weekly Go Flip Yourself

That can explain why things always seem bad and why things always seem like they’re getting worse. Which is exactly what we see in the data: every year, people say that humans just aren’t as kind as they used to be, and every year they rate human kindness exactly the same as they did last year.

If I’m right, people’s colorful theories of the End Times come second. What comes first is the conviction that the world’s problems are brand-spanking-new. And that conviction is stunningly consistent across time.

“Happiness is all gone,” says the Prophecy of Neferty, an Egyptian papyrus from roughly 4000 years ago. “Kindness has vanished and rudeness has descended upon everyone,” agrees Dialogue of a Man with His Spirit, written at around the same time. “It is not like last year […] There is no person free from wrong, and everyone alike is doing it,” says the appropriately-named Complaints of Khakheperraseneb from several hundred years later. And some unknown amount of time after that, the Admonitions of Ipuwer reports that actually things just started going to hell. “All is ruin! Indeed, laughter is perished and no longer made.” Worst of all: “Everyone’s hair has fallen out.”

There is a new lifestyle imposed on almost the entire world, (...) which somehow affects all ordinary people: a consumption-oriented life. Fast consumption, constant consumption, more consumption.

There is something about this coexistence and codependency of the public and the private which feels even more important now than it was in our last Gilded Age.

• a willingness to speak the truth = the intent of this discussion is to discover the truth together

• a directional document that you can rely on (not to run in circles)

• self transcendance (latest right before Maslow died) -- it's all about love & relationship

If the culture in a school is at odds with its pedagogical goals, energy will be wasted trying to deal with the friction between these value systems: You get disruptive students and motivation issues. An educator might have an easier time if they found a way to align the peer culture with the pedagogy. But crafting aligned cultures is not how mainstream education works.

Culture is a catalyst. It multiplies the effectiveness of all other interventions and tools. A kid that grows up in an academically oriented family might use the internet to accelerate their rate of learning. The same kid in a different context might use the same tool to distract herself. Knowing how to scale up cultures that support us would be immensely useful, but it is a difficult problem.

“Children are biologically programmed to imitate the behavior of our older peers. There are no actions that an adult can take to rival the effectiveness of older children modeling desired behaviors for younger children.”

You are what you wear. It felt that way, back then. What you wore was intimately tied to your sense of self. What are clothes if not outward reflections of internal projections?

Focus moves from fashion to function.