SelfAdoration.com

Retail is dying. Movie theaters are dying. Schools and churches are dying. The world outside the home, especially the world of sociability among strangers, is shrinking, shriveling, vanishing.

It’s not hard to see why: It’s so easy to stay home, even as it is seems every day riskier to venture out.

Amazon will bring you all the gear you could buy at retail, including the TV and films to replace the cinema. When you do go out, you drive to a guarded lot, or you valet, or you just taxi door-to-door. You can even work from home.

Meanwhile, depending on where you live, chaos reigns on “public property.” Little things turn into big things, so, while most of us are still and always sane, random insanity happens – and so does its intentional mimicry. Where no one keeps the peace, the peace is steadily less kept.

Even if it were, vacancy repels: Nothing draws a crowd like a crowd, but nothing is quite as spooky as dropping a coin or your keys into a vast, cavernous, echoing silence.

People vote with their feet – and they’re voting to stay home.

That’s only a problem if you need for them to vote some other way. I’m a natural-born home-body – really a work-body – so I couldn’t love these changes more. In the course of my lifetime, the world at large has come, more and more, to resemble the one I’ve lived in all along. It will be a very happy day for me when I know I will never have to walk into a Safeway ever again.

But considered as a real estate problem, it’s a catastrophe: Public-facing commercial space of all sorts is flailing, but the investment value of the residential dirt around it is affected, as well. We built for cars, so the homes we don’t venture from make less and less sense.

But I’ve thought that way all along. We’re talking about high-density development, so you know, but I’ve been talking about this since I was a teenager. I had a class (more…)

This is me looking back on looking back on a Labor Day a long time ago. The first extract was written on Labor Day, 2005, as the City of New Orleans was demonstrating for all of us that dependence on government is a fatal error. The second extract was written a year or two before that. And the Labor Day I am talking about there was years before that. Even so, every bit of this is perfectly apposite to the world we live in now – more is the pity.

This is me from elsewhen. I think about this every year at Labor Day. I spent much of the weekend working on business planning issues, macro, micro and meta. I remember from the days when I had a job how much I relished long weekends, because I could build so much on vast tracts of uninterrupted time. I did a bunch of money work last week, but my weekend was virtually my own – to fill with the work that too often takes a back seat to money work. Off and on we had Fox News on in the office, and the whining, pissing and moaning was an effective counterpoint to my entire way of life. My world is where the Splendor is, no alternatives, no substitutions, no adulterations, no crybaby excuses:

The time of your life is your sole capital. If you trade that time in such a way that you get in exchange less than you really want, less than you might actually have achieved, you have deliberately cheated yourself. You have acted to your own destruction by failing to use your time to construct of your life what you want most and need most and deserve most. You have let your obsession or anger – over what amounts to a trivial evil in a world where people are shredded alive (more…)

The curse of long holiday weekends is that time can hang heavy on your hands. Still worse, every source of new online content goes off for it’s own bar-be-que. Apparently, the true purpose of the internet is wasting your time at work – not engaging you when you actually have time free to invest.

I have the cure for all of that. I’ll give you two Netflixable benedies first, since the best benefit of having time off is spending it with the people you love.

So for a date-night movie, I like Begin Again. And for the whole family, Chef rocks – especially on the kind of Ds virtues we saw so beautifully in the Houston floods.

Meanwhile, I had a Splendorous Summer. I always do well this time of year – Nine empathies was born on Labor Day weekend three years ago – but this year has been especially good for me.

Accordingly, if you want to spend some time improving your mind this weekend, I commend you to me. That’s a vanity, I know, but I have no idea what to do about it. I repay effort, but you can only find that out for yourself by making one.

DISC-my-way is the place to start, since the notation system will show up everywhere else. The big work this Summer was ThriversEd – the DISC of educational philosophy – but I’m also worth reading on leadership and marriage.

Humanity is Ds. We saw that this week in Houston: When every wealth of every other DISC strategy has been stripped away, the only wealth that endures is the Ds frame of mind – the drive to survive for me and mine.

Why should you be studying me? Because I have the map for getting our civilization back to it’s best expression: Driven-sociability.

It’s not just worth reading about: It’s how we survive.

Man Alive elucidates the ontology of human social relationships, but it’s dense, tough sledding. Appended below is a easier-reading summary of some of these ideas. I wrote this as a speech for my Toastmaster’s Club in August of 2001. In the blog.world, I’ll throw out details about our lives, but that’s really just so much plastic fruit, local color. This is the world that I live in, the world I wish everyone lived in… –GSS

 

Shyly’s delight: Manifesting the secondary consequences of splendor.

I have a Labrador mutt named Shyly. She’s about three years old, but because she’s a Lab, she’ll always be a puppy. Always busy, always involved, always eager to be right in the middle of everything.

Shyly is the world’s greatest master at expressing delight. She has a fairly limited emotional range — sadness, boredom, territoriality and contentment. But at expressing delight, Shyly is unequaled. When I come home, even if I’ve only been away for two minutes, Shyly races back and forth through the house, her every muscle rippling with undiluted delight.

It’s an amazing thing to watch, funny and charming and sweet. Shyly’s joy is clean and whole and pure and perfect. Uncontaminated by memories of past pain. Unfiltered by guilt or shame or doubt or self-loathing. Untainted by envy or anger or malice. Unaffected by affectation. Shyly’s delight is impossible to doubt, and the day she fails to express it will be the day she has scampered off this mortal coil.

“What,” you may ask, “does this have to do with me?”

Here’s what:

Friedrich Nietzsche said, “god is dead.” By this he did not mean that there had once been an omnipotent universe creator but that he had since expired. What he meant was that the manifestations of (more…)

Not to alienate myself – even further – from the rest of humanity, but I think this eclipse mania is absurd.

Crouching down to bespy the transit of billiard balls from eye-level would be an equivalent thrill – but you can talk yourself out of that just by imagining how boring it would be.

I admire physics just as much as the next guy, but the best thing about physics – compared with every other origin story – is that physics is a god who manages to get along without constant palliation.

A decent reason to be aware of the eclipse is that it puts the lie to every other origin story – but so does all the rest of reality. Meanwhile, if you have to tell yourself the same story over and over again – including physics – my guess is you don’t believe it.

Your business. If you are a kid or you have kids, it’s a rare teachable moment, and I totally get that. And I have no doubt that everyone would welcome having something else to talk about right now – especially something that unites us all, even if only as passive spectators. I get that, too.

But if you have made any preparations beyond planning to take a look out the window Monday – we’re going at this being-a-grown-up business differently. And if you have spent money on the eclipse…

Good grief. We traipse through life like mourners except when we’re skipping around like drunks. We eat nothing but gruel – or cotton candy. We are gorged by our own starvation. Fascinated by our incessant, repetitive boredom. Credulously jaded, cynically incorrigible, smug as only the perfectly-ignorant can be smug…

Hey, wait! We are kids!

I knew that, of course. It’s what we’ve been talking about: You became you when you graduated from Toddler to Child, and you haven’t changed much since then. Me, neither: I had zero patience for standing around doing nothing back then, too. So, yes, (more…)

I wrote this in a comment on one of my videos:

Inlookers: If you’ve written something I’ve ignored, with an effort you might-could guess why. If you have a serious issue to raise, raise it. If you want to try to silence me or cow me with your disapproval, stop it. It has zero impact on me, but it soils your own character enduringly.

That’s the precise self-adorationist position on ad hominem attacks and other weaponized fallacies: Cultivate indifference and press on regardless. Other people’s bad behavior only becomes a matter of my morality when I choose to behave badly in response. Your choosing to soil your self dirties mine not at all. I grow by pursuing my values, not by wrestling in the mud with your vices.

It is also the best way I’ve found of implementing the second rule of The Church of Splendor: I am not arguing with you. If all you want to do is pick a fight, pick you nose instead. I am not arguing with you.

But that sort of thing is easy to say, and you may think it’s some sort of posturing on my part. It’s not. I live this as a daily reality, waxing and waning with the distractions of mobbed-up minds, and I’ve lived it for my entire life. This is a question that came to me a few years ago, and it seems worthwhile just now to revisit the topic of cultivating indifference.

I guess my question is simply this… How do you do it? You lay your heart, soul and ideas on the line and so often have them thrown right back in your face. And yet everyday, I wake up and see that you have written again, unscathed and unabashed.

Without intending to be flippant, I don’t notice things like that. In any sort of reaction to anything (more…)

James Mattis is Dc, and so are all the generals he has surrounded our Prom King president with. That has scared me since his appointment, since Dc is the most-efficient killer in the DISC deck.

Killing is not what Dc’s should be doing, mind you. Their role in the world of commerce is precise productivity, from back-end accounting to tool-and-die making. But put one in charge of an artillery unit and sparks will fly.

The best generals are Ds, but in a Ds world military leadership is an as-needed job – and Dc’s are master millwrights.

Mattis worried me simply because of the heightened homicidal need that Dc’s bring to the world. We talked about amiability with respect to marriage and other relationships. The opposite of amiability is irascibility: How much does our interaction anger me? How much does our ping-ponging anger make things worse? And how badly do I want to kill you when you block my access to my values?

I don’t know that any but the truly outraged actually wants to kill anyone, but I know we all feel that way when we’re not getting what we want. That’s actually predictable from your full DISC profile – where in a frustration loop the homicidal need will come out. Meanwhile, as you might guess, the more amiable you are, the less irascible:

But, of course, wanting to kill someone is different from getting the job done. Ci yearns to kill almost everyone all the time. That’s what all the simmering rage displays are about, summoning lightning bolts and conjuring up detailed smitations of the wicked. But to do real work, not just abstraction-juggling, you need real D, and, accordingly, the best killers among (more…)

What are you missing? Everything.