We imagine the perfect setting will cause us to develop the habits we want to develop, but it won’t.

The perfect writing nook, the incredible gym, or the ideal kitchen will certainly provide a burst of initial inspiration and get us going. But they do nothing to overcome resistance, and resistance is inevitable.

The worst part about the perfect setting is that it buys extra time. We feel OK not getting the real work done because we are getting all setup, playing with setting, and thinking about what we’ll do. Worse still, the perfect setting crushes us if we don’t achieve what we wanted. Even with this perfect setup, I’ve squandered it – I’m such a loser!

Setting does matter.

But it’s better to relentlessly hone the habit before you create the perfect setting. Without distraction or excuse, you can hone the habit wherever you are.

Then, once the discipline is as natural as breathing, you find or craft that setting.

When a seasoned practitioner steps into the ideal setting, magic happens.

When the deprivations, limitations, and annoyances of the non-ideal setting are removed from one who’s learned to work in spite of them, new levels of precision and power are unlocked.

Put in the work. Prepare in season and out of season. Do it wherever you are. When the perfect setting avails itself, you want to be ready to really seize it.

Travelling all day today. And when I arrive, it will be in a different time zone than I left.

This kind of experience always creates a strange time bubble for me. When I arrive at the destination, you can’t convince me it was the same day as when I left. The time in transit also feels non-contiguous with what’s before and after.

It’s like the travel creates a warp zone of some kind, which stands outside of time. It’s its own self-contained reality, divorced from the origin and destination. All rules of time are different in there. Then I emerge at another time and place.

“If there was no scarcity, we could all work on self-improvement and higher things.”

If this were true, you would devote yourself to self-improvement and higher things now.

From the perspective of most humans in history, the average American lives in a post-scarcity world. Food and shelter almost never have to be thought about. Especially for the first 20 or so years of life.

Yet people still strive, work, envy, and desire.

This would remain even if all material wants could be satisfied with the push of a button.

Time is scarce. Space is scarce. You can only be in one place at one time. You can only be in the presence of those you want to be with when they also want to be with you at that same time.

This is enough for an economy, exchange, and inequality.

You can’t escape it. What it means to be a living individual is to be scarce and to live within a reality of scarcity. You cannot separate scarcity from human experience. The absence of scarcity is non-existence.

It doesn’t matter if it’s money, attention, or status – it will always take work to accumulate what others value in order to exchange it for what you value.

Rather than longing for escape, learn to do it earnestly and take joy in the process.

Yesterday, I saw a Tweet about unhealthy people delivering healthy food to other unhealthy people. It concluded that the world is insane.

There isn’t anything necessarily wrong about seeing malfunction and contradiction in something like this, or acknowledging the absurdity of the world when you see this kind of thing often. It may be true enough.

But it’s incomplete, narrow, and one-sided. It’s also easy.

To like or repeat this and similar observations (which I have often done) takes no work whatsoever. I get to keep my brain unchallenged with any deep analysis, and keep my sense of smug superiority. I walk away from the observation not having stretched myself or grown in any way, but with a slightly narrower, less happy experience of the world.

I had one of those moments of realization yesterday when I saw the Tweet. Normally I’d probably just scroll or even click like. It was a little funny and a little true. It confirmed my own tendency to judge those around me and feel I’m the only sane person in the world. A warm in-group is created by all those who rally around the observation.

Such observations and in-groups aren’t all bad. But it just struck me yesterday as too damn easy. When I’m easy on myself, I become less of who I want to be.

I forced myself to reframe the situation described in the Tweet and see it from an optimistic point of view. Total strangers struggling with health are voluntarily helping each other attempt to improve it through the miracle of market exchange.

As soon as I framed it that way, it snapped me into a better mindset. And the process of working to see a more hopeful angle sharpened my mind just a bit.

Just like the original Tweet, nothing about this alternate take was untrue.

Optimism doesn’t require you to pretend things are good when they’re not. It only requires you to push past the laziness of pessimism and find the less easy truths of a situation.

All good things must come to an end. But they can be replaced with things that are good in a new way.

It’s hard to let go of phases and feelings that are good. But the only choice is to let them go gracefully or to cling to them as they get ripped away.

Both leave you with a bittersweet pain over what no longer is, but the graceful process makes it easier to begin to grow new kinds of goodness in place of the old. Then you begin to see that the old good carried through as a seed that grew into a new goodness.

New goodness only grows as the old fades. New goodnesses are perhaps less sweet and light, but they are stronger, deeper, hardier.

Once you let go of the idea that what is good must also be easy, you will continue to see new goodness as old goodnesses pass.

Artisan pickles

But hold the communism

Good eats not ideas

I have a commitment to myself to blog daily. Laying in bed tonight I realized it somehow slipped.

I don’t have the time or energy to write something worthwhile. But it doesn’t matter. What matters is the commitment. Nobody would miss it if I didn’t post today. But I would.

I’m still not sure whether I’m excited or bored by the explosion of generative AI writing tools.

I certainly do not fear them and I’m not a luddite. The concept is fascinating, and the idea of efficiency gains is always promising, as resources get freed up to do new and interesting things.

As a writer, it doesn’t bother me. But it doesn’t really appeal to me either. I write for me. I write because the process of writing transforms my thinking. Outsourcing it to an algorithm doesn’t sound useful to me in this regard. It’d be like having a robot do push-ups on my behalf.

Then again, I use a computer, a word processor, and automatic spell-checking tools. Would writing with ink and quill be a better form of exercise? If not, why would adding autocomplete, or auto-generation of words be any different?

I’m not sure if and to what extent it is, and I don’t feel the need to have an answer. For now, I don’t have any interest in using AI as a writer.

There might be some exceptions. Some kinds of writing for business aren’t the same kind of exercise, and are not done for my own benefit like personal writing. Summarizing an article or video into a post for a company social media page, for example, is about maximizing value to the audience, not indulging the writer. If an AI can either do it better straight up, or do it well enough that the dip in quality is smaller than the value of what the employee can do with the time freed up, it could make sense to use it.

As a reader, I have not yet read anything AI generated that seemed worth my time. I’ve seen plenty of formulaic AI generated Tweet threads that seem plausibly human, which is an impressive feat, but they’ve all been the kind of threads I find uninteresting when written by humans anyway.

Most of the other AI generated stuff I’ve read is just too weird. It’s got that uncanny valley feeling. All the pieces are there but they just don’t quite connect right. It feels not so much like crappy writing, but crappy thinking dressed up in decent words.

It’s possible I’ve enjoyed reading stuff that I didn’t know was AI generated. But the percentage of content online that I enjoy reading in general seems to be dropping fast. I have sometimes suspected that it’s because more and more of it is partially AI generated, but that’s just a guess. It could be that there is just more bad writing out there, or less good writing, or that I’m getting old and senile.

I’m open to plenty of interesting things from generative AI, but so far, I just haven’t found anything to make me care much about it as a writer or reader.

I suspect as things progress, the best way to think about it will not be as writing, but as a new art form. The interplay of human words, images, prompts, and data being turned into a string of words generated by code could result in some really interesting, beautiful, and useful things that are net new, not merely replacements for current forms of writing. The way radio didn’t replace books, or TV radio.

Or it could destroy language and meaning itself and turn us into babbling idiots who experience cognitive decline with each generation and communicate entirely by blinking and grunting at computers that decide what we meant by it and go do it.

Kidding. I think.

Humility is the hardest thing to learn. It’s even harder to be humble in a healthy way, and not become self-hating (which is actually a sneaky kind of pride), or overly dependent on the narratives of others.

As you begin to open yourself up to the reality of your flaws, and work to observe, listen, and empathize with the ways in which your shortcomings affect others, you may run across someone who (intentionally or not) tries to gaslight you.

Sensing an opening, some people may seize on your humility and use it as a way to shift the weight of their own shortcomings on to you.

They will begin with truth. They’ll tell you truths that are hard to hear, but since you’re working on humility, you’ll listen and take them seriously. It may seem a bit one-sided, but you’re willing to forgo your defense and accept they ways in which you are wrong.

Feeling this victory, they will push further. They will begin to suggest more and more of their challenges are due to your shortcomings. They will try to get you to a place where you accept not just blame for your failings, but blame for everything.

They will try to rewrite history, and get you to accept that what you thought was A was really B.

What’s tricky is sometimes what you thought was A really is B. Sometimes you are deceived, and pride prevents you from seeing it. Humility is a necessary step to examine these errors.

But if humility causes you to give up all self-judgement and simply accept the judgements of others, you’ve got to pull back. It’s no longer humility, it’s merely shifting the responsibility of judgement from yourself to others.

You are responsible for finding and admitting your errors and adjusting. That’s humility. You are also responsible for seeing and admitting when you are not in error and not adjusting based on other people’s feelings. That is strength. You need both.

We need better words, not fewer.

The cure for too many weak words is more strong words. It’s tempting to eschew words in a world drowning in information. But we can’t. That option is not available to us.

We think in words. Words are the substrate of shared experience. If we try to reduce them or give up on them, we’re just enslaving ourselves to subtler words unknowingly.

Words are fearful masters but wonderful servants.

Do not run from them because you see the damage they can do and the power they wield.

Wield them wisely, forcefully, purposefully.

Play with them and learn from them so you can tame and direct them.

You can become a monster online.

You can also become a monster offline.

You can become wise, loving, and kind offline.

You can also become wise, loving, and kind online.

You can choose to use the internet to elevate yourself. It’s not the source of your problems. The inability to control impulses and addictions and develop self-control is the source.

The culprit of human problems is always found within humans.

True myth.

That’s what C.S. Lewis called the Christian story.

These are challenging concepts to square. A myth is a story that is making a point, or pointing to transcendent truths rather than attempting a retelling of facts or truth. A true story is an account of historical facts.

How can a story’s main purpose be to convey transcendent truths while also adhering to factual truth? In most stories, facts have to be woven and bent in service of the myth or metaphor, or perfect symbolism has to be sacrificed to the cause and effect world of facts.

To do both at once would be some kind of extraordinary, unlikely story. Facts that lay themselves out in a perfect mythical structure. Metaphors that actually happened.

From what little I understand it, Orthodox iconography does a wonderful job of embodying this apparent paradox. Icons depict real people and events, and have the necessary visual elements to convey this, while also being layered in symbols and metaphors telling greater truths about the structure of reality. They have a mysterious and confounding mix of literal and non-literal imagery.

Or is it all literal? Or is it all non-literal?

That’s exactly what this kind of story causes us to question. The nature of truth, of fact, of symbol, of reality itself.

This act of questioning makes me stumble into something that pulls it all together. The concept of Logos embodied. The joining of the abstract and the concrete, the eternal and the temporal. Word and Truth. Symbol and Reality.

Oh that I may die

My death become fertile soil

Oh that you may live

There’s an idea in Christianity that the world and every city in it are held up by the prayers of the Saints.

Without these quiet prayers and those who pray them in secret, everything would crumble into darkness.

Greatness brings to mind big visible achievements. But true greatness is much harder to achieve.

True greatness is consistent goodness in the details of daily life. True greatness is living in alignment with the truth, showing love, patience, kindness, strength, resolve, self-control, and joy in every duty, every friendship, every action.

True greatness is relentless movement towards perfection. True greatness never seeks and seldom gets attention.

There are true greats hidden among us. They are the saints whose lives hold together this fragmented and fallen world. They are the Remnant. It’s unlikely you’ll encounter one, and even less likely you’d realize it.

Sometimes it takes thousands of words. If the spirit that animates them is weak.

Sometimes it takes only one. If the spirit than animates it is strong.