👊Rolling with the Punches👊
🔥Welcome to volume #0049!🔥
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.
👊Rolling with the Punches👊
“Agent Assitance Needed” flashed on the screen.
What the heck?
The pause created an uncomfortable feeling for us.
We arrived at the airport on time, getting the little guy’s bags packed and running through our checklist. Just leaving the house with a two-year-old, five-year-old, and snacks plus entertainment for the flight pumped up the stress levels. We reminded ourselves throughout the preparation that this was an adventure.
The five-year-old kept noting on the way to the airport that he thought we might miss our flight. The reassurances failed to soothe him even as we arrived at the airport on time.
My hand went up for the agent, and we waited. The seconds seemed to expand as we waited. Finally, someone came over, looked at a passport, and noted that it’s expired.
Then, the record scratched, and the five-year-olds premonitions found validation.
“This passport is expired, and that’s why you can’t check-in.” The words hit like daggers. Then we looked at the five-year-old’s passport, and it expired two days ago.
We went two out of four, which works for shooting threes in the NBA, but not for boarding planes with a family.
Waiting a year to finally jump on a family vacation and going to Costa Rica while the temperature approached 0 degrees felt like a genius move. Finding out that two of four passports expired at the airport felt like we dropped the game-winning pass in the endzone.
The situation felt absurd.
At no point did we think the constraint would be leaving the country. The belief that the airline’s system tracked our passport expirations proved false. The breakdown in the chain belonged to us.
The punch comes, and all we can do is roll with it. The initial angst bubbles up when the news strikes. What can we do? The release comes from controlling what we can control and rolling with the punches.
We walked back out into the cold, shook our heads, and laughed. We rolled with the punches and waited to surf another day.
📓Articles to Read📓
Venkatesh Rao on Mars and the Meaning of Money
Venkatesh breakdown what he views as money’s money attribute and the importance of that function. Along with why spending $2.7B to send a rover to Mars is worth it, similar to an art project.
8/ Money is the largest-scale coordination mechanism we have for negotiating differences in values of things, and is what allows us to define what the word “we” means. Its design has to accommodate everything humans might disagree about. Money that cannot value space exploration or art cannot value medicines or food very well either.
Pricing things is the key to an economic system.
19/ A functional economic system isn’t about judging human choices and preferences, but to price them. Everything from cancer drugs and aid to disaster zones to climate change and space programs to luxury yachts and obscene extravagances by rich celebrities. If humans are capable of it, a real economic system should be able to put a price on it.
People want all kinds of different things which is a gift not a curse.
21/ Many people want to translate their political and ideological interests into economic terms. They want to somehow design an economic system that makes, for example, Mars missions so expensive we don’t do them, and saving lives so cheap, we never fail save them. But this is fundamentally wrong-headed.
22/ If you can’t come to terms with the diversity and variety of things humans want and value, and are willing to work for, you will want to design economic models to coerce them to act differently. This is a version of what statisticians call the bias-variance tradeoff, which I’m using as a metaphor here. The more you try to bias an economic system to do certain things, the more you’ll narrow the overall range of things it can do.
23/ If you think people suck, and try to make an economy that prevents them from sucking, you’ll either oppress people, or create an economy that sucks, or most likely, both. The only way we know to avoid that is to keep recalibrating the scope of the economy — the things it is capable of pricing, at the weirdest extremes, without unraveling entirely.
An Interview with Science Fiction author Malka Older on building the future.
“Practice believing that the world can change radically” - Malka Older
What are possible futures? She talks about a Latinamérica Unida similar to the EU to combine the powerful economies of Latin America and walks through various potential outcomes that her books explore.
One possible scenario is what I describe in my Centenal Cycle trilogy, starting with Infomocracy. There is still a territorial element, but it’s much smaller – involving only however much territory is required to house a set of roughly 100,000 people – and it is only to create a cohesive unit; the government chosen by that group can be anywhere (or nowhere, in the sense of entirely distributed) in the world. Alternatively, it’s possible to imagine a situation with no territoriality at all, in which people choose allegiances – even overlapping allegiances – and pay taxes and receive benefits as a result of that choice, with no relation to location. One country could begin by offering limited, pay-per citizenship to anyone anywhere in the world, and potentially trigger a competition to access taxes.
How can we imagine future possibilities and help put them into action:
Read more speculative fiction, for starters. Practice, like anything else; practice believing that the world can change radically, that the past may give us indications and clues about the future but that it is by no means certain as a predictor. For me it’s important at this juncture – perhaps always – to combat the idea that “progress” is unilinear, indeed that increased industrialization and technology is necessarily “progress” – really, to question all of our ideas about what the future can and should look like. A future that looks like Darfur could be postapocalyptic, or it could be a sustainable, healthy adjustment. We’d need to know a lot more about what was going on to decide which. But either way, there’s no guarantee it won’t happen.
🎙️ Listen / Watch 📺
Alain de Botton on Krista Tippet’s On Being Podcast talking love and relationships (Spotify / Transcript)
Our view of relationships is warped
de Botton:Right, right. So we have this ideal of what love is and then these very, very unhelpful narratives of love. And they’re everywhere. They’re in movies and songs — and we mustn’t blame songs and movies too much. But if you say to people, “Look, love is a painful, poignant, touching attempt by two flawed individuals to try and meet each other’s needs in situations of gross uncertainty and ignorance about who they are and who the other person is, but we’re going to do our best,” that’s a much more generous starting point. So the acceptance of ourselves as flawed creatures seems to me what love really is. Love is at its most necessary when we are weak, when we feel incomplete, and we must show love to one another at those points. So we’ve got these two contrasting stories, and we get them muddled.
Tippett:And also, I feel like this should be obvious, but you just touched on art and culture and how that could help us complexify our understanding of this. And one of the things you point out about — I don’t know; When Harry Met Sally or Four Weddings and a Funeral — one of the things that’s wrong with all of that is that a lot of these take us up to the wedding. They take us through the falling and don’t see that — I think you’ve written somewhere — you said, “A wiser culture than ours would recognize that the start of a relationship is not the high point that romantic art assumes; it is merely the first step of a far longer, more ambivalent, and yet quietly audacious journey on which we should direct our intelligence and scrutiny.”
The work of loving is about doing the inner work together and by ourselves.
Tippett:A lot of what you are pointing at, the work of loving over a long span of time, is inner work, right? [laughs] And it would be hard to film that. But I’m very intrigued by how you talk about the Ancient Greeks and their “pedagogical” view of love.
de Botton:That’s fascinating, because one of the greatest insults that you can level at a lover in the modern world, apparently, is to say, “I want to change you.” The Ancient Greeks had a view of love which was essentially based around education; that what love means — love is a benevolent process whereby two people try to teach each other how to become the best versions of themselves.
Tippett:You say somewhere, they are committed to “increasing the admirable characteristics” that they possess and the other person possesses.
How do we fail to help people learn when we are in relationships?
de Botton:[laughs] By the time we’ve humiliated someone, they’re not going to learn anything. The only conditions — as we know with children, the only conditions under which anyone learns are conditions of incredible sweetness, tenderness, patience — that’s how we learn. But the problem is that the failures of our relationships have made us so anxious that we can’t be the teachers we should be. And therefore, some often genuine, legitimate things that we want to get across are just — come across as insults, as attempts to wound, and are therefore rejected, and the arteries of the relationship start to fur.
And there should be a mutual acceptance that two damaged people are trying to get together, because pretty much all of us — there are a few totally healthy people — but pretty much all of us reach dating age with some scars, some wounds.
And sometimes we bring to adult relationships some of the same hope that a young child might’ve had of their parent. And of course, an adult relationship can’t be like that. It’s got to accept that the person across the table or on the other side of the bed is just human, which means full of flaws, fears, etc., and not some sort of superhuman.
We can’t read mines. We don’t know what anyone else is thinking, no matter how long we’ve been together.
de Botton:We see it in children. This is how little children behave. They literally think that their parents can read their minds. It takes a long time to realize that the only way that one person can really learn about another is if it’s explained to them, preferably using words, quite calm ones.
Tippett:Yes, “use your words,” [laughs] which we say to children.
de Botton:[laughs] When people always say, “Communicate,” we have to be generous towards the reasons why we don’t. And we don’t because we’re operating with this mad idea that true love means intuitive understanding. And I go crazy when people say things like, “I met someone. The loveliest thing is, they understood me without me needing to speak.”
How we can think of our partners as children, bringing the generosity we bring to a child. This could be the most loving thing we can do.
de Botton:It’s the work of love. But it’s interesting that you mention your children and children generally, because I think — it sounds eerie, but I think that one of the kindest things that we can do with our lover is to see them as children — and not to infantilize them, but when we’re dealing with children as parents, as adults, we’re incredibly generous in the way we interpret their behavior.
If a child says — if you walk home, and a child says, “I hate you,” you immediately go, OK, that’s not quite true. Probably they’re tired, they’re hungry, something’s gone wrong, their tooth hurts, something — we’re looking around for a benevolent interpretation that can just shave off some of the more depressing, dispiriting aspects of their behavior. And we do this naturally with children, and yet we do it so seldom with adults. When an adult meets an adult, and they say, “I’ve not had a good day. Leave me alone,” rather than saying, “OK. I’m just going to go behind the facade of this slightly depressing comment…”
Tippett:And understand that that’s actually not about me; that’s about what’s going on inside them today.
Tippett:I want to read this definition of marriage that you’ve written in a few places — I think it’s wonderful — and just talk about this. “Marriage ends up as a hopeful, generous, infinitely kind gamble taken by two people who don’t know yet who they are or who the other might be, binding themselves to a future they cannot conceive of and have carefully avoided investigating.”
The entire conversation is beautiful, thought-provoking, and full of ideas for being a more loving compassionate human to yourself and others.
Robert Sapolsky on Sean Carroll’s Mindscape Podcast (Spotify)
Hormone levels affect us and what we do but are generally out of our control
If you are in pain, if you are tired, if you are hungry related to that, if you have low blood glucose levels, you're going to cheat mawr. In an economic game, you're gonna be less charitable. You're going to be less trustworthy. You are going to be less generous you are going to be more likely to punish somebody for their norm violations if you were in pain of the time or if you're sitting and you're playing some online economic game.
We are different people at different times
If you are in pain, if you are tired, if you are hungry related to that, if you have low blood glucose levels, you're going to cheat more. In an economic game, you're gonna be less charitable. You're going to be less trustworthy. You are going to be less generous you are going to be more likely to punish somebody for their norm violations if you were in pain of the time or if you're sitting and you're playing some online economic game.
How we frame things (or why words matter) changes how we play a game. If you call it a prisoner’s dilemma game, a wall street game, or a cooperation game, the same person plays each one differently.
Sapolsky thinks that most things will end up being shown as being biology vs. being good or bad or free will. Like
We can train ourselves to be less biased by introducing more variety and more of the other into our lives along with being cognitive of our biases
We can use system 2 overcome system 1 automatic responses (happens when we activate our frontal cortex usually two seconds after we notice our initial response)
📚 Books to Read or Listen to📚
The Serendipity Mindset by Christian Busch (Goodreads)
TLDR: We can create serendipity by being open to what the world throws at us and spending a little bit of effort creating our own serendipitous moments.
Serendipity is ACTIVE SMART LUCK that depends on our ability to spot and connect the dots
Developing a serendipity mindset allows us to see the trigger, connect the dots, and develop the tenacity necessary to focus on and influence valuable outcomes
We underestimate the unexpected --> "It's very probable that something improbable will happen"
Manage your energy --> it's not if you show up BUT how you show up
Reflect on the incidents in your life that shaped you. What could have happened differently? What was your role in them? Were they examples of blind luck or smart luck? What can you learn from them?
Who are the people in your life that create smart luck? What are three things you can learn from them?
Check in with your serendipity monthly. Ask how it did month over month and what you can do to improve it?
Zappos asks people if they are lucky? You want to work with and be around people who think they are lucky? Belief creates its own luck.
Make Magic Happen --> Ask WHY to yourself and others!
Serendipity alchemists create good energy where ever they go --> exchanging positive energy and ideas with everyone
Create a spiritual vision by living with intention --> move from a suffering state to a beautiful state
💣Words of Wisdom💣
Tweets From Bonnitta Roy@bonnittaroy on Twitter
Everyone you've ever loved will die. Every sight you've ever seen will disappear. Everything you've ever touched will be gone. What you are actually suffering. Is time
Seeing What Others Don't - Gary Klein
Deliberate and specific preparation doesn’t guarantee success. Therefore, I didn’t see how I could advise people to start with a preparation stage when so many insights are accidental and when specific preparation doesn’t reliably lead to breakthroughs
Becoming Wise - Krista Tippett
I’ve come to believe that our capacity to reach beyond ourselves—experiencing mystery or being present to others—is dependent on how fully we are planted in our bodies in all their flaws and their grace.
Oathbringer - Brandon Sanderson
‘The question,’ she replied, ‘is not whether you will love, hurt, dream, and die. It is what you will love, why you will hurt, when you will dream, and how you will die. This is your choice. You cannot pick the destination, only the path.’ ”
Antifragile - Nassim Nicholas Taleb
Heuristics are simplified rules of thumb that make things simple and easy to implement. But their main advantage is that the user knows that they are not perfect, just expedient, and is therefore less fooled by their powers. They become dangerous when we forget that.
Understanding Media - Marshall McLuhan
The owners of media always endeavor to give the public what it wants, because they sense that their power is in the medium and not in the message or the program.
The Second Mountain - David Brooks
As Annie Dillard put it, how you spend your days is how you spend your life. If you spend your days merely consuming random experiences, you will begin to feel like a scattered consumer. If you want to sample something from every aisle in the grocery store of life, you turn yourself into a chooser, the sort of self-obsessed person who is always thinking about himself and his choices and is eventually paralyzed by self-consciousness.
Can’t Sleep, Time to Do...@visakanv on Twitter
86. If it’s been a few years, reread your old favorite books, rewatch your old favorite movies. It’ll hit different because you’re a different person now. The ways in which your reactions have changed will reveal things to you
🙏Thanks for reading🙏
What punches do you need to roll with?
Any thoughts or comments, please share!
Namaste,
Christian
The birthday celebration did not take place in Nosara!
