Peter Fenzel and Matthew Wrather pull the tassle out of the dragon bookmark in their discussion of solitude, being alone in repose, the English Romantic poets and their hiking practices, the desire not to rag on technology, one-handed phone use, naps, meditation (again), and what effect the attention economy and mental environment has on us.
Subscribe: iTunes Other Apps
Further Reading
- The Lake District
- The Dragonbone Chair on Amazon
- Dragon Beaded Bookmark
- Acceptance and Resilience
- Corn Whiskey: “The time when Americans drank all day long” from the BBC; “The History Of American Alcohol Consumption, Charted” from Digg; “A Nation of Sots” from The New Republic
- “Solitude and Leadership”
Disconnected thoughts, because I love episodes that wander a bunch of topics:
Maybe it’s time for the polemic against technology, or at least the social media kind of technology that’s increasingly obviously just there to prod our emotions so that we’ll pay more attention to the ads. Because those little dopamine/cortisol hits can’t be healthy in the long term.
On sleep problems, the best investment I’ve made in recent years was the eight or so bucks on green/blue laser safety glasses (they’re red). You can install the magic software that tints your computer/phone screen red, but these do the same thing for, y’know, the entire world. I wear them for about an hour before bed and am usually tired enough to drop right off.
Possibly-interesting point on relationships to people who have created art (or “content,” as the all-business-all-the-time people call it), the history of General Semantics gets weird (grammar and Scientology weird), but one of Alfred Korzybski’s ideas you can find in “The Manhood of Humanity” (on Project Gutenberg) is the idea that humans are distinct from other animals because we’re able to aggregate resources and communicate across time, at least in one direction. I like thinking about things in these terms, in that there are at least aspects of an increasing number of people’s thoughts that we can engage with whenever we want and use them as a springboard for our own thoughts. (Korzybski was also the “the map is not the territory” author.)
Unfortunately, I’m writing this kind of late in the evening, otherwise I’d make a big deal about leaving it at that to go outside for a while…
Wow, you took my (over)thoughts on thoughts and really took it to a deep and dark, yet honest place. Thanks guys.
What was the “AAAA, rotor rooters” bit about at the very end?
It’s not every day you hear a one-liner that you know will haunt you for ages. I thought about Pete’s comment that “the history of America is corn’s quest to find a way into the human body” (or something to that effect) all weekend.