Venkatesh Rao

P. G. Wodehouse did not deal with WW2 well. He was unjustly smeared as a Nazi collaborator (that reputational damage took decades to undo) but there is no doubt he made dumbass, clueless decisions. Almost certainly because he tried to navigate grim times with a comic mindset.

I’ve thought about this a lot lately. Even though I’m not a comedian, I do mostly think of myself as being part of the light comic relief crew on Spaceship Earth. Any other value I may add to people’s undertakings is incidental/side-effect.

There’s something you might call personality-era fit, PEF. The grain of your personality meshing with grain of the times. Eigenvectors of personality aligned with eigenvectors of the era. I have this sense that I have poor PEF for these times, beyond Great Weirding effects.