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Sloww Sunday Newsletter 115 (Aug 21, 2022) — Rational Minimalism, Flywheel Effects, Enlightenment, & More
Happy Sunday!
Here’s the latest from Sloww along with the most interesting things I discovered last week. Here’s the latest from Sloww along with the most interesting things I discovered last week. If you enjoy this issue, please forward the email version it to some friends and family. 🙏
🌎 Lighter Living
Rational Minimalism vs Radical Minimalism
Various Lengths | Sloww
One of my key insights a few years ago while learning about minimalism was that there’s a big difference between rational minimalism and radical minimalism. Here’s a book recommendation for each…
- Rational Minimalism: “Simplify” by Joshua Becker (eBook Summary)
- Radical Minimalism: “Goodbye, Things” by Fumio Sasaki (Book Summary)
“If minimalism is the intentional promotion of the things that I most value, it is also about deciding what is most important in my life and removing the things that distract me from it. It is about removing the urgent for the sake of the important … Minimalism isn’t about removing things you love. It’s about removing the things that distract you from the things you love.” — Joshua Becker (Founder, Becoming Minimalist)
🧭 Higher Purpose
What is the Flywheel Effect? (& Building Momentum for your Life Purpose)
5 mins | Sloww
Last week’s newsletter covered a variety of Venn diagram approaches to life purpose. Whether you’re still seeking purpose or have found it, how do you keep it going? The flywheel approach is here to help. And, it’s a key component of Ikigai 2.0.
“A flywheel is an underlying, compelling logic of momentum … there’s an inevitability built in. If you do A, you almost can’t help but do B. And if you do B, you almost can’t help but do C. And if you do C, you almost can’t help but do D. And around and around. And it’s driven around because there’s an underlying connection. There’s a logical sequence that builds dynamic momentum, because A drives B drives C drives D and around back to the top of the loop.” — Jim Collins
🧠 Mental Wealth
Sensemaking, Uncertainty, and Purpose
75 mins | Nate Hagens (YouTube)
This is a recent podcast with Daniel Schmachtenberger where he takes a much more macro and meta perspective than you may have typically heard from him before. As expected from Daniel, it’s amazing, and I got sucked into the whole thing.
Here’s a highlight:
We need heart (❤️), will (🧭), and mind (🧠) all working together. It’s pretty easy to see that any two of those three don’t work.
🧠 + ❤️ – 🧭 = Really smart, caring academics who feel broken and hopeless at the impossibility of the world.
❤️ + 🧭 – 🧠 = Activists who are willing to go put their life at risk to chain themselves to a boat or whatever, but they don’t know how to think through strategy at the scope of what has to change.
🧭 + 🧠 – ❤️ = Narrow value systems and the kind of sociopathic rule that currently runs the world. That knows how to be highly strategic, knows how to be highly agentic, but to serve some narrow interest at the expense of somebody else.
It takes all three of those (❤️ + 🧭 + 🧠) together.
“No one person can understand everything, but they can seek to understand in a way that has more cognizance of the depth of interconnectedness.” — Daniel Schmachtenberger
☯️ Timeless Wisdom
Free Will, Enlightenment, & Subject-Object Relationship
Various Lengths | Sloww
I finally binged hours of Robert Sapolsky on free will. This new post synthesizes everything I learned.
🆕 Public Post: No Free Will: The Biology of Behavior with Robert Sapolsky
Also, I finally consolidated, organized, and synthesized what I’ve learned about enlightenment from Eckhart Tolle, Ramana Maharshi, Rupert Spira, and Jed McKenna—including an infographic that synthesizes them all together. In order to really understand enlightenment, I realized you also need to understand the subject-object relationship.
🆕 Premium Posts:
🔒 Stream of Consciousness: What is Enlightenment? (+ Infographic)
🔒 Stream of Consciousness: What is the Subject-Object Relationship?
🔒 Behind the Scenes: Dissecting my own Lottery of Birth Ticket
“If there were no illusion, there would be no enlightenment.” — Buddhist saying
🤯 Mind Expanding
Primitive Forest Tribe meets Modern Man for the First Time
40 mins | YouTube
Last week’s newsletter featured a video of an Amazon tribe reacting to images of our world. This week we have something similar—or do we? This video documentary is apparently staged according to Reddit, Wikipedia, and Sci Hub.
Today—in the world of growing deep fakes, digital propaganda, media manipulation, and info warfare—we have to question everything we see and hear. This isn’t always easy. Check out this video series from Jake Orthwein for a helpful frame: How Politics Became Pro Wrestling (Part 1), When Fake Growth Leads to Real Violence (Part 2), This Model Explains Media Manipulation (Part 3 Preview).
“You start doping reality with fakeness, and the brain can’t go much beyond four levels of lies.” — Eric Weinstein
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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
Founder, Sloww
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