Aaron and I conclude our conversation on Storytelling, Dichotomies and Complexity with some reflections of character development and archetypes used in stories. Hope you’ve enjoyed this series, and more to come soon! Enjoy!
Colby and I continue our conversation on money and various ways to navigate finances. We now get into approaches to banking and other financial institutions…Enjoy!
In a continuation from our last Finance post, Colby talks a little about finding one’s path, and ways that one can approach career and education…Enjoy!
In this short post, Colby and I discuss approaching higher education, and the implications of choices going in…
What would you do differently if you had it to do over? If you’re at the point of transition from high school to college, what’s your sense of purpose for the next few years?
Here, Colby and I finish out this part of the Finance conversation, which is a continuation of Wealth and Poverty and Religion and Culture. It has been quite fun hearing folks’ thoughts on these last couple posts! Enjoy!
Here we have a continuation of “Avoiding Debt”, Part 1 and Part 2, dealing specifically with credit cards. Colby and I explore some of the implications of credit to one’s future…
e·go (g, gn. pl. e·go)
1. The self, especially as distinct from the world and other selves
2. In psychoanalysis, the division of the psyche that is conscious, most immediately controls thought and behavior, and is most in touch with external reality
3 a. An exaggerated sense of self-importance; conceit
b. Appropriate pride in oneself; self-esteem
[New Latin, from Latin, I; see eg in Indo-European roots. Sense 2, translation of German Ich, a special use of ich, I, as a psychoanalytic term.]
The individual units that make up society, each one of us, play a concrete role in how our social reality is shaped. If we buy organic, even the Wal-Marts of the world take notice and change or add to what they stock up on. If we respond to large banks’ taking advantage of people through exorbitant charges by moving your business to local banks and credit unions, the Bank of Americas of the world will trip over themselves to change some long-standing policies. In so many areas of social reality, each individual’s decision makes a difference, and the differences that I’ve thus far described are only economic. Companies like Google have designed a different kind of workplace environment from many companies of their size to improve the creative atmosphere for those doing the innovating, rather than stuffing their employees into bland cell-like cubicles. All this demonstrated to me the power of the individual to shape reality.
The other side of this reality for the individual, though, is what I’ve heard described as “unfettered individualism”, which I understand to be closely related to ideas like “survival of the fittest” and “may the best man win”…a mindset that sees “my driveway”, “my yard”, “my job”, “my space” and the like. In short, ways that we’ve managed to teach ourselves and each other in this country to think of ourselves as …Read the entire post here
In this post, Colby and I talk through ways to analyze what we absorb through media, and provide some concrete examples of how we navigate this large task.
Here’s the first in a series of video blog posts that will be interspersed with the text based posts that have been coming in. Enjoy, and tell me what you think!
Feel free, also, to record audio or video to your mobile device and upload it. Post the link in comments, or send them to me and I’ll post them here. I look forward to hearing from you!
Here’s a post that can also be found at Nineteen Months, where I write occasionally:
“…all the present arts and sciences, inventions and discoveries man has brought forth were once mysteries which nature had decreed should remain hidden and latent, but man has taken them out of the plane of the invisible and brought them into the plane of the visible.”
- ‘Abdu’l-Bahá
“…technology is the programming of nature. It is a capturing of phenomena and a harnessing of these to human purposes.”
- W. Brian Author
Smart Phones. Hybrid Cars. Genetically Modified Foods. Social Networking. Blogging. Stem Cell Research. Cloning. Teleportation… why not? As I type away on my iPad and check the weather outside on my Android phone, all while putting some thoughts together on a post on technology, makes me feel like I’m in some sort of “Inception” storyline where I am entirely unsure where the rabbit-hole leads.
I was an old-school hold-out on having a cell phone in the earliest years of this century but faced the unshakeable reality that I needed to engage with the new technologies that emerged to gain an understanding of their usefulness (or lack thereof) and potential application. My questions then were: “What’s the point of texting?” “What is best conveyed in an email or chat and what warrants a phone or face-to-face conversation?” Fast forward a decade, (more…)
An organization whose work I highly respect identified three sets of principles that can assist in a search to rethink governance, one of which is “unity and interdependence”.
I’ve seen trends in my lifetime that have made it clear that we are naturally and inevitably moving toward higher and higher levels of global interdependence: the FAA and international flight travel; the rise of the European Union; and even electronic product availability deeply affected by the earthquake (and its resulting fallout) in Japan all show a global trend that brings to my mind the “human body analogy” that I mention often.
Each of the arrangements mentioned describes an agreement that transcends national boundaries and international rivalries and conflict. Some of it is motivated by economic factors; others seem to be the result of an understanding that the individual units (more…)
An organization whose work I highly respect identified three sets of principles that can assist in a search to rethink governance, one of which is “unity and interdependence”.
