What a wonderfully constructive comment. This is a great model for me to remember when I encounter things I like the substance of but dislike some of the specifics. Thank you!
Admittedly, I wrote this post 3 years ago when I was seeking clarity around disagreement during a wild time. Re-reading it now, in yet another wild time (3 years "wiser" aka having learned how to change a diaper or two), I missed out on compassion for those who are offended. Like you said, if it's important to find a mutual way forward, then it is also worth addressing the fears + emotional lives of those that are offended.
Author here, thanks for writing this thoughtful comment.
1. I agree, during debate, put the offense monster to the side.
2. In an effort to spare words, I compressed the Galileo story into something that missed important details. My bad. My understanding of the saga was that many members of the Church did engage with good faith in the emerging science of the time. What happened was mostly a political spat (though I still think there was an element of "offense" involved).
This is a great point. I suppose my hope is that by being less shutdown-offended yourself, you can have an open heart to those that are shutdown-offended. Because engaging with such people is crucial to understanding what’s actually going on (rather than just lobbing facts and conflicting histories back and forth). Trauma is real!
Came here to agree with this. Beyond basic conditionals and loops, Django templates get really hard to read IMO. Combine that with “sprinkling in” some HTMX and Alpine and you’ve got the making of a true headache that no one wants to work with, even though it technically gets the job done
I understand the cynicism about Substack thoughtbois. I send my emails to a very small group of people I’ve met in real life, and we chat and discuss many of these topics in person.
Question away! If I don’t stick the landing on the follow-up email (which I’m still working on - original email got too long hence the truncation), you can say that you were right ;)
Author here. Yes exactly! Intellectually that is 100% correct. In practice, as many others in the discussion have remarked, sustaining a meditation practice past the initial barriers is hard (as is learning programming, btw). Everyone brings their own baggage. Mine was that I thought I should be able to do it all on my own. :shrugs: Not surprisingly, I had the same experience with computer science before finding a teacher + community.
Thanks for your comment, not a fan of the snark but the content is great.
Love Shinzen! His Outline for Practice was fundamental in me discovering that there are different meditation maps that present different flavors of “progress”/“realization”
Author here. This is so spot on. I spent years avoiding the traditional practices/concepts because of a desire to be Someone Special (spiritual materialism). Burning that desire is probably one of the more profound early experiences of formal practice I’ve had with a teacher and a community. Wish I had the humility to avoid those 10 wandering years.
Just wanted to send you a sincere thanks for all your work around RN and NextJS - your libraries and patterns have really helped our team cover a lot of ground :pray:
We have to earn the generalist label - the generalist has his own form of specialization.
From what I’ve seen, the successful generalist’s command over the basics is so strong that you wonder why they never specialized deeper. The generalist has a good mental map of the territory and solves problems very proficiently, though perhaps not as quickly or rigorously as someone more specialized in a specific sliver of the problem domain.
(anecdotal from my own journey learning how to program and initially feeling frustrated by the lack of market for generalists)
You can either demolish the brick wall or you can take it apart brick by brick. One of which is overwhelming and can cause collateral damage, the other of which takes longer but accomplishes the same with more safety.
My understanding is that many spiritual traditions have historically viewed psychedelics as ego’s way of “grasping” for enlightenment, for many before they are prepared for what they may experience.
A “bad trip” can leave someone in a state of confusion that they aren’t quite prepared to deal with.
I’m all for content marketing like this but if your competency is creating culture through design at least make sure the reading experience isn’t painful
How do you want to invest in yourself? Skills, mindset, or output? Or all the above?
Money is a useful way to buy accountability for your goals. Most of what you need to know is already out there for free, it's just really easy to get discouraged or not scope your goals well enough.
I have deep respect for this entrepreneur because it is so damn easy to theorize impact/success in one’s brain and masturbate over pure thoughtstuff. It’s a whole different story when the rubber hits the road and so I really appreciate the author sharing their story. The parables to one’s personal life are impeccable.
The “Hippo” irony comes from a story from the incredible Ernesto Sirolli:
“SIROLLI: It was a project where we Italians decided to teach Zambian people how to grow food. So we arrived there with Italian seeds in southern Zambia in this absolutely magnificent valley going down to the Zambezi River. And we taught the local people how to grow Italian tomatoes and zucchini. And of course, the local people had absolutely no interest in doing that so we paid them to come and work, and sometimes they would show up. And we were amazed that the local people in such fertile valley, would not have any agriculture. But instead of asking them how come they were not growing anything, we simply said, thank God we're here. Just in the nick of time to save the Zambian people from starvation.
And of course, everything in Africa grew beautifully and we had these magnificent tomatoes. In Italy, a tomato would grow to this size. In Zambia, to this size. And we were telling the Zambians, look how easy agriculture is. When the tomatoes were nice and ripe and red, overnight, some 200 hippos came up from the river and they ate everything. And we said to the Zambians, my God, the hippos. And the Zambians said, yes, that's why we have no agriculture here. Why didn't you tell us? You never asked. I thought it was only us Italian's blundering around Africa, but then I saw what the Americans were doing, what the English were doing, what the French were doing. And after seeing what they were doing, I became quite proud of our project in Zambia because, you see, at least we fed the hippos.”
I find it more interesting to view it as a Chaos Monkey for the symbolic system that is the mind.
The ways in which we organize and make sense of the world calcify with the repetition of certain memes.
The idea at least is that psychedelics add entropy to this habituation. Perhaps this itself causes a lot of trouble for people (like myself) who think they have this world figured out in a significant way, only to start seeing God/Satan/Hades and throw that all up in the air.
Going on that journey without an experienced guide would be the dangerous part methinks (Pollan discusses this in another podcast he was a guest on recently)
Also strikes me as related to the core difference in views on mental health (Western analytical psychology a la Jung vs Eastern demonological/mystical)