Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/#9a417fe513f58988c3b5b1e84cfc57397194a79b 2025-01-13T13:50:08Z Ran Prieur http://ranprieur.com/ ranprieur@gmail.com January 13. http://ranprieur.com/#e4ae3fd22e0e48e7765c638cd5a439f4adaea58e 2025-01-13T13:50:08Z January 13. Long article in the Atlantic, The Anti-Social Century. It's about how we've been getting more isolated and how it's bad for our mental health. Smart phones and Covid have made it worse, but the trend started more than 50 years ago with TV and cars.

Related, another thread removed from Ask Reddit, containing many good answers to the question, Why do you think so many people are depressed?

And a quote from a book I'm rereading, and still my favorite book of social philosophy, Tools for Conviviality by Ivan Illich:

The re-establishment of an ecological balance depends on the ability of society to counteract the progressive materialization of values. Otherwise man will find himself totally enclosed within his artificial creation, with no exit. Enveloped in a physical, social, and psychological milieu of his own making, he will be a prisoner in the shell of technology, unable to find again the ancient milieu to which he was adapted for hundreds of thousands of years. The ecological balance cannot be re-established unless we recognize again that only persons have ends and that only persons can work toward them. Machines only operate ruthlessly to reduce people to the role of impotent allies in their destructive progress.

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January 8. http://ranprieur.com/#f8214b76875c1e870550bb978245e18f5fe0cb4f 2025-01-08T20:00:35Z January 8. I'm starting to like January. October is still the best month, but January is when everyone hibernates after the holidays, and if your job isn't too taxing, you can get into some personal obsessions. I've been playing lots of solo games of Spirit Island. Anyway, a few more happy links, starting with another about the new year, Kakizome, Japanese way of new-years resolution. Instead of setting exact goals, you set a theme. "New Year's resolution feels like a path set on a map, and the theme feels like a compass."

Seattle Piano Recycling gives unwanted pianos new life. Basically, when they're hired to take pianos to the dump, they store them, make minor repairs, and then sell them for the price of delivery.

China has confirmed that solar panels in the desert are good for desert ecology.

Living proof that you can spend money on the poor: Utopia comes to Mexico City. "Utopia" is an acronym for putting nice public facilities in the poorest neighborhoods. This could never happen in the USA because the second poorest people demand that the poorest people be worse off.

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January 5. http://ranprieur.com/#aaf48c45f862346d4fbfd54cb20aff17f72bbcd7 2025-01-05T17:30:12Z January 5. After three negative posts in a row, here are some positive links for the new year. Quiet Mind is a nice explanation of mindfulness/meditation. "This is not rocket science. It is our own mind! The abilities to walk upright and to use symbolic language were attained by proto-humans with effort over many generations. Learning to use the mind well will occur in the space between thoughts."

From The Whippet, The Animal Crossing / Stardew Valley model for NY goals. The idea is to gamify personal improvement, but do it in a low-stress way.

Related, a sub-thread in a Reddit thread about health tips, Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly

From the Psychonaut subreddit, Shrooms showed me my "pipes were clean"

The "pipe" in this analogy represents our capacity to let emotions flow. If your pipes are clogged - if you have unresolved issues, repressed feelings, or mental blockages - those emotions can come out muddy or overwhelming when shrooms turn on the tap. But if you've been doing inner work and clearing out old debris, the flow can be more crystalline and uplifting.

And two more Reddit threads. I don't know what's up with the Ask Reddit mods, that they consistently remove the most interesting threads. What's the most meaningful expression of love you've ever seen or experienced? And What's the one random genetic trait you lucked out on? This is the one I most envy:

Got the joie de vivre. Life fuckin rules, even when it doesn't. My dad has it, his parents had it, their parents had it, etc. Honestly feels like a superpower to find joy in things every day, especially in the world we live in now.


Space Needle fireworks January 1, 2025. It's possible that the next few years will be good for me personally. But in the realm of public events, every happy prediction I can think of is completely off the wall. Might RFK Jr legalize shrooms? Might AIs, while still arguably nonsentient, declare themselves gods and push progressive policies? Might enough competent people fall into homelessness that there's a homeless renaissance? Might the white working class finally support redistribution of wealth? Might Trump give us a UBI, just to have his name on it?

None of those things will happen. In the ebb and flow of history, this has to be the part where things get worse so that later they can get better. It might be as mild as a few years of authoritarianism to show new generations why it's a bad idea. Or it might be as extreme as a small nuclear war, a giant solar flare, or a deadlier pandemic, to accelerate the collapse of the global system and set the stage for something less insane.

This is my advice for the apocalypse. Last month I did a bibliomancy reading in an English-German dictionary, and the word was the German word zubereiten under the English word brew. Zubereiten means prepare, and I thought about the difference between those two words. You can prepare for something, but you don't brew for something, you brew something. That's my advice.


Samantha Rupnow troubled selfie]]>