Colin Wright's Blog, page 6

Gratitude

It’s relatively well-known, at this point, that allowing ourselves to feel gratitude is a calming, anxiety-reducing, happiness-inducing, overall psychologically healthful exercise.

Reflecting, meditating, praying, journaling—anything we do to remind ourselves of the wonderful people and things and experiences from which we’ve benefited can be a profitable use of time, even if just for a few minutes a day or periodically throughout the week.

Just as important, though, is what we do with tha...

Resculpting

I’m in the process of rethinking my platform use, moving things around, and reconfiguring various projects and online presences.

This process is partly the consequence of a semi-regular desire to shuffle the components of my life and try out new arrangements, new approaches, new projects and options and tools.

But it’s also the consequence of forces beyond my control: a sort of economic and digital weather composed of recessionary animal spirits, political hubbub, inflationary concerns, an...

Pragmatism

I believe that looking for commonalities and shared concerns will typically lead to better outcomes than creating and reinforcing tribal (in the sociological sense of the word) labels, reflexively opposing anyone not of Our tribe and attempting to claim more power for Our side so They cannot stop us from doing what We want.

In politics, this type of thinking fuels some pretty cynical strategies, including but not limited to the full-scale blocking of any legislation that might conceivably mak...

Living Off the Land

We are (alarmingly but maybe predictably) tumbling into holiday shopping season early this year.

Tidal waves of deals are flooding the market as not-good back-to-school sales figures alarm analysts, and as a looming potential global recession triggered by a slurry of sky-high inflation, upwardly careening interest rates, supply chain hangovers (and mismatches) from the pandemic, and a land war in Europe threatens to upend balance sheets for the next year or two.

All of which means it’s eve...

Killing and Composting

A few weeks ago I decided to kill one of my projects.

I’ve been running a little podcast called I Will Read To You since September of 2021, and in the past little-over-a-year I’ve recorded and published nearly 200 poems and essays (but mostly poems) from the public domain.

Killing a project, I’ve learned, can be almost as difficult as starting one.

It’s not easy to tell, for instance, if you’re getting rid of it for good, justifiable reasons or due to a failure of fortitude and resilien...

Sick and Tired

I’ve been in Seattle, visiting family and pet-sitting, for a week.

I’ve been sick for nearly the same duration.

I had a few days of relative normalcy and then—immediately after driving back from the dock where I dropped my sister, brother-in-law, baby nephew, and parents off to board a sideways skyscraper-scale ship for a seven-day cruise—WHAM, I nearly collapsed with exhaustion.

My brain was cloudy, my focus nonexistent.

I was congested, it hurt to swallow. I could barely grunt, muc...

Centaurs

One of my favorite myth-related conceptual labels is that of chess tournament centaurs: a human who plays with computer assistance.

Centaur players tend to outperform both software and human players, though sometimes straight-up AI will have the advantage and some tournament rules favor humans.

I like the premise, though, because I believe it points at a (generally applicable) truth that we’re augmented by technology more frequently than we’re replaced by it. And even in cases when we’re r...

Slow Fast Near Far

I think (and write) about consumption a lot, because—as someone who loves to create things—what I consume informs what I produce, and the time and energy I spend consuming are resources I cannot use to make things.

Consequently, I use several mental models to help keep things balanced, and one of them is focused on the perceptual distance of what I’m taking in.

World news contains data about things happening far away: on the other side of the planet, or even off-planet, at times.

Local ...

Social Media

It hasn’t been a great year for social media companies.

They’re still raking in money, dominating the ad-sector, and shaping personal, economic, and political discourse, but they’re also at the center of many lawsuits and scandals.

The increasingly dominant narrative is that these companies are on a downswing, shamble-walking toward a zombie-like existence of irrelevance, and even the balance-sheet winners are coming to be seen as bad bets: uncool uses of one’s time and attention, unfortun...

Small, Simple, Every Day

How do we become the people we need to be to live the lives we want to live, do the things we want to do, and face the challenges we want to (or must, because of forces beyond our control) capably face?

There are countless ways to pursue this type of outcome, but the one I’ve found to be most effective and sustainable (for me) is to implement small, simple, daily changes and maintain them over time.

In practice, this means deciding to put away yesterday’s washed dishes each morning before ...