Category: Commentary

Gonna try to do a short video every week or so exploring the possibilities opened up by micro+nanopayments. Purely for my own fun, enjoyment, and education.

Here’s the first edition (also on the Isaac Morehouse Podcast):

Universities are dying.

They have long ceased being the best way to gain knowledge.

More recently, the degrees they confer have ceased being the best way to signal employability; the only exception being jobs that legally require them. (Such jobs are increasingly stodgy, unattractive, bureaucratic, backwards, and subservient to tyrannical governments).

The final leg universities stand on is the mythology of social status. That’s it. That’s what gives them what waning power they have.

I can’t count the number of parents I’ve talked with who recognize that college is one of the worst places to learn and degrees are one of the weakest ways to try to get hired, but who still needlessly bite the bullet and send their kid anyway.

Often, they shackle themselves or their children to tens of thousands in debt along the way. They despise the infantilizing policies on campus and bitter ideas in the classroom. They see the waste, corruption, stupidity, warped worldview, and bad habits cultivated and rewarded by the system.

But they still send their kids.

Why?

Because they value the decaying social status indicator of a degree. They want a shortcut to communicate to the world that they are good parents and their kids are better than most.

Even when they know the college experience is not good for their kids, many go through with it because they panic. They don’t know how to face other parents who ask what their kids are doing. They don’t know how to deal with the social expectation among the masses that college is somehow respectable.

I can think of few things less respectable than unthinkingly going into debt to spend half a decade drinking and begrudgingly completing meaningless assignments for professors detached from the world all so you can emerge with a piece of paper that does nothing to help you start a career and mindsets that make success harder.

This doesn’t mean it’s not possible for the college experience to be good or valuable or any of those things. The point is, almost no one seriously analyzes it. Almost no one sets out specific goals, examines the various ways to achieve them, and compares college to the relevant alternatives. Because only college confers the social praise of the self-appointed “important people”.

The priests of our cultural religion teach that you are not important without a degree. It’s the equivalent of a blue checkmark on Twitter. A self-serious symbol that turns out to be a better indicator of who is a fool or apologist for tyrants than who’s a serious person.

As easy as it is to see the foolishness of university degrees as a status symbol from a distance, the spell the priests have cast over the past half century remains powerful. Even for those who should know better.

A college degree does not make you serious, important, or special in any way. It only proves that you were willing to follow the crowd. A dangerous prospect, especially lately.

Now, universities are extending their absurdities to the bodily autonomy of their students. They are forcing students to cover their faces, swab their noses, present medical papers, or get injected with crony corporate concoctions they know little about. They are belittled and harassed in the process. The few social joys of campus life are reduced, while tuition is increased.

Now is the time to pull the last leg out from under the zombie corpse of college.

Now is the time to break the spell cast by its priests and reject the idea that degrees make you matter.

Now is the time to courageously unleash human creativity and imagination and engage in alternative educational, social, and career experiences.

There is a war for the mind. A war of information. A war for control of human societies and cultures. This war requires you to believe the priests and accept the idea that The Ivory Tower is more important than you, and those they slap a stamp of approval on more important than those who bypass the madness.

The tyrannical individuals, policies, and beliefs crippling the world today emanate from universities and the sphere of influence they enjoy. They continue to take your money and weaken young minds all while using their undue influence to make your life worse.

Don’t accept it. Don’t allow it.

You can overcome the pernicious influence of “experts” by simply ignoring them and refusing to give them your money, attention, and children.

Institutional paper doesn’t matter. The life, ideas, and actions of individuals humans do.

You are free to pursue life, learning, and career any way you choose, investing your time, money, and energy anywhere you wish. Do you want to empower the system that wishes to enslave you, or do you want to blaze a trail of freedom and show the world a better way?

It can be hard to keep connected to the purpose of your daily actions. For me, the reason we keep grinding at Crash.co is all about our mission:

To help people discover and do what makes them come alive.

This mission is near and dear to my heart, and animates both Praxis and Crash, the two companies I started around it.

It also anchors into an even deeper mission; that of my own life.

My personal mission is to make people free (starting with myself). Freedom has been my animating principle my entire life, and this mission became explicitly clear when I was around 20 or so.

I strive every day to make myself as free as possible and to help others live free. Freedom is not only a political concept, though that is a major part of it. It begins in the mind.

A mindset of freedom, ownership, and agency unshackles people from guilt, shame, fear, status-chasing, compliance, thoughtless following, and listlessness. That mindset is formed by experiences more than through ideas, though both matter. Most people have been conditioned into accepting an unfree world, starting with school and cementing itself in career.

I want to bust that to bits.

Praxis helps people escape the college debt and mindset trap and realize what they can do when they take charge instead of following norms.

Crash grew out of that as an effort to reach a much larger audience with a much smaller piece of the freedom puzzle. If we can help people realize just a little bit of the power they have at that crucial moment when they are trying to find a job, we can increase the freedom in the world.

If we can wake people up just a little bit with a mindset of ownership, the compounding effect is massive. Going from feeling dead inside in your job or on your job hunt – assuming it’s all just luck and you live at the whims of some resume-scanning HR software – to feeling just a bit more alive has the power to change the workforce and the world.

Individuals who see, for the first time, that they can be alive and find work that makes them alive are individuals who are harder to shackle and enslave. A world full of such people is a freer world.

Drops on a rock, wearing away little by little.

“How do we make the world a better place?”

Make yourself a better person.

“How do we expand freedom?”

Make yourself more free.

“How do we improve people’s habits and health?”

Kill your bad habits and get healthier every day.

“How do we spread truth and light?”

Always tell the truth and purge darkness from your life.

“How do we encourage courage and virtue?”

Pay the price for doing what’s right.

“How do we improve education?”

Push yourself to learn every day.

“How can we improve families?”

Improve your family.

“How can we curb misinformation and programming?”

Never follow the news.

‘We’ is nothing. You are the only thing.

I’ve never found a funk that doesn’t snap with giving.

Just giving away goodness, value, joy, or any part of myself without any need or expectation of return works a transformation in me. It pulls me out of myself. I pour myself out until empty.

Then guess what?

I get filled again.

Conserving what I have like a cup of stagnant water is absurd once I’m reminded that there’s a spring of life that refills everything I pour out.

Sounds so stupid and cliché. But it literally never fails for me. The key, however, is truly giving with an undivided heart.

Giving while holding something back, or telling yourself you’re giving all when you’re not, or giving while wishing you weren’t are recipes for destruction. (Ask Ananias and Sapphira.) Bette to not give at all if the giving is free, open, full, and genuine.

But giving with abandon – giving as a way of being – just blows the lid off all the self-pity, frustration, stagnation, and joylessness in life.

Why I have to consciously re-adopt this mindset every day even after learning so many times I’ll never know. But that’s why I write about stuff; to help cement it into my small brain!

Once again, I’ll be doing my daily writing on some other platforms – some public, some not – so this blog will be a bit more sporadic for a while.

It breaks through every iron gate

And shackles of the law

It won’t be held by iron fist

Nor coaxed with velvet paw

No tide too great to stand against

Nor fire too hot to quell

It burns with fire the fire that burns

And floods out flood with swell

I remember when my good friend TK Coleman started his first daily blogging challenge. He had a medical emergency and was in a hospital bed but he still managed to publish a post that day.

Those are the most powerful posts. Not because the content or style are better. They’re usually worse. They are powerful because one of the greatest strengths is being able to act when you’re weak.

Each act has two sources of power: the strength of what the act is, and the strength in the fact that you acted at all.

Posting a few paragraphs to a blog is not a very powerful thing in itself. But keeping a commitment in the midst of physical illness is.

The fact that you are weak and unable to bring strength to an act only opens more opportunity to increase the power of the fact that you acted at all.

There’s what you do. When conditions are great you can do more. Then there’s what you do with what you have. You can always choose to do the most given the constraints.

When creator’s block comes, it can be helpful to re-think what creating is.

J.R.R. Tolkien called all acts of creation, other than the initial one by God, ‘sub-creation’. Only the uncreated Creator brought something out of nothing. After that, all of our acts are utilizing things already in existence.

We are discovering, rethinking, using in new ways, re-arranging, combining, unbundling, and re-ordering bits of creation. Remembering this can take some of the cognitive burden off of creating.

Find some stuff that’s out there in the universe. Pick up little shards of reality and forge them into something new.

Our relationship with screens is very young.

It’s only been a hundred years since we began using them. It’s only been a decade since we have them on ourselves 24/7 and most jobs require them at least many times a day.

We’re just learning the ways they change us. Blue light impacts our circadian rhythm. EMFs impact us in ways barely known. Dopamine addiction alters our psychology. Staring and typing affects our posture.

I suspect humans in the future will look at people in the first half of the twenty-first century as a bit crazy and unwise in their screen habits.

We’ll learn ways to better integrate our lives with this technology to maximize benefit and reduce harm.

“We are destroying arguments and all arrogance raised against the knowledge of God, and we are taking every thought captive to the obedience of Christ.” — 2 Corinthians 10:5

If thoughts can be taken captive, then the mind is more like a signal receiver than generator.

This was the common view of the mind until relatively recently, and it has very interesting and hopeful implications.

Ideas come to us. Nobody knows exactly from where or how. One of the more interesting and influential books I’ve read is Arthur Koestler’s The Act of Creation. This book studies the ‘eureka’ moment – the point at which a new idea enters the minds. It’s a tricky thing. You can affect the setting, and direct your mental focus to different areas, but you cannot consciously control the appearance of the new idea. It comes to you. You receive it.

This leads to several important questions about where ideas originate and how and why they come to us when they do. Even without solving that, the idea of the mind as receiver implies very useful things about how to conduct ourselves.

For one, it does away with the notion that you are your thoughts. If you are bombarded with negative thoughts, that does not mean you are bad. It would be like saying your bones are fundamentally flawed because they keep getting bombarded with rocks that fracture them.

This is empowering, but also challenging. You have the ability to filter thoughts, dismiss thoughts, entertain thoughts, and enact them. You also have the responsibility to do so.

The thought as captive analogy is really quite excellent. First, capture the thought. Don’t let it run wild in your mind. Confine it to a space you control. Interrogate it. Figure out its nature. If it’s friendly, let it in. If not, cast it out.

Usually, this process is quick and easy. When a good thought pops into mind, in your gut you immediately know it’s true. Bad thoughts tend to be trickier. They require more analysis, which is often a sign that they are bad or in the very least dangerous.

I think the common conception of the brain as a computer that generates ideas is quite flawed. Whatever is going on biologically, the mind as a receiver and thoughts as signals originating elsewhere is a powerful paradigm in practice.

More and more people sound like a Biblical prophets or religious cult leaders.

Instead of a CEO tweeting out something like:

“Hey we’re working on something really cool, can’t wait to launch it!”

You get stuff like:

“You shall soon see what the meaning of multivariance is when combined with human energy.”

Jokes are cryptic memes. Announcements are cryptic insinuations. Things are rarely stated plainly, but delivered as vague and fiery predictions with plenty of room for confusion and interperetation.

Mystery sells.

Everyone wants to be in on secret knowledge. People want magic. They want the amazing outcome without the predictable process of steady hard wok. As a result, communication gets cryptic, epic, vague, symbolic, and lures people into believing something big is ever around the corner and all they need to do is believe.

This phenomenon has been around for forever, but it seemed relegated to the fringes. Now it’s mainstream. Everything is starting to resemble a cult.

And no matter how many disappointments come, the belief and desire to be in on a secret doesn’t seem to fade.

Ever come across Q anon true believers? They still believe that everything is going perfectly according to Donald Trump’s plan and it’s just their lack of understanding that prevents them from seeing how. Each disappointment is alleviated by looking to the next cryptic message and trying to find an interpretation that gives hope.

I suspect there’s something about an inflationary economy, inherited wealth and quality of living, loss of agency while many things decline, that combine to create a get-rich-quick magic potion seeking culture.

There are many good things about this change. Symbolism is real and powerful. Many truths cannot be captured or communicated with straightforward words. A new appreciation for magic, enchantment, myth, and symbol are welcome.

But it’s also weird. It’s bled into everything, so half the time I can’t tell what the hell people are talking about, and I wonder if that’s the point.

Some days are hard. But the hardship has meaning if I take the time to connect with what really matters.

Lots of things matter. But only a few things really matter.

I don’t usually wake up thinking about what really matters, just a bunch of stuff that seems to matter. It’s a choice and conscious effort to ask myself what really matters, answer it, and focus on it throughout the day.

Sometimes I have to change scenery, music, or posture to help snap my heart and soul back into the epic battle that is at the heart of every day and all of reality. There is always a war going on between light and dark, and I am always a part of it. Every choice, every thought.

To remember this is to find the strength to march into another day, come what may.

I’m not a details person. But I’m trying to find ways to pay attention to small details I can employ to create big value for others.

When you buy a new iPhone, the details of the packaging are amazing. They create these small moments of delight that set the tone for your entire relationship to the device.

When a song has that one background instrument that gives a little unexpected ear candy in that one small part, you wonder what made someone put that in? It’s not necessary to the main melody, but it’s the very thing that separates great songs from good.

I once bought a book that arrived in a very satisfying plastic wrapping that opened smoothly. I loved that book more than the contents warranted.

When someone takes the time to deliver small, pleasing details where they do not have to it creates not only value that will come back to benefit them, but also a positive externality of delight for the entire world.

I’m trying to get better at this.

In the Garden of Eden, Adam and Eve ate the fruit because they wanted a good thing – to be like God. But they were not ready. The fruit was an attempt to short-circuit the process.

We tend to think of things as simply good or bad, rather than good or bad depending on place, time, person, and circumstance. We also tend to think of bad as inherent in the object or act, rather than a matter of whether we are able to handle it. Most good things are bad if experienced too soon.

Often, people achieve success or wealth faster than they develop the character necessary to handle it. We see this play out all the time among celebrities in tragic ways.

It’s better to not succeed than to succeed before you’re ready.

Rather than externalizing what choices are good or bad, it’s better to look internally at what you are living in accordance with. What can you handle? Have you done the inner work to make yourself worthy of the next level?

If not, you shouldn’t wish it on yourself.