🐈

7/ If you refuse to label yourself and keep your identity small no matter how great you feel you are at something, there's less room to feel unseen and less opportunity for ego to get triggered.

8/ Competition, bell curves & the free market check ego via global calibration. Without it all you have is your circle of friends which fall into the traps of (1) feel good circle jerk (2) thinly veiled dog-eat-dog competition (3) cold professional pragmatism

9/ Actual friendship requires refusing to judge others as well as yourself. The internet makes this easier because we present smaller slices of ourselves making everything more difficult to judge. But only if you view the other as 99% mysterious.

10/ When we start putting people into boxes based on small slices, we tend to make caricatures out of people. We end up fighting ourselves because our minds are what creates these caricatures.

11/ In the early days of the internet and even the early days of facebook we had this mysterious quality. It felt like the world was suddenly a lot bigger. Now that it no longer feels mysterious it feels claustrophobic.

12/ And it IS claustrophobic. We're living in our own world because we trust our minds too much. Most school systems squeeze out individuality and create an empty and malleable mind. Well suited to learn whatever is needed by whatever system.

13/ We become the mind and believe ourselves to be this brain that can only experience one thing at a time. We lose the ability to see the wholeness of things in exchange for the ability to slice the moment into every smaller and smaller pieces.

14/ A 'smart' person is someone who sees the world in slow motion because that moment was sliced into small pieces. It makes regular moments terribly boring. Nothing survives being cut up so much, not even reality.