Speak what you think now in hard words, and tomorrow speak what tomorrow thinks in hard words again, though it contradict every thing you said today. - Ralph Waldo Emerson
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I don't think Emerson is advocating flakedom, but your response does bring up two issues. One is the desire to appeal to authority. Emerson is an authority in wisdom, ergo we must accept his ideas in order to be wise. The other is the issue of taking ideas out of context and oversimplifying the message. Emerson's essays are dense and challenging to understand. You can quote from them, but those quotes are really part of a string of complicated thoughts that are easy to misinterpret when taken out of context. So Emerson, the ultimate intellectual, becomes the mouthpiece for the defense of anti-intellectualism when those seeking to validate the "smartness" of their ignorance pluck his words out of text and time.
I thought about going the sci-fi route where some future me could only send back 140 characters due to the information compression of the time-space continuum, and then I thought "That's fucking stupid."
There was way too much repetition in this challenge, and I also think Emerson may not have been the best choice for the goals of this project. It really focused on work=fulfillment. Even when the quote was much more introspective, the author's prompt translated it into "What's keeping you from having the career you want?"
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So, I didn't.
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I wish they would've coordinated a bit more.
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