disordered loves in america

“And so I go to Augustine’s concept of “disordered loves” which is we all love a lot of things, and we all know some loves are higher than others. Our love of truth should be higher than our love of money, but because of some screw-up in our nature, we get our loves out of order all the time. So if a friend blabs to you a secret and you tell it at a dinner party, you’re putting your love of popularity above your love of friendship, and that’s a sin. And I think, in this world, which doesn’t like to peer darkly into brokenness, it’s easier to swallow the concept of two positive things that are out of order.” — david brooks, on being: sinfulness, hopefulness, and the possibility of politics

unsurprisingly (because i love st. augustine and was once torn between an augustinian and franciscan monk), i love this idea of “disordered loves.” i grew up in a religious household and the idea of sin was everywhere. but because of how the american progressives (older white people and younger poc & white people alike) have, by and large, rejected religion, sin isn’t really a useful construct.

however, disordered love seems very useful. it’s a concept that helps explain why things are broken. examples brooks gave: love for money over love for people. love of popularity over love of friendship. another one i see often is love of comfort over love of planet.

this concept is easier to understand in our society because we struggle to think of things we like as bad. it makes us feel bad. and, unfortunately, feeling bad is a trigger for shutdown of engagement for most of us. of course, that is a problem all its own that needs change, but let’s take it as a given for now.

if “putting our loves in order” is a useful frame for making things better, i’m into it. i really like that idea. it even allows for tough love as a mechanism for helping each other put our loves in better order. when we allow tough love or “fierce compassion” as buddhists might say (mentioned by robert thurman in the on being episode called meeting our enemies and our suffering), we get new opportunities for engagement. loving fiercely (in that cornell west “just is what love looks like in public” sort of way) gives us new ways of bringing different people into our work. because as a call to action, who  doesn’t want to love more?

and this isn’t the watered down version of love fed to us by destructive media sources. this is the type of love that makes us understand and hold each other as we open our eyes and have our world views shattered. this is the type of love that makes us put some skin in the game for each other. this is the type of love that makes us really understand that our liberation is bound up with people different from us.

maybe that’ll be my frame for 2017: getting these loves in order…

writing: 21:22
​spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 11:12

i really hate corporate sellouts (simple, this time)

once again, an app that i heard about, started to use, and fell in love with has sold out to a larger, older entity. simple, which used to be a super slick mobile-only banking service, was bought by bbva compass: fluff piece #1 (which mentions “new features” that were announced almost a month earlier) fluff faq. in the process, they’ve lost the spark that set them apart for me.

vision statement

Short

My top-level values are love, justice, and community. My other values are self-determination, equity, and freedom.

on making your art, doing the stuff that only you can do, freedom, and being fully human

some person, podcast, or hyperlink in an article told me to listen to this graduation speech by neil gaiman so i did. it was pretty great and this chunk felt pretty relevant to me and also to the work i want to do in the world. 

“…make your art. Do the stuff that only you can do.

The urge, starting out, is to copy. And that’s not a bad thing. Most of us only find our own voices after we’ve sounded like a lot of other people. But the one thing that you have that nobody else has is you. Your voice, your mind, your story, your vision. So write and draw and build and play and dance and live as only you can.

The moment that you feel that, just possibly, you’re walking down the street naked, exposing too much of your heart and your mind and what exists on the inside, showing too much of yourself. That’s the moment you may be starting to get it right.

The things I’ve done that worked the best were the things I was the least certain about, the stories where I was sure they would either work, or more likely be the kinds of embarrassing failures people would gather together and talk about until the end of time. They always had that in common: looking back at them, people explain why they were inevitable successes. While I was doing them, I had no idea.

I still don’t. And where would be the fun in making something you knew was going to work?

And sometimes the things I did really didn’t work. There are stories of mine that have never been reprinted. Some of them never even left the house. But I learned as much from them as I did from the things that worked.” — neil gaiman

at first, my takeaways were personal:

1. no one else has my voice, mind, story, vision, or experiences. that means that there actually are things that only i can produce.
2. starting out copying is fine, normal even. we find our own voices by copying others. like, literally that’s how we learn to speak. so the fact that it’s the same in terms of creating work is actually unsurprising; maybe even obvious.
3. just put out work. in hindsight, people will call it good, bad, whatever. but people can only call it something if it’s out there. 
4. this line: “…Which has left me with a healthy respect and fondness for higher education that those of my friends and family, who attended Universities, were cured of long ago.”

then i started to connect that first point to the systemic. when i think about the fundamental ways we need to shift our thinking about work, it seems increasingly clear to me that individuality is the solution. automation and overconsumption (both of which are driven by blind capitalism) will destroy us if we don’t get out of these crazy hedonistic cycles.

by recognizing that my experiences create a unique vantage point, it’s clear that there is work only i can produce. then, if i create or find for myself systems that support my livelihood while also allowing me to do the work that only i can do, i will never be made obsolete. this replicated at societal scale means that all people have value and need to be supported to do their work. the type of work only one person can do is likely to be highly complex, connected, humanity-centered, and experiential. we could then really let the machines do all the boring stuff and be totally freed up to live life well and be fully human.

i’m still not totally sure what it means to be fully human, but it’s a question i’m increasingly interested in.

writing: 15:51
​spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 7:41

making progress, slowly but surely

i started this year with a commitment to myself. i called it constrained creativity:

“…everyday. fewer than 200 words. 10 minutes or less (including editing, not including research). whatever is on my mind. public. (mostly) not fact checked.”

i mostly started it to get over my writing anxiety. eventually, i realized it was helpful to have my thoughts in a sharable format. now i spend 20-30 minutes writing and lightly editing posts every day. it’s been a journey, but i’m doing it and now it feels strange to not! habit built.

a few weeks ago, my friend miriam told me she used my blog post about the safety pin backlash to have a conversation with a friend. the first thought when i heard that was “wow! this is great and also fucking terrifying.”

neither of them agreed (fully) with me, but she said having a piece of content neither of them created helped them walk through each of their issues related to the subject matter. they used it as a foundation on which to discuss about their own thoughts.

honestly (truly), one part of me is freaking out about this. i’ve heard of a few other stories like this from other friends and it’s insane. people are reading my thoughts and then sharing them with other friends. what??!?!?!?!!

part of the thinking behind writing in a public place was so that i could share it. but it also means that if other people want to share it and discuss it, they can. at the beginning of this year i couldn’t even hit publish more than once a week and now here we are.

monthly post numbers:

jan: 12
feb: 3
mar: 4
apr: 3
may: 9
june: 16
july: 21
aug: 29
sept: 36
oct: 26
nov: 29
dec: 36 (including this post)

i don’t really have any plans on stopping and listening to this interview with ezra klein on the podcast longform is really inspiring me (thanks for the tip ac valdez from show about race).

anyway, all that to say… i guess we’re doing this. here’s to 2017!

writing: 10:01
​spell-check, link-finding, & formatting: 22:56