What happens when the experience of celebrity becomes universal?
In his lectures, Kojève takes up Hegel’s famous meditation on the master-slave relationship, recasting it in terms of what Kojève sees as the fundamental human drive: the desire for recognition—to be seen, in other words, as human by other humans. “Man can appear on earth only within a herd,” Kojve writes. “That is why the human reality can only be social.”
Understanding the centrality of the desire for recognition is quite helpful in understanding the power and ubiquity of social media. We have developed a technology that can create a synthetic version of our most fundamental desire. Why did the Russian couple post those wedding photos? Why do any of us post anything? Because we want other humans to see us, to recognize us.
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There is no way to bridge the inherent asymmetry of the relationship, short of actual friendship and correspondence, but that, of course, cannot be undertaken at the same scale. And so the Star seeks recognition and gets, instead, attention.
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There’s no reason, really, for anyone to care about the inner turmoil of the famous. But I’ve come to believe that, in the Internet age, the psychologically destabilizing experience of fame is coming for everyone. Everyone is losing their minds online because the combination of mass fame and mass surveillance increasingly channels our most basic impulses—toward loving and being loved, caring for and being cared for, getting the people we know to laugh at our jokes—into the project of impressing strangers, a project that cannot, by definition, sate our desires but feels close enough to real human connection that we cannot but pursue it in ever more compulsive ways.
And other links, larks, and lackadaisical opinions
A new study shows that when a listeners pay close attention to a story, their heartbeats synchronize. At certain junctures in the story, the whole group’s pulse rate speeds up or slows down in tandem. I’m absolutely certain this is true of music too. As in the old cliché, our hearts beat as a one, and simply because of a story or song.
“I’m tired of people acting like they’re better than McDonald’s. It’s like, you may have never set foot in McDonald’s but you have your own McDonald’s. Maybe instead of buying a Big Mac you read Us Weekly. Hey, that’s still McDonald’s, it’s just served up a little different. Maybe your McDonald’s is telling yourself that a Starbucks frappuccino is not a milkshake. Or maybe you watch Glee. It’s all McDonald’s. McDonald’s of the soul.”
— Jim Gaffigan, Mr. Universe (via girlwearsmascara)
The problem, often not discovered until late in life, is that when you look for things like love, meaning, motivation, it implies they are sitting behind a tree or under a rock. The most successful people recognize, that in life they create their own love, they manufacture their own meaning, they generate their own motivation.
For me, I am driven by two main philosophies, know more today about the world than I knew yesterday. And along the way, lessen the suffering of others. You’d be surprised how far that gets you.
You know we’re constantly taking. We don’t make most of the food we eat, we don’t grow it, anyway. We wear clothes other people make, we speak a language other people developed, we use a mathematics other people evolved and spent their lives building. I mean we’re constantly taking things. It’s a wonderful ecstatic feeling to create something and put it into the pool of human experience and knowledge.
“1/ there is this sense when you are young that your accomplishments need to be a list of things that seem impressive to others. A list of several items you did. This isn't actually right, so here is another suggestion.”
I regularly help pre-seed entrepreneurs identify and evaluate potential startup opportunities. The following is a set of heuristics I’ve developed and collected over the years that might of u…
Bookmarking this list for the next time I’m itching to start something new.
All the personal tasks in our lives are being made easier. But at what cost?
The paradoxical truth I’m driving at is that today’s technologies of individualization are technologies of mass individualization. Customization can be surprisingly homogenizing.
This idea — convenience as liberation — could be intoxicating. Its headiest depictions are in the science fiction and futurist imaginings of the mid-20th century. From serious magazines like Popular Mechanics and from goofy entertainments like “The Jetsons” we learned that life in the future would be perfectly convenient. Food would be prepared with the push of a button. Moving sidewalks would do away with the annoyance of walking. Clothes would clean themselves or perhaps self-destruct after a day’s wearing. The end of the struggle for existence could at last be contemplated.
Convenience has the ability to make other options unthinkable. Once you have used a washing machine, laundering clothes by hand seems irrational, even if it might be cheaper. After you have experienced streaming television, waiting to see a show at a prescribed hour seems silly, even a little undignified. To resist convenience — not to own a cellphone, not to use Google — has come to require a special kind of dedication that is often taken for eccentricity, if not fanaticism.
But we err in presuming convenience is always good, for it has a complex relationship with other ideals that we hold dear. Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us.
Consider the man of the early 1980s, strolling down the street with his Walkman and earphones. He is enclosed in an acoustic environment of his choosing. He is enjoying, out in public, the kind of self-expression he once could experience only in his private den. A new technology is making it easier for him to show who he is, if only to himself. He struts around the world, the star of his own movie.
Convenience has to serve something greater than itself, lest it lead only to more convenience...When things become easier, we can seek to fill our time with more “easy” tasks. At some point, life’s defining struggle becomes the tyranny of tiny chores and petty decisions.
As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or facing the point when the runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel against him.
Everyone, or nearly everyone, is on Facebook: It is the most convenient way to keep track of your friends and family, who in theory should represent what is unique about you and your life. Yet Facebook seems to make us all the same. Its format and conventions strip us of all but the most superficial expressions of individuality, such as which particular photo of a beach or mountain range we select as our background image.
The pursuit of excellence has infiltrated and corrupted the world of leisure.
In a way that we rarely appreciate, the demands of excellence are at war with what we call freedom. For to permit yourself to do only that which you are good at is to be trapped in a cage whose bars are not steel but self-judgment.
But there’s a deeper reason, I’ve come to think, that so many people don’t have hobbies: We’re afraid of being bad at them. Or rather, we are intimidated by the expectation — itself a hallmark of our intensely public, performative age — that we must actually be skilled at what we do in our free time. Our “hobbies,” if that’s even the word for them anymore, have become too serious, too demanding, too much an occasion to become anxious about whether you are really the person you claim to be.
If you’re a jogger, it is no longer enough to cruise around the block; you’re training for the next marathon. If you’re a painter, you are no longer passing a pleasant afternoon, just you, your watercolors and your water lilies; you are trying to land a gallery show or at least garner a respectable social media following. When your identity is linked to your hobby — you’re a yogi, a surfer, a rock climber — you’d better be good at it, or else who are you?
In conversation with Potluck last night, I realized the way I measure a productive day is not conventional or obvious. Got me curious about how people decide if they had (or are presently having) an A+ day or not
For me, the measure of a great day is more qualitative than anything.
Did I keep my cool in unfavorable circumstances?
How much space did I create to pause / think / step outside for a breath of fresh air / go for mid-work walks to process a thought?
Did I dilly-dally around difficult things or did I just dive headfirst?
Did I concern myself with what other people think of me in the decisions I made today? Did I try to understand where others might be / forgive any transgressions on my expectations of the world?
Did I set realistic but ambitious expectations and allocate my energy proportionally to the importance of any given thing? Did I do my best?
Did I notice my own shortcomings and think about what I might have done differently / not loathe myself for not being perfect?
Was I lazy? Did I proactively take care of things that may have entered my path or did I "mark as unread" to come back to things at an undetermined time?
Do I feel like the ideas I shared were the result of original and critical thought? Or were they the result of feeling like I needed to say something (for whatever reason)?
Did I crash into bed? Or did I get ready for bed and actively go to sleep?
Was I noticing my thoughts as they arose? Did I let all that noticing distract me from getting things done?
What are other ways that people measure great days? Also curious about other ways people think about this sort of thing.
Also are my questions to myself entirely odd / out of left field for people? I feel like this is entirely normal but I may be just super lost in my own ways of thinking of day-to-day wins
What do principals do? They build a culture. Researchers from McKinsey studied test scores from half a million students in 72 countries. They found that students’ mind-sets were twice as powerful in predicting scores as home environment and demographics were. How do students feel about their schooling? How do they understand motivation? Do they have a growth mind-set to understand their own development?
These attitudes are powerfully and subtly influenced by school culture, by the liturgies of practice that govern the school day: the rituals for welcoming members into the community; the way you decorate walls to display school values; the distribution of power across the community; the celebrations of accomplishment and the quality of trusting relationships.
Principals set the culture by their very behavior — the message is the person.
Research suggests that it takes five to seven years for a principal to have full impact on a school, but most principals burn out and leave in four years or less. Chicago has one of the highest principal retention rates of any large urban system, 85 percent. Principals are given support, training and independence. If you manage your school well for a couple of years in a row, you are freed from daily oversight from the central office.
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Today’s successful principals are greeting parents and students outside the front door in the morning. That Minnesota-Toronto study found successful principals made 20 to 60 spontaneous classroom visits and observations per week.
In other words, they are high-energy types constantly circulating through the building, offering feedback, setting standards, applying social glue. In some schools, teachers see themselves as martyrs in a hopeless cause. Principals raise expectations and alter norms. At Independence Middle School in Cleveland, principal Kevin Jakub pushes a stand-up desk on wheels around the school all day.
Research also suggests a collaborative power structure is the key. A lot of teachers want to be left alone and a lot of principals don’t want to give away power, but successful schools are truly collaborative.
Good Leaders Make Good Schools https://nyti.ms/2GmSEkM
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