing campaign to make money. They want you in the door with a free donut not because they’re benevolent but because they want you to spend more money. Some companies are leveraging the pandemic to better people’s lives. Krispy Kreme is using the vaccine as a way to make more money for themselves–at the sake of your health.
But they don’t care about your health. It’s clear COVID disproportionately affects people who are overweight and obese, as well as individuals with diabetes, but we’ve yet to have a public conversation about metabolic health. Hand sanitizing, masks, social distancing, and vaccinations are the only topics allowed.
By getting a free donut, you are enabling industrialists to take advantage of your health and the health of our population for their own personal gain. It’s a bad precedent, a dangerous precedent. I don’t think you can be serious about wanting to change this broken system of capitalism-gone-wrong and get a free donut at Krispy Kreme. It’s one or the other. It’s principle or submission.
Krispy Kreme would do more good by giving a free donut-a-day to people who are homeless, hungry, dispossessed, or in financially challenged positions. Or perhaps they could take the money for all these free donuts and start a fund for people who need help. But they didn’t do this. Because they want to take advantage of your personal medical history for their own short-term financial gain.
Do not go to Krispy Kreme. We cannot continue to enable this system.
P.s. Donuts are not bad. I love donuts. Making free donuts an incentive to get vaccinated (or vice versa) is a fundamentally flawed, unethical principle.
A Fermata
There is a moment
before your world ends
and after you thought
it would that everyone
takes a breath, deep
and quiet. You hear
birds chirp and kids play.
It breaks your regular
existential delusion
and nudges you back
to here, the place you
never left, your home
now and always,
shared with beasts not
of burden and mirages
as real as you, or more.
You are more than
what worries you
but less than the world
in which you reside—
you live in it and it in you,
a perpetual, gentle reminder
that you are here and here
is good and you are, too.
You are a note
waiting to be played
in a song no ear
has ever heard.
Walden
Henry David Thoreau was not revered or well-respected in his lifetime.
John Wick
Watch the movie from start to finish and pay attention to the world building. It’s masterful.
Then pay attention to how the world is unveiled throughout the film. It’s not all at once but but by bit, from the bottom up. This style uses the concept of “the half known world” to add suspense—I’d posit not only for the viewer but the writers while drafting the story.
Suspense isn’t just in what happens. Suspense is in what’s not said, the world within which the film takes place. The unknown makes the movie more exciting, enthralling, and inevitably more enjoyable.
Maybe the same is true for our half-known lives, too.
Escapism
Why do you bear so much? Why are the world’s problems yours to solve? What makes you think you could even solve them? You don’t have the experience, the tenacity, the resources, or the time to take on so much right now. You’re a kid.
Drop it. Leave your ego at the door. You are not making a difference–you are trying to tell yourself this isn’t all for nothing. You’re lying to yourself. Stop making this about you.
Just write the damn paper and teach the damn class. You’re not contributing to your field, you’re just doing an assignment. Stop making this something it’s not.
Go watch some It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and get over yourself. It’s not that serious.
Stop worrying
When successful people are asked what advice they’d give their 20 year old selves, they usually say something like, “Stop worrying so much. It all works out in the end.”
That’s nice. But how do you stop worrying?
What if worrying fundamentally changes who I am and what I do in the world? What if worrying was the only thing that made me successful? If these successful people gave their younger selves this advice, would they still have been successful?
I want it to all work out, but I don’t know how to stop worrying.
Always a player-coach
I’ve never been the best runner.
When I ran track in college, I was fueled by my teammates. They made me want to run and not give up. I made a commitment to show my gratitude in support for them. I started leading them and helping out the young guys, like a coach would.
Today was my first day coaching track at my high school. Only one athlete showed up, so I ran the workout with her.
Something tells me I’ll always be a player-coach.
My lost iPod classic
Spotify wasn’t around in high school, so I bought a $300 iPod classic. It held all my music on it, from Jesus Culture to Eminem. While my musical taste has shifted, I can still remember the weight of that iPod classic, hundreds of gigabytes for hundreds of dollars. I used to plug it into my casset-to-aux adapter in the family Honda CR-V (her name was Fern). Those were magical days.
I lost my iPod one day and couldn’t find it, so I cleaned out my car. Part of cleaning out my car meant taking out the grocery-bag trash-bag. In Fern, this was conveniently looped around the elbow rests for the driver and passenger seats. I still couldn’t find my iPod. It would show up, I thought.
The garbage men came the next day.
My $300 iPod was in my trash bag which was in the garbage.
Some times you lose things and never get them back. Acceptance is the only way out.
Acceptance, and Spotify.
What’s your personality?
Jordan B. Peterson is a former Clinical Psychologist and University of Toronto professor, among other titles. He’s most famous for his 2018 book, 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos, which sold over 4 million copies worldwide (and has been on the Amazon Bestsellers list since published). After that he did a lecture tour, inspiring individuals–especially young men–to take responsibility for their lives.
There’s a whole group of people who despise Peterson. These are generally people who don’t like taking responsibility for things.
The field of Personality is one of Dr. Peterson’s strongest areas of expertise. He developed his own personality test based on the Big 5 Model. You can find it at UnderstandMyself.com (code MP [from his daughter, Mikhaila Peterson] to pay 8 dollars instead of 9, lol).
I took the test and, not ironically, learned a lot about myself. Camille took it, too. Then we connected our results (a feature on the website) and got a report about the ways we might struggle and thrive as a couple. We both found this to be the most insightful test we’ve taken, far more telling than Myers-Briggs.
It got me thinking a lot about what personality actually is. I used to think of it as the way that you interacted with other people. “Oh, that’s just her personality,” or, “He has a dominant personality.” But now I’m starting to think of personality as something far deeper and more core to one’s being.
The way I’m beginning to understand it is this: Personality is the combination of all the psychological and physical processes which make you who you are. All your past experiences, beliefs, conceptions, genetic programming, and default patterning that have developed over your lifetime influence your personality. When you make an instinctual decision, it’s actually your personality–and all of its associated facets–making the decision. It’s far more than how you interact with others at a party.
Your personality is who you are. It’s part plastic, part fixed. Understanding it can tell you a lot about the unresolved work in your life and who (or what) is actually in control of your decsions.
What’s your personality?