Brooding: Should Our Children Have a Political Party?
Most of us have loved ones whose beliefs don’t perfectly align with ours, and kids need help making sense of that beyond a binary of right and wrong. Our biases are often simultaneously irrational and grounded in experience. Understanding this is not moral relativism, it’s social intelligence. Belonging to a group feels good, but teaching your kids how to identify group dynamics can feel good too.This was from before the election, but will continue to be relevant.
Finished reading: Martin Heidegger by George Steiner 📚
Cadillac Mountain, Maine
Verona Island, Maine
Accountability sinks | A Working Library
Once you start looking for accountability sinks, you see them all over the place. When your health insurance declines a procedure; when the airline cancels your flight; when a government agency declares that you are ineligible for a benefit; when an investor tells all their companies to shovel so-called AI into their apps. Everywhere, broken links between the people who face the consequences of the decision and the people making the decisions.
I’m thinking about how accountability sinks might operate in my context, the local church. Sometimes you get opposing sinks: the pastor concludes the church doesn’t move forward because of the stubbornness of the laity; the laity conclude the pastor is to blame; everyone escapes accountability as the community degrades. The consequences, though, are much harder to discern in this case.
Other People's Projects
This is not an imposition, it’s a kindness. The point of a suspense file isn’t to nag others into living up to their commitments, it’s to form a network of support among collaborators where we all help one another make those conscious choices about what we’re not going to do, rather than having the stuff we really value slip away because we forgot about it.
This is important…I’ve often wondered about good boundaries around reminding other people of their obligations. Should I send out a reminder email about the meeting, or assume we’re all adults? Instead of seeing it though through the expectation of perfection, if I admit that we all need help (this is why I have a Getting Things Done system after all), reminding others turns into a collaborative system in which we’re all trying to do our best.
“merlin mann” apple site:music.apple.com at DuckDuckGo
Merlin doesn’t share his profile on Apple Music but you can find his public playlists with this search.
