🗣️People Like Us...🗣️
🔥Welcome to volume #00038!🔥
I’m Christian Champ. This is ☯️The Middle Way Newsletter ☯️. It is a place where I write, explore, share, and invite you along for the journey.
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🗣️People Like Us...🗣️
People like us show up. We do our best work. We try to bring out the best in ourselves and others. We show up with positive energy because we know energy is contagious. We reach out a hand and try to lift up others.
We realize it is all play. We cheer on others rooting for them, too, and play infinite games. We’d rather lose in service of the team than win a solo mission.
We realize it is all about estasis, communitas, and catharsis. We find flow and live inflow. We know it is about the collective as much as it is about ourselves. We respect death and know that we die each moment.
We do the damn thing when it needs to be done. We seek to be the change in the world we want to see. We try to leave everything a little bit better than when we showed up.
We act in the service of our family, friends, and the community.
📓Articles to Read📓
Agnes Callard on Acceptance Parenting especially during a pandemic.
Economist Bryan Caplan supplements this advice with some science to ease the parental burden. Twin studies, he points out, suggest that genes are significantly more influential than parenting with respect to a wide variety of factors: future income, personality traits, educational attainment, religiosity and marital status. This knowledge, Caplan hopes, ought to give parents permission to take shortcuts: given how minimally you can influence your children, you might as well buy more childcare, ease up on those extracurriculars, let them watch TV and take vacations without them. Let your children roam free outside! They are safer than they have ever been. Don’t let them walk all over you, use discipline to set boundaries—it’s ultimately harmless—and make your own life easier!
The consequences of the shift extend well beyond increased parental stress levels. When it comes to the question of whose job it is to conform to whom, the sign has gotten reversed. As a teenager coming of age in the 1990s, I watched the tide turn on homosexuality. From my vantage point, a lot of the change seemed to be driven by acceptance parenting: those who couldn’t stomach rejecting their children rejected their own homophobia instead. As acceptance parenting takes hold culturally, we find ourselves speaking more and more about what it takes to be a “good parent” and less and less frequently of the virtues of a “good son/daughter.” The more we expect the parents’ acceptance, the less concerned we are with children’s obedience.
This in turn helps explain why parenting has objectively become harder. If you want to understand why parents are so much more stressed than they used to be, just consider the slip between “transsexual” and “transhuman”: you cannot predict what, at the end of the day, you will be asked to accept; and you know that from day one; and that knowledge—of your own ignorance—casts a shadow over every parenting decision you make.
Rethink Humanity Report offers an interesting glimpse into the possible futures and the technological emergence we are seeing. Of course with great power comes great responsibility.
Throughout history, 10x advancements in the five foundational sectors have driven the emergence of a new and vastly more capable civilization than any which has come before. But this has only been possible when combined with vastly improved organizational capabilities. This has always represented a formidable challenge for incumbents, and the lessons of history are sobering – every leading civilization, from Çatalhöyük and Sumer to Babylonia and Rome, has fallen as it reached the limits of its ability to organize society and solve the problems created by its production system. When these civilizations were threatened with collapse, they looked backwards and attempted to recapture the glory days by patching up their production system and doubling down on their Organizing System rather than adapting. The result was descent into a dark age
There can be sunshine or there can be darkness, which do you choose?
Dark ages do not occur for lack of sunshine, but for lack of leadership. The established centers of power, the U.S., Europe, or China, handicapped by incumbent mindsets, beliefs, interests, and institutions, are unlikely to lead. In a globally competitive world, smaller, hungrier, more adaptable communities, cities, or states such as Israel, Mumbai, Dubai, Singapore, Lagos, Shanghai, California, or Seattle are more likely to develop a winning Organizing System. They will appear, just like their predecessors, as if from nowhere, with capabilities far beyond those of incumbent leaders. Everyone else could get trampled before they have time to understand what is happening.
The intervening decade will be turbulent, destabilized both by technology disruptions that upend the foundations of the global economy and by system shocks from pandemics, geopolitical conflict, natural disasters, financial crises, and social unrest that could lead to dramatic tipping points for humanity including mass migrations and even war. In the face of each new crisis we will be tempted to look backward rather than forward, to mistake ideology and dogma for reason and wisdom, to turn on each other instead of trusting one another.
If we hold strong, we can emerge together to create the wealthiest, healthiest, most extraordinary civilization in history. If we do not, we will join the ranks of every other failed civilization for future historians to puzzle over. Our children will either thank us for bringing them an Age of Freedom, or curse us for condemning them to another dark age. The choice is ours.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Jamie Wheal’s new podcast featuring Sue Phillips hosted on the Neuro Hacker Collective network (Spotify)
We need inspiration, healing, and connection (estasis, catharsis, and communitas) per Flow Genome Project (Jamie’s group) or belonging, becoming and beyond (Sue’s lab uses) to uncover what the soul needs and designing for it.
Belonging is knowing and being known, loving and being loved
Becoming is growing in our capacity to be the people we are called to be
Beyond is our connection to something more
Spiritual practices can be adapted and used in today’s world. It is the delivery that can be changed for spiritual practices
The need for covenants with spiritual practices
Agnes Callard on Econtalk, speaking with Russ Roberts about her book Aspiration (Spotify)
Agnes Callard: Aspiration is the rational process of value acquisition.
So, aspiration is how you got from there to here. How you came to care about the things that you care about.
Absolutely. Aristotle would think if you devoted your life to that, it would be selfish. It's not all about how perfect, how improved you are. Sometimes your life should also be about other people.
Agnes Callard: So, I want to distinguish, first, between giving people advice and saying why something is good. So, I think--like, I have an academic paper, okay, on aspiration in Elena Ferrante, this novelist whose next novel is coming out in a couple days--I'm really excited. And when I write about Elena Ferrante, I'm actually, trying among other things, to convey my own love and enthusiasm of the novels. I want to convey that to people. I think that's a good thing to do. Like, show people what's beautiful in something: because it helps them aspire. Including aspiration, right?
Russ Roberts: Yeah.
Agnes Callard: Absolutely. But, I think that's very different than telling someone what to do. It's not telling them, 'You should choose this over something else,' because I don't know that they should choose it over something else. It's not giving them a recipe for how they might succeed in that domain. It really is in no sense telling them what to do. It's just showing them that here is a good thing that is in some sense available to them.
Now, it's not that I want to deny either telling people what to do. I do that all the time. I'm totally comfortable telling people what to do, but the issue is not whether I know them. So, the issue is not whether they've asked me, it's whether I know them. I don't think I can productively tell someone what to do unless I know them pretty well.
And so, when people ask me for advice who are strangers, I fear that I will give them bad advice--because I don't know them.
But, something I can do for them is just explain why something is good or beautiful in such a way that it might hopefully resonate with them and they'll be inspired to pursue it. That's absolutely a thing I can do--including with aspiration. And I try to do it.
Russ Roberts: But what I find fascinating about it is that the--as you get older, if you're lucky or not, but I notice that as I get older, I get to glimpse both of my selves. So, I get up to get the nuts and I realize, 'Oh, I'm doing this compulsive thing, I've developed a habit over. I don't really like this habit and I'm going to eat the nuts anyway. And what I'm exploring right now in my personal improvement project called me is using a little bit of your language. And, when I get to the shelf, where the nuts are, I say, 'Well, I aspire to be a person who's not a nut eater, while he's reading.'
Now, I still often going to eat the nuts. But I think that language, or 'I want to be the kind of person who' fill in the blank, does the right thing--helps the neighbor across the street, rather than does the thing that's convenient for me, reads to my kid even when I'm busy and have stuff I rather do. I think that language is helpful--in thinking about the first level is, 'Oh, I step back and I see I have two selves.' The next level is: which self do I want to be? Oh, I'm stuck in that old one. But if I learn enough--is your language--maybe I can get to be the self I aspire to.
Agnes Callard: And like, I've tried to change those things about myself and my self just keeps resisting. And, on a bunch of fronts, I'm like, one of the ways in which life is a learning process is you also learn like who you are in your limits. Even something like there can be sort of advantages to being really, really distractible, which is like I think it's connected to creativity in ways like even if you could have had this fixed idea about yourself that I'm going to sit here and I'm going to do this and I'm not going to think about something else. And, if that doesn't work for me--so, some of it is also feedback of, like, the self doesn't just let you mold it into whatever you want it to be.
In the Mix
This week I listened to this Seven Lions mix on SoundCloud while I finished up the newsletter, when writing and when juggling.
💣Words of Wisdom💣
And you must not, ever, give anyone else the responsibility for your life.
Musashi - Eiji Yoshikawa
“Think what you like. There are people who die by remaining alive and others who gain life by dying.”
Interviews With the Masters - Robert Greene
What often separates masters from others is this willingness to be different and unique.
Theo Epstein, once known as the number-crunching wizard who broke the championship curse of the Boston Red Sox, built this team with an emphasis on people who would create the right ethos.
The Five Invitations - Frank Ostaseski
Death is not waiting for us at the end of a long road. Death is always with us, in the marrow of every passing moment. She is the secret teacher hiding in plain sight. She helps us to discover what matters most. And the good news is we don’t have to wait until the end of our lives to realize the wisdom that death has to offer.
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
People like us change the world. What do people like us need to be doing more of and less of?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
Alex and I got in some Chicago Halloween Parade drumming, Brazilian style.
