Category Archives: Emotion

PROMPT: Business

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If you could start a new business right now, what would it be?

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A “Human Skills for Humans School” that teaches all the important competencies that have been left out of an educational system that is 75% about making the workers of yesterday and 25% about making citizens, but which doesn’t care a whit about building emotional intelligence, self-confidence, natural setting problem solving, movement skills, creativity, primitive living, combat skills for a robot apocalypse, etc. Those worker bee skills are already starting to show their obsolescence and are very likely to continue to do so at an accelerating rate.

The bad news is that AGI and robots are sure to do almost all productive tasks better than humans by the end of the century. The good news is that we have plenty of room to be grow as a species.

Angry Monkey [Common Meter]

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Photograph of monkeys taken at the Medellin Conservation Park in Colombia.
Angry Monkey pops his head up,
   behind glass at the Zoo.
 I sympathize. If I were stuck
   there, I'd be angry, too.
 Sitting 'round in a monkey suit
   with walls one sees right through.

DAILY PHOTO: Joyful Murals of La Candelaria

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PROMPT: Uncertainty

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Daily writing prompt
How do you deal with uncertainty?
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Know its inevitability. Ride its currents.

After getting freaked out, realize that being freaked out changes nothing. Might as well see the unfolding of an uncertain event as the unwrapping of a gift.

PROMPT: Villain

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Daily writing prompt
What villain actually had a good point?
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Heath Ledger’s Joker [The Dark Knight (2008)] has a monologue that goes: “Nobody panics when things go ‘according to plan’… even if the plan is horrifying. If tomorrow I told the press that, like, a gang-banger will get shot, or a truckload of soldiers will be blown up, nobody panics, because it’s all part of the plan…I’m an agent of chaos. Oh, and you know the thing about chaos? It’s fair.”

It is definitely true that our psychology allows us to accept tens of thousands of deaths from drug interactions or auto accidents, but then we will go to outlandish extents — billions upon billions of dollars — to avoid the possibility of a couple of terrorism fatalities. We would use resources much better if we were not so panicky about uncertainty.

PROMPT: Fear

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Daily writing prompt
What’s a fear you’ve overcome — and how did you do it?
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Swimming in the deeps.

Swimming day in and day out until my buoyancy became an incontrovertible fact of nature that not even my amygdala could deny.

PROMPT: Self-Confidence

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Daily writing prompt
What’s the best way to build self-confidence?
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Going the places that scare you.

I’m fond of primitive living skills and unarmed martial arts that train against armed opponents. There’s something about stripping away all technologies that you can’t build yourself in the moment that gives one faith in one’s capability far deeper than a high GPA, a good paying job, or any of the usual markers of success in today’s world. I highly doubt any cavemen experienced Imposter Syndrome. If you managed to be alive into adulthood, you had an intuitive understanding that you were some kind of awesome. Not so in the modern world.

PROMPT: Won’t Live to Witness

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Daily writing prompt
What’s something you’d love to see in the future, but know you probably won’t live to witness?
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I would love to see an era in which AI and robotics frees up humans to work on the project of being better humans physically, mentally, creatively, emotionally, artistically, etc.

However, I suspect that on the way to that point there will be periods of dystopia, chaos, and quasi-Armageddon. As near as I can tell, it will involve the invention of a new form of economy (and possibly governance,) which I haven’t seen anyone discussing in the merited depths.

Tainted (Free Verse)

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Photograph taken at Andersonville National Historic Site in central Georgia.
A gorgeous day:
   the sky is blue;
   the air is crisp,
      and a bird swoops in low
          over the field to land
             in search of insects.

The sign is kind of a bummer:

   It tells me that 13,000
      people died here --
   most by shitting themselves 
      into unconsciousness.
     (it doesn't use those exact words.)

This is Andersonville -- 
   site of a Civil War prison camp.

Here, I believe in ghosts.
   I don't believe in ghosts
      when drinking my morning coffee
      at my dining room table.
   I don't believe in them when I 
      turn off my bedside lamp.
   I don't believe in them anywhere --
      anywhere else -- really. 

But here they vibrate up
    through my boot heals,
        and I fear I may 
           shit myself.

PROMPT: Fear and Self-Doubt

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Daily writing prompt
How do you handle fear and self-doubt?
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Feel it but don’t feed it. I feel whatever emotional sensation it brings with my whole attention, but don’t ruminate — i.e. don’t let the mind go into worst-case scenario building or pity partying or self-criticism. Use the sensation as an anchor for one’s awareness. This honors the source of consternation while recognizing that one’s mental (/ emotional) experience of an event is not the event, itself — i.e. that one has influence over one’s experience even when one has zero influence over the event. Gain confidence with the small emotional experiences and work toward the big ones.

This was the great gift I received in being taught sakshi bhava, the yogic practice of dispassionate witnessing.