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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 100 (Mar 27, 2022) — Life-Changing Ideas, Truth about Emotions, Art of Living, & More
Happy Sunday!
Here’s the latest from Sloww along with the most interesting things I discovered last week.
To respect your time and attention, every newsletter can be read in under 5 minutes. If you enjoy it, please take 5 seconds to forward the email version to some friends and family. 🙏
🆕 New News
🎉 Sloww Sunday #100
It’s hard to believe this is already newsletter issue #100! I took a stroll down memory lane and put together 🔒Premium summaries of issues 1-50 and issues 51-100. Whether you’ve subscribed recently or just missed some issues, these two posts are great places to scroll through all the newsletter highlights.
⚠️ Beware of “Slow-Washing”
Sadly (but not surprisingly), marketers are now brainstorming how to exploit slow living (what I’m calling “slow-washing”). Here’s a Twitter thread highlighting various forms of “washing” you should know. If you aren’t consciously aware of them, they may be unconsciously influencing you. I’ve also included highlights from the article in this 🔒Sloww Society community post.
🌀 Sloww Stuff
🆕 10 Most Life-Changing Ideas I’ve Discovered
After 6+ years and 400+ posts on the site (including 100+ book summaries and 100+ newsletters), it’s time to curate a top-10 list of the most life-changing ideas I’ve discovered to date. It covers everything from slow living to synthesizing minds, the lottery of birth to lifelong learning, memetic immunity to the meta-crisis, and more. Happy learning and living!
🔒 Mental Mastery Cheatsheet: 500+ Cognitive Concepts Curated
This comprehensive spreadsheet is now completely updated! But, it can be overwhelming. How can we actually learn all these concepts? Introducing Mini Mind: 365 daily emails of bite-sized brain food. Every single day for a year, I’ll introduce you to a new cognitive concept. I’m currently organizing all of the concepts into themes and building out the emails to send one per day. As they say, “An applied learning a day keeps the deluded thinking away!” Launching in the next couple weeks (and Premium members will get a discount).
🧠 Modern Knowledge
You aren’t at the mercy of your emotions (your brain creates them)
18 mins | TED (YouTube)
Want to know the truth about emotions? Lisa Feldman Barrett, PhD is a distinguished professor, author, and top-cited scientist in psychology and neuroscience research who has studied emotions for 25+ years. The link above is to her TED Talk, but also check out her podcast with Lex Fridman. Her book Seven And A Half Lessons About The Brain is on my full reading list.
“(You) do not and cannot detect any emotion in anybody, ever … Emotions are not what we think they are. They are not universally expressed and recognized. They are not hardwired brain reactions … No brain on this planet contains emotion circuits … Emotions are guesses that your brain constructs in the moment where billions of brain cells are working together.” — Lisa Feldman Barrett
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
The Supreme Art Of Living
10 mins | Eckhart Tolle (YouTube)
Eckhart Tolle, spiritual teacher and bestselling author of The Power of Now (Book Summary) and A New Earth (Book Summary) says an essential lesson in the art of living is doing whatever is required of you in any situation without it becoming a role that you identify with. As you can imagine, the “art of living” is defined in countless ways. Here are my favorite art of living perspectives.
If you want to learn Tolle’s teachings, you’ll find no deeper guide than this: 🔒Eckhart Tolle Synthesis: How to Live a Life of Presence & Purpose with “The Power of Now” + “A New Earth”
“There are three words that convey the secret of the art of living, the secret of all success and happiness: One With Life. Being one with life is being one with Now. You then realize that you don’t live your life, but life lives you. Life is the dancer, and you are the dance.” — Eckhart Tolle
🤯 Mind Expanding
This is us.
If I find myself taking life too seriously, I just look at this image and laugh (these too). Fair warning: you may get nervous looking at your own nervous system. 👀🧠
💡 New Learning
Overton Window
Wikipedia
· The range of policies politically acceptable to the mainstream population at a given time.
· An idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians’ individual preferences.
“The smart way to keep people passive and obedient is to strictly limit the spectrum of acceptable opinion, but allow very lively debate within that spectrum—even encourage the more critical and dissident views. That gives people the sense that there’s free thinking going on, while all the time the presuppositions of the system are being reinforced by the limits put on the range of the debate.” — Noam Chomsky
💭 Deep Thought
Upgrade to the Ultimate Rule:
- The Golden Rule: Treat others how you want to be treated.
- The Platinum Rule: Treat others how they want to be treated.
- The Ultimate Rule: There are no others.
💬 Wise Words
To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again.
— Pema Chödrön
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Feedback: Have something you want to say, or just want to say hi? It’s always greatly appreciated. Just send me an email or reach out socially.
Have an alive week!
Kyle Kowalski
Synthesizer & Solopreneur, Sloww
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