Everything but waiting the five minutes to press the plunger on the French press. As Tom Petty said, “The waiting is the hardest part.”
PROMPT: Lose Track of Time
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Tag Archives: dailyprompt
PROMPT: Bothers
I once got a masala cookie beside my coffee at a cafe that took itself way too seriously. What’s a masala cookie, you might ask? It’s treachery, I say. It sits on a plate pretending to be a delightful sugar cookie, but without sugar or sweetness of any kind — just salt and a spice mixture. It was supposed to bring out the notes of cherry, chocolate, and… Blah, Blah, Blah. You know what would bring out the notes of chocolate in the coffee, some fucking chocolate in the cookie — that’s what. You can’t just impersonate a cookie and expect anyone to tolerate that level of betrayal. I certainly don’t want to live in such a world. That’s it, the only offense of recent years that I haven’t gotten over. A few years after it happened, I walked by that place and saw that the cafe had gone out of business, replaced by a Hello Kitty phone-case store. Good! I hope the owner and staff have moved on, putting their liberal arts graduate degrees to good use, teaching at community colleges as they should, rather than terrorizing the public with pseudo-cookies to make their overpriced coffee seem more of a bargain. I’ll end my rant here to go sit with my trauma.
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PROMPT: 10 Things
List 10 things you know to be absolutely certain.
1.) Nothing is permanent.
2.) The world is not what it seems.
3.) One’s subjective experience is not determined by the state of the world.
4.) Nobody grasps enough truth to be intolerant.
5.) Uncertainty is the root of all fear.
6.) Fear is the root of all hatred.
7.) Hatred is a subjective experience (See #3.) Also, uncertainty is the root of all hatred (by the transitive property,) hence the benefit of travel.
8.) Any who: a.) has suffered a string of hardships; b.) allows themselves to believe that some “other” is wholly responsible for said hardships; and c.) who lacks a sufficient sense of self-empowerment to avoid surrendering entirely to a group identity can (and likely will) become a Nazi (or the equivalent of their day.)
9.) No one can predict the future. [Regardless of how much we all love to try. (See #5.)]
10.) Entropy increases (ultimately, in a closed system.)
NOTE: I remain ready to abandon any certainty in the face of better information.
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PROMPT: Security or Adventure
Not sure what to do with this one. It reads to me much as would, “Would you prefer air or water?”
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PROMPT: Better with Age
Equanimity and emotional resilience — i.e. the ability to give fewer f___ks.
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PROMPT: Bed
When I can’t read two sentences without drifting off, I sleep. When the sun comes up, I awaken.
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PROMPT: Comfort
Daily writing prompt
What strategies do you use to increase comfort in your daily life?
I never writhe in a tub of broken glass… anymore.
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PROMPT: Excited
I think humanity has a golden age coming. Unfortunately, a.) as John Maynard Keynes pointed out, “In the long run, we are all dead.” Accordingly, I don’t expect I’ll live to see that great age. And, b.) said great age is likely to come on the backend of a tragic period whose reach and devastation will make the Second World War seem like a puny and short-lived regional skirmish by comparison. [I also think there’s a good chance I’ll miss the worst of this, but there’s no accounting for the rapidity at which it might move (and the process has begun.)]
The root of this combination of relative near-term pessimism and long-run optimism is the observation that we are experiencing a technological revolution that there is no reason to believe won’t end in machines that are both smarter and more capable than we, and we have no plan for what to do in that scenario. We have no conception of what an economy looks like in which machines do everything faster, more cheaply, and more efficiently than human labor. I wouldn’t be so pessimistic if our institutions and legal frameworks were trending better and better, but — in fact — after years of spreading rule of law and democracy, we are starting to see global shrinkage and a rise of a strange populist authoritarianism that I can only imagine being catastrophic under the stress test that is to come.
Why the long-term optimism? Nothing lasts forever, and tough times breed tough and capable people. [Whereas comfort addiction is a major factor in our near-term predicament.] I think the Golden Age will be humans learning not to be defined by production / consumption but by developing the human body and mind to its utmost capacity.
A lot of people are worried about population collapse. I am not so worried about that. I think that: a.) humanity could use some thinning; b.) we do fine with long time scale threats. As pressures rise, the adjustments start and — perhaps with some growing pains — we’ll get where we need to be. The AI / Machine Learning revolution concerns me because I suspect it will happen too quickly to steer the ship (like being in an aircraft carrier as a tsunami comes, there’s no agility to navigate out of the way and no speed to outrun it, you just have to take the damage and try to recover.)
You were probably looking for an answer like flying cars, but I gave up on those long ago.
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PROMPT: Harmony
My wonkish need to analyze the train wreck that is our present state of governance and social discourse.
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PROMPT: Music
I’m not one for favorites; I think it’s a form of experiential laziness. That said, there is music that has particular emotional resonance for me because it’s what was playing where I was when I was when I was younger — mostly rock and indie rock.
Tiger Riding for Beginners 