pshaw_raven | Entries tagged with long reads

How To Be An Adult - Dr. Robert Kegan posits that adults go through developmental stages the way that children do. However, at least in America, we seem to think that once you turn 18 or 21 that's pretty much it. But there's more to life than that, and apparently many of us are stuck on Stage Three. At that stage we're more concerned with what other people think of us and with their emotional states. My unprofessional opinion is that we're raised to believe this is the highest standard of adulthood, and that caring about yourself simply for yourself is pure selfishness and narcissism. So you ought to be far more concerned with other people's opinions about you than how you feel about yourself. But the reality is that while you can, and to a certain extent should, care about other people, you can't really be happy if you constantly allow them to shape you. At some point you start saying "fuck it" and moving into Stage Four, where you are "self authoring," and while you can take other points of view into consideration, you also are able to explore and articulate your own opinions and values. And anyway, there's a whole article on this, and you don't exactly need me to explain it to you.

10 Signs You're an INFP - Before anyone tries to let us all know that "MBTI has been debunked," please know that it's been debunked for the one and only thing American capitalism ever valued it for, which is job placement. Beyond that, MBTI is as reliable as any other personality assessment. That being said, this is a pretty spot-on description. While I do have my shit together to a great extent and can navigate my days without too much trouble, it's because I understand my own tendency to spaciness and living inside my own head, and have taken steps to make sure things flow smoothly in the outer world. Normally this involves lots of post-it notes, and my all-time favorite "get stuff done" tool, the digital checklist. Where would I be without Habitica and Google Keep? Probably sitting in my car somewhere in Palatka, eating an ice cream cone, wondering where my other shoe is, and Googling bird calls.

How Social and Physical Technologies Collaborate to Create Culture - This one's a bit more meaty, taking on the ways in which the outer world shapes our inner worlds, which in turn shapes our outer world ... and ... you get the idea.

Current Mood: contemplative
Current Music: Owl City - Good Time

Seeking the Lost Art of Growing Old With Intention - This is an older piece from Outside Magazine on Bernd Heinrich, who is not only a record-holding ultra-runner but a naturalist who has published some fascinating and highly readable pieces on Raven behavior. Obviously I am not in any way biased about this, wink wink. And obviously, he lives the dream in his rural cabin, surrounded by the natural world. I always aspired to a Thoreau-like existence as well. I mean, not camping out in Emerson's backyard, but settling into a quiet, routine observation of nature, season to season, until I'm able to read clearly the story being told in every ditch, thicket, and field. I feel like I'm beginning to develop that kind of observational ability, too. I know which trees change when fall approaches, even if in Florida we have precious little between "roasting" and "freezing." Which birds will migrate, which will stay year-round, which flowers will begin blooming first when spring approaches, and which bear is going to shit in my driveway.

To Feel the Awe of Living, Learn to Live With Terror and Wonder - This may be a bit of an over-simplification of this essay's point, but it brings to mind something I was reading a couple of years ago that's become basically a guideline for life for me. "Be willing to do what other people won't, and you'll be able to live how other people can't." In other words, do hard stuff, be willing to put in the work, show up every day, and you'll do epic shit. And there's going to be incredibly difficult things that happen, whatever it is you're pursuing. You'll be scared, you'll feel deeply alone, even depressed, angry, and like none of it's worth it. And I think, in the "transformation stories" we see so often now, those realities get glossed over in favor of The Change itself, cue the lights and music. So it's easy to believe that someone became the person they are without the blood, sweat, and tears. But that does a huge disservice to how life really goes. Shit hurts, but it's necessary. Ever met someone who never really had any hard or scary times in their lives? Didn't you want to just punch them in the face? Yeah.

How Energy Bars Became America's Favorite Snack Food - I'm certainly not above eating an energy bar as a meal replacement. Typically I make my own at home, mainly because I can, and also because I can control the amount of sugar, and because it's sometimes not easy to find good vegan ones. That's becoming less of a problem, though, as I start seeing more openly vegan (as opposed to accidentally vegan) snacks in grocery stores and such. My only problem with my homemade bars is that I can't take them out on a run. I haven't figured out how to pack them, and I assume if I'm going to take a stab at ultrarunning I'm going to have to figure this out. I guess I could buy something, but I like my little recipe - it tastes pretty good, and depending on whether I use vanilla extract or almond, it can be "just chocolatey" or have a more sophisticated, amaretto like flavor. But I've got the nutrition dialed in - fats, complex carbs, simple sugars, etc. Fiber, but not too much. Even for me - someone who routinely eats a very high-fiber diet - too much fiber on race day can lead to ... predicaments. But then, towards the end of long races I'm shoveling stuff in my mouth without being too critical of what it is. Which is how I've ended up chugging beer and shooting vodka, LOL.

Current Mood: thoughtful
Current Music: Crowded House - Don't Dream It's Over

I've recently been reading Mystics & Zen Masters by Thomas Merton, and I'm now at his essay, "The Other Side of Despair: Notes on Christian Existentialism." It first appeared in 1965 but it obviously still has a great deal to say to us today, despite the fact that at the time, many of the philosophers Merton cites were actually his living contemporaries. You've often throughout history had people who warn against the dangers of the herd, or the public, or the collective mass of minds which forms "society." As in the odious phrases "productive member of society," or "fitting in," or "being well adjusted." In this essay, Merton is addressing a particular sort of existentialism, which isn't nihilism or pessimism necessarily, but the philosophy of a person who comes down on the side of existence, as in the experience and life of individual people, rather than the collective experiences of society or the public, which often aren't experiences at all but are filtered, packaged entertainments.

The entire essay is posted online, here, and it's a long one. Pour a cup of coffee and get comfortable if you want to read the whole thing at one go. Long as it is, the main reason I'm posting any of this today is to call attention to a passage that I feel is worth quoting at length - italics are mine.

The objective truth of science remains only half the truth – or even less than that – if the subjective truth, the true-being (Wahrsein), of the subject is left out of account. This true-being is not found by examining the subject as if it were another object. It is found in personal self-realization, that is to say, in freedom, in responsibility, in dialogue (with man and God), and in love. Existentialism is, in other words, concerned with authentic personal identity, and concerned with it in a way that behaviorist methods and psychometry can never be. (The tests are neither interested in nor capable of finding out who thinks, only with describing how he reacts.) The chief complaint that sets existentialism over against positivism in diametric opposition is this: the claim of science and technology to expand the capacity of the human person for life and happiness is basically fraudulent, because technological society is not the least interested in values, still less in persons: it is concerned purely and simply with the functioning of its own processes. Human beings are used merely as means to this end, and the one significant question it asks in their regard is not who they are but how they can be most efficiently used.

At this point, we might go back a hundred years to consider a prophetic page of Kierkegaard’s, from The Present Age. Here he describes the process of “leveling” and of “reflection,” related to what has come to be called “alienation” and “estrangement” in more recent existential thought.

The process which Kierkegaard calls “leveling” is that by which the individual person loses himself in the vast emptiness of a public mind. Because he identifies this abstraction with objective reality, or simply with “the truth,” he abdicates his own experience and intuition. He renounces conscience and is lost. But the public mind is a pure abstraction, a nonentity. “For,” says Kierkegaard, “the public is made up of individuals at the moments when they are nothing,” that is to say, when they have abdicated conscience, personal decision, choice, and responsibility, and yielded themselves to the joy of being part of a pure myth. The mythical being which thinks and acts for everybody, and does the most shameful of deeds without a moment of hesitation or of shame, is actually no being at all. Those who take part in its acts can do so insofar as they have abstracted themselves from themselves and have surrendered to the public void, which they believe to be fully and objectively real: this collective self whose will is the will of nobody, whose mind is the mind of nobody, which can contradict itself and remain consistent with itself. “More and more individuals, owing to their bloodless indolence, will aspire to be nothing at all – in order to become the public.” Therefore, Kierkegaard concludes, the public is an “abstract whole formed in the most ludicrous way by all the participants becoming a third party (an onlooker).” This process of leveling, of self-abandonment, of abdication of identity, in order to dare what nobody dares and to participate in the unthinkable as though one were an innocent bystander, sweeps through the world as a “hopeless forest fire of abstraction.” The individual no longer belongs to God, to himself, to his beloved, to his art or his science; he is conscious of belonging in all things to an abstraction to which he is subjected by reflection (estrangement) just as a serf belongs to an estate. The abstract leveling process, that self-combustion of the human race produced by the friction which arises when the individual ceases to exist as singled out by religion, is bound to continue like a trade wind until it consumes everything.”

The existentialist is aware of this danger above all. He tirelessly insists that it is the great danger of our time, since it is completely prevalent both in the capitalist positivism of America and in the Marxist positivism of the Communist countries. For this reason, the existentialist is condemned everywhere for a wide variety of reasons which usually boil down to this one: he is a rebel, an individualist, who, because he withdraws from the common endeavor of technological society to brook on his own dissatisfactions, condemns himself to futility, sterility, and despair. Since he refuses to participate in the glorious and affluent togetherness of mass society, he must pay the price of fruitless isolation. He is a masochist. He gets no better than he deserves.

And now for something completely different, later today I'll tackle the last of the three random topics I was given - architecture. It turned out to be a rabbit hole I went down after innocently Googling Frank Lloyd Wright and now I really want to go to Chicago for a week or so.

Current Mood: thoughtful

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The Raven's Roost

“What we have to be is what we are.” ― Thomas Merton

Entries tagged with long reads

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