Never forget when William James said that Nietzsche and Schopenhauer remind him “of the sick shriekings of two dying rats.”

Thanks! I'm mostly just a Martin Hägglund shill around this these days.

I obviously agree that the abundance of time both used to be the big thing, and would be nice as part of today's discourse, though my sense is actually implementing it is a question of power. Curious how you both see it?

Please participate in my very rigorous user research:

If you hear "contemplative science and practice," what does that mean to you?

Abundance is up for grabs Progressives should help shape it.

Wrote about the ~abundance agenda~

The book has this errant mention of shorter workweeks & shared profits, neither of which will follow from what it actually covers.

But we can still deal an abundance of time & worker power into the agenda — why not try?

open.substack.com/pub/musingmi...

Imagining the bygone days where...*one major assignment per couple of years* (???) could pay a writer's rent in NYC........

How do you find the Sennheiser noise cancelling?

does anyone have strong preferences on good over-ear headphones?

This is pretty neat — the eruption of phenomenology in the West through a “planetary synchronicity,” in Varela’s phrase, across Husserl, James, & the Kyoto School boys

Are minds made of wonder? I'm beginning to suspect it's strangely plausible that awareness is something like wonder incarnate.

I wrote about advanced meditation research, my mom's curious recovery from brain surgery, Abhinavagupta's metaphysics, & the surprisingly plausible case that minds are, to some literal degree, made of wonder.

musingmind.substack.com/p/are-minds-...

If you want frontier research on the upside of breathing, James Nestor reports the relevant scientific field has "next to nothing."

Pulmonologists "focus on emergencies...that's how the system works."

To focus on positive capabilities, guess you've gotta go hunt in the wild

I wish more great novelists would decide to read the canon of classical economics & tell us what they think.

From Marilynne Robinson's Is Poverty Necessary: "Poverty is static, effectively resourceless, subject to interests that are not its own, therefore valuable to those interests."

https://blog.superb-owl.link/p/insights-from-a-week-long-silent/

checking phone for 20min reset ~5 days worth of deepening into meditation mind-space, & took another ~18 hours to (not even) recover from.

considering most of us never go 18 hours (let alone 5 days) w/o phones, how much of our mind-regions are just unknown to us?

Dig this bit from Levin's paper on biology & buddhism — as evolution enables living systems to pursue larger goals, that also creates cognitive space for progressively more complex causes of stress to unfold

thrilled to announce that about ~650 pages into Infinite Jest, my mind began to detect something like the contours of a plot, and I’m now on track to greatly exceed my ~20 pages/year average pace

Good time to go finish the book then! (Thanks for writing it — loving it so far)

I'm also realizing that entrepreneurialism's success in conflating the "heroic spirit," or the most valued and elevated human pursuits, with economic activity probably has a lot to do with why American culture largely abandoned caring about the project of being able to choose more leisure time

(you can tell how thoroughly disconnected the idea of a "heroic spirit" was from any economic or commercial activity, maybe until the rise of entrepreneurialism, as @erikmbaker.bsky.social's new book documents)

a little note from Adam Smith:

“These are the disadvantages of a commercial spirit. The minds of men are contracted, and rendered incapable of elevation. Education is despised, or at least neglected, and the heroic spirit is almost utterly extinguished..."

May we all feel each moment of existence with as much gushing adoration, reverence, and sacrality as financial planners feel towards Roth IRAs

Anyway, now I have to ask: do normal adults wear undershirts with suits/tuxedo shirts?

When I was a freshman in college, I tried walking into a frat party — some guy with flowing black hair and a button down opened to his sternum stopped me, grabbed my collared shirt, stared down my chest, and sneered: “Never wear an undershirt with a dress shirt again.”

Roasted

Bookchin’s take on the abundance agenda — a sheer abundance of goods that would ‘explode capitalism from within’ by permitting the expression of preferences for forms of life that don’t need to also fetch a living wage off of labor markets

There's a fun conflict in how different groups think about awe/wonder.

The 'science of awe' sees it as an evolutionary tool; others see it as a deeper subjectivity that has to shine through evolution's other mind-tools; & psychedelic science think we evolved to keep wonder within a middling range.

How meditation deconstructs your mind Want to learn how to meditate? Scientists have a new theory that might change how you practice.

Really appreciated this clear-eyed view onto the predictive processing account of meditation from @oshan.bsky.social: www.vox.com/future-perfe...

Have some work coming in this space... stay tuned 📺

The Other Place can still produce gems

This is “The Matter of Wonder” by Loriliai Biernacki — it focuses on how Abhinavagupta’s flavor of panentheism could link up with some new ideas in the philosophy of materialism today (I’m about halfway through, some great stuff so far)

Totally agree — I don’t think there is “a” goal. Just a whole landscape of interesting things that are possible. And whatever’s at the deeper end, happiness/flourishing are bad proxies, I think. But all proxies I’m aware of are, so it’s a bit of a pickle

thanks, glad you dig it, Andy!

no better season than scheming season. the adjacent possible is huge