No Nuance Nancy

Hey friends,

Not only it feels like our world can't catch a break lately, but the quality of discussions around the very real problems we're all facing isn't exactly the best.

Humanity is either doomed or doing great. People, cultures, countries, ideas are either good and right or evil and wrong. No regulations or a bureaucratic hellscape. No taxes or eat the rich. Reckless expansion or degrowth. Open borders or mass deportations. Terrorists or freedom fighters. You're either with us or against us. My way or the highway.

Without getting too political, it's like we've collectively entered our angsty teenage years as humanity. This reminds me of myself a few decades ago when many of my opinions were black and white. Rap is crap, metal's the best. Apple sucks, Android forever. Windows sucks, Linux is great. Real men don't use social media!

I've always considered myself to be pretty opinionated, but the loss of nuance on this scale is annoying and unproductive. Our world is too dynamic and the problems too complex for black-and-white discussions – and solutions. And what's not a better approach? Disillusionment, disengagement, and opinionlessness. We can't not discuss the challenges we're facing.

What I do to stay sane is surround myself with people who hold strong, but nuanced opinions, and have passionate, but nuanced discussions. It's hard, but possible. Perhaps not on X, formerly known as Twitter, but definitely elsewhere. And the more nuanced people you have around you, the less likely you'll be to get pulled into emotional black-and-white arguments.

How do you deal with the opinionatedness of the modern world?

Have a nuanced week,

Martin

A few thoughts

Create micronovelty. Novelty is good for you, but maintaining it isn't an easy task, especially if you're a routine-driven person. Last week, I moved my pillow to the other side of the couch and slept in the opposite direction. The first few nights definitely felt markedly different because of this micronovel experience.

Thinking strategically. I'm a bit too much of a getting shit done type of person, so when I fail, it's often because I do the wrong thing without a good plan. Last week I've been practicing thinking and acting more strategically. Great, but stopping myself from doing when I should be thinking is a lot of effort.

Enjoyed this

Age of Miracles "An Age of Miracles won’t see us listlessly popping soma a la Huxley or slovenly guzzling slurpees in hover chairs a la Wall-E. An Age of Miracles isn’t an end; it’s the means to explore even further. A culture that’s satisfied with stagnation or degrowth is a dead culture. Progress imbues us with energy and vitality, as individual people and as a civilization, which is, at the end of the day, a group of billions of individual people."

Dear Lewis: How do I demonstrate executive presence? "So, basically, what we’re trying to do here is to leverage our core competencies and synergize our cross-functional capabilities to create a value proposition that resonates with our target segments and differentiates us from our competitors in the marketplace. And, you know, we have some preliminary data that suggests that this approach might work, but we still need to validate it with some more rigorous testing and analysis. So, yeah, that’s kind of where we are right now."

The fun part

I didn't plan to buy this thing, but as soon as I saw it I couldn't not buy it.