Language and Thought

Looking at the connections between the language we use and the thoughts we have

Discipline is what the factory and the office and the store share with the prison and the school and the mental hospital.

Bob Black • The Abolition of Work

H]uman beings need all the relatives they can get–as possible donors or receivers not necessarily of love, but of common decency.

. . .

When we were children in Indianapolis, Indiana, it appeared that we would always have an extended family of genuine relatives there. Our parents and grandparents, after all, had grown up there with shoals of siblings

Austin Kleon • KURT VONNEGUT ON THE NEED FOR BUILDING EXTENDED FAMILIES

Extended Family is important. Why not choose the extended family we bring in?

Perhaps I could lean into my weirdness and curiosity, and earn a living from a small group of similarly curious weirdos. It felt like the permission slip I needed to give it a shot.

All That Remains

Sometimes we still need permission in the permissionless economy

Curse of Knowledge : The inability to communicate your ideas because you wrongly assume others have the necessary background to understand what you’re talking about.

Morgan Housel • 100 Little Ideas

Learn to simplify if you want to connect.

Mentors and friends have always warned me that employers will never care about you.

But what if that’s a story we decided was true, one that doesn’t have to be?

Alicia Bonner • Why do you work?

It’s possible to paint an dishonest picture of reality without telling a single lie.

if i'm honest with myself

The difficulty of valuing information.

every failure is my fault and it’s up to me to fix those failures

Leo Guinan • The Biggest Obstacle To Scaling Creativity

Useful falsehoods

björk said that trying to communicate through talking feels like trying to put the ocean through a straw

Example - Energy requirements of communication.

Free time is mostly devoted to getting ready for work, going to work, returning from work, and recovering from work. Free time is a euphemism for the peculiar way labor, as a factor of production, not only transports itself at its own expense to and from the workplace, but assumes primary responsibility for its own maintenance and repair.