Playfulness? (I'm sure at some point I'll get a grip.)
Affirmation for this morning: "I am a playful participant in life, and I always have the option to make something a fun game rather than a heavy burden."
My preachy financial column this morning: "When you’re out in public, think to yourself about the type of person you want to be present in your community and then be that person. There’s no better way to bring about the people you want to have in your community than by being that person by example.
Remember we’re not as different as we sometimes think we are. It is very, very easy in moments of change to see people on the other side of that change as being incredibly different than you. It’s easy to see them as something “other,” something unrelatable.
That is basically never true.
To buy into the idea that people on the other side of change are unrelatable does nothing but damage your personal and professional relationships. It puts you into a situation where you’re restricting yourself to interacting and dealing with only a subset of people, which is going to diminish your life.
Instead, you should be looking at what we all have in common, even across divides. We all love our families. We all love our friends. We all want a better life for ourselves. We all want better economic outcomes for the people around us. We all want to experience happiness in life.
We agree on those core things almost universally. The difference between us is solely on the path to ironically identical goals. The events of our lives cause us to follow different routes to those end goals than other people. Those differing events causes us to look at dilemmas in life differently because we’re simply at different places in our own journey, not because the person who sees it differently is evil.
It’s simply not true.
Whenever you see someone expressing views different than your own, take a moment to realize how much you really have in common with that person. You both have people that you deeply love. You both want to see a better world, though you may differ in some of the specifics. You both want to build a better life for yourself and for the people you care the most about. All you really differ on are the details, and they’re small by comparison and often shaped just by different life experiences.
Don’t get caught up in the little details. If you do, you throw away wonderful relationships and awesome opportunities, and for what? Very little. (Are the "little details" here racism, misogyny, rape, innapropriate social control of others, and adopting a swinging dick attitude towards world policing and war power? Those just don't feel like "little details" to me.)
The old Chinese proverb, “May you live in interesting times,” is meant as an insult, because to live in “interesting” times meant that you were likely living in dangerous and unfortunate times. Let’s do our best to make these times a little less interesting. (I'd really like to try that--genuinely--but I'm not the one that has made these times "interesting." :()
My response to said article: (I doubt they'll approve it.)
While I appreciate the calming rhetoric here, the notion that the divide that separates folks currently are "little details" is false. Racism, homophobia, misogyny, rape-culture, bullying, inappropriately legislating others' lives from who they marry to health care choices and so forth are not little details. I agree strongly with the overall point this article makes--which is in difficult, turbulent times, slow down to avoid poor financial choices. I am a poster child for that poor strategy in 2008. But this article far oversteps its case. Just two cents from a long-time avid lurker.
And, #2 I deleted my account there.
My preachy financial column this morning: "When you’re out in public, think to yourself about the type of person you want to be present in your community and then be that person. There’s no better way to bring about the people you want to have in your community than by being that person by example.
Remember we’re not as different as we sometimes think we are. It is very, very easy in moments of change to see people on the other side of that change as being incredibly different than you. It’s easy to see them as something “other,” something unrelatable.
That is basically never true.
To buy into the idea that people on the other side of change are unrelatable does nothing but damage your personal and professional relationships. It puts you into a situation where you’re restricting yourself to interacting and dealing with only a subset of people, which is going to diminish your life.
Instead, you should be looking at what we all have in common, even across divides. We all love our families. We all love our friends. We all want a better life for ourselves. We all want better economic outcomes for the people around us. We all want to experience happiness in life.
We agree on those core things almost universally. The difference between us is solely on the path to ironically identical goals. The events of our lives cause us to follow different routes to those end goals than other people. Those differing events causes us to look at dilemmas in life differently because we’re simply at different places in our own journey, not because the person who sees it differently is evil.
It’s simply not true.
Whenever you see someone expressing views different than your own, take a moment to realize how much you really have in common with that person. You both have people that you deeply love. You both want to see a better world, though you may differ in some of the specifics. You both want to build a better life for yourself and for the people you care the most about. All you really differ on are the details, and they’re small by comparison and often shaped just by different life experiences.
Don’t get caught up in the little details. If you do, you throw away wonderful relationships and awesome opportunities, and for what? Very little. (Are the "little details" here racism, misogyny, rape, innapropriate social control of others, and adopting a swinging dick attitude towards world policing and war power? Those just don't feel like "little details" to me.)
The old Chinese proverb, “May you live in interesting times,” is meant as an insult, because to live in “interesting” times meant that you were likely living in dangerous and unfortunate times. Let’s do our best to make these times a little less interesting. (I'd really like to try that--genuinely--but I'm not the one that has made these times "interesting." :()
My response to said article: (I doubt they'll approve it.)
While I appreciate the calming rhetoric here, the notion that the divide that separates folks currently are "little details" is false. Racism, homophobia, misogyny, rape-culture, bullying, inappropriately legislating others' lives from who they marry to health care choices and so forth are not little details. I agree strongly with the overall point this article makes--which is in difficult, turbulent times, slow down to avoid poor financial choices. I am a poster child for that poor strategy in 2008. But this article far oversteps its case. Just two cents from a long-time avid lurker.
And, #2 I deleted my account there.