Analects
analects
noun, pl
a collection of ideas, extracts, or teachings;
marginalia
noun, pl
notes one makes in the margins;
On Attraction and Love
stuff
The Perfection Of The Paper Clip.
filed under:
gratification
on-aesthetics
on-attraction-and-love
wealth-architecture
The honesty of pornography. The last paragraph:
All of this is to say that pornography is remarkably honest, and not simply because, as anti-pornography feminists allege, it documents patriarchy’s debasement of women. Rather, it is honest because it showcases the hard, often confusing work of reconciling private desire with public life, of admitting that sex with others can be unethical, of distinguishing between fantasy and reality. Antique pornography makes these contradictions obvious, circulating knowledge that we think, today, is at odds with eroticism. But perhaps it isn’t – perhaps there’s a utility to pornography’s mixed messages. Perhaps it was designed to confuse us, the better to underscore the clarity with which we should enter into the messy endeavour of sex with other people.
filed under:
cognitive-karstica
digital-architecture
gratification
narrative-culture
on-(un)happiness
on-aesthetics
on-attraction-and-love
somatic-architecture
On ‘romantic friendship’:
Murdoch’s own account of love. In The Sovereignty of the Good (1970), she theorised that love is vision perfected. It is seeing the other person with clarity, as she really is, in all her particularity and detail. In Murdoch’s view, love is a willingness or a choice to see another person this way. But it is also more than this. Love is a desire – a desire to really see the other person and to be seen by them in return.
filed under:
collective-architecture
connection
on-(un)happiness
on-attraction-and-love
on-emotion
on-friendship
on-love
somatic-architecture
On the value of nurture. “Exploring how different brain states accompany different life stages, Gopnik also makes a case that caring for the vulnerable, rather than ivory-tower philosophising, puts us in touch with our deepest humanity.”
filed under:
accidental-civilisation
collective-architecture
connection
gratification
on-attraction-and-love
on-emotion
on-ethics
on-friendship
on-love
on-thinking-and-reasoning
Social media and teenage mental health.
Estimates indicate high-speed wireless internet significantly increased teen girls’ severe mental health diagnoses – by 90% – relative to teen boys over the period when visual social media became dominant in teenage internet use. I find similar effects across all subgroups. When applying the same strategy, I find null impacts for placebo health conditions – ones through which there is no clear channel for social media to operate. The evidence points to adverse effects of visual social media, in light of large gender gaps in visual social media use and documented risks. In turn, the analysis calls attention to policy interventions that could mitigate the harm to young people due to their online activities.
filed under:
cognitive-karstica
economy-of-small-pleasures
gratification
on-(un)happiness
on-aesthetics
on-attraction-and-love
on-culture
on-therapy
somatic-architecture
The gossip trap: How civilization came to be and how social media is ending it. Interesting enough exploration of our ‘silent years’—the huge gap between modern physiology and modern civilisation. The thesis: when society is small enough for each of us to know each other, society is organised through social pressure. When we exceed that, natural social hierarchy breaks down and we are forced to use other tools (i.e. civilisation). ‘Gossip’ is posed as a constraint on innovation. The outro suggests that social media has brought back the ‘gossip trap’.
It is not clear precisely to me how this is entirely a bad thing, although the author things so:
The gossip trap is our first Eldritch Mother, the Garrulous Gorgon With a Thousand Heads, The Beast Made Only of Sound.
I’d be more likely to agree that this modern form of the gossip trap is a bad thing, and point to the loneliness epidemic, the hydraulic trap and the amusement trap as examples. But I’m inclined to suspect the gossip trap facilitated not by social media but by actual connections to people brings many benefits we are quick to dismiss or ignore.
filed under:
collective-architecture
connection
economy-of-small-pleasures
gratification
narrative-culture
on-(un)happiness
on-attraction-and-love
on-culture
on-friendship
somatic-architecture
successful-prophets
Not new, but the crisis of masculinity.
Ambition doesn’t just happen; it has to be fired. The culture is still searching for a modern masculine ideal. It is not instilling in many boys the nurturing and emotional skills that are so desperately important today. A system that labels more than a fifth of all boys as developmentally disabled is not instilling in them a sense of confidence and competence.
Probably not a central issue, but an interesting one. More interestingly and concisely explored by Sebastian Junger. Perhaps my time in the military biases me, but Junger’s point that the military is one of the last places one can go to ‘become a man’ experientially checks out (and implies many issues).
filed under:
betterment
collective-architecture
connection
on-(un)happiness
on-attraction-and-love
on-culture
on-emotion
psychologia
somatic-architecture
Not just IQ or EQ, but CQ: cultural intelligence determines your success. This is not such a surprise of course. Bourdieu told us long before Henderson. But a good reminder.
filed under:
accidental-civilisation
betterment
collective-architecture
connection
on-attraction-and-love
on-being-fruitful
on-culture
psychologia
somatic-architecture
wealth-architecture
Detailed article on the ‘origin’ of the two-spirit concept in Native American culture. Interestingly, it claims that the concept is largely a product of the white LGBT movement, attempting to lend historical credence to their own way of being. Not particularly surprising, given Native Americans are an incredibly diverse group—assuredly not sharing the same concepts of sexuality. Similarly assuredly some groups had much more fluid sexual dynamics than the rigid masculine/feminine dichotomy, so we probably shouldn’t lose sight of that either. I am left to wonder about how legitimate complaints of ‘cultural appropriation’ apply to the adoption by a group of a modern concept.
filed under:
betterment
collective-architecture
narrative-culture
on-attraction-and-love
on-culture
spiritual-architecture
there is nothing essential or inevitable about the ways we conceive of romantic relationships
Romantic friendships take some of the elements of a traditional romantic relationship – the desire for intimacy, the commitment to build one’s life around another person, and even sex – without having to take all of them at once
filed under:
connection
on-(un)happiness
on-attraction-and-love
on-friendship
on-love