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  • Defensiveness or Growth

    Growing up in a family with several educators, I made some keen observations before starting my own journey within it. While I could spend endless time on its politics, and the societal issue with why we can never “fix” education itself, my focus remains solely on becoming a better educator.

    Within every profession, there seems to be a plateau where people develop enough skills to become proficient, maybe even good for a brief period, but then stagnate in their growth. I figured out the response to this particular moment separates the disgruntled from the masters.

    One of two things happen:

    You recognize there’s still more to learn and when you hear praise being thrown towards others, you immediately find out what they’re doing and pick up their ideas.

    Or you assume you have it figured out and when you hear praise being thrown towards others, get defensive about it.

    I suppose option three is to just give up, but speaking from an education standpoint, it’s usually one of the two above.

    The part I always find wild is that when you’re willing to put aside ego and pick up new ideas to implement, making mistakes and having missteps along the way, the defensiveness naturally subsides because you’re not even thinking about these ideas as a personal attack. It simply becomes part of the process to ask whether something works, if it can work for you and how.

    And more often than not, the best ideas tend to be old ideas that are repackaged for a new audience. As a magician, this rings so accurately that you start to wonder whether there has been any progress in the magic world. That’s why Penn & Teller’s “Fool Us” is so popular among magicians–there’s a promise of something new… but not really. Just new takes on old ideas. Usually.

    But all of this is how growth happens.

    It’s how learning happens.

    All you have to do is be open to it.

  • Left Behind?

    Keep up or get left behind.

    This was the mantra of the tech industry in the 90s, specifically, before the dot com boom and bust. It was pushed so hard that even though I was studying computers at the edge of this movement, I felt like it was already too late for me.

    But then I saw this message repeated over the years:

    “Learn about this new networking tool or you’ll be left behind.”
    “If you haven’t jumped on MySpace yet, you’re already too late.”
    “Learn this new piece of software, this app, this social media platform, this investment opportunity, this training technique, be an early adopter…” and so forth.

    And what happened?

    Things came, things went. Some of it stuck around and new stuff emerged.

    But go ahead, keep telling bestselling, award-winning authors who still write by hand that by not learning the shiny new tech toy, they’re being left behind.

    Also tell the teachers that get their students excited about learning that they will be left behind if they don’t fully embrace the latest “ed-tech” nonsense (most of which has been an *abysmal* failure).

    While you’re at it, let your plumber know they will be left behind because they didn’t prompt AI on how to fix a leaky pipe. Screw their experience with the matter.

    We can all find a regret on not getting in early for a long-term investment, but for the rest of the hype? 

    It’s time these people look up what being left behind in the world really means.

  • Dare to Be Bored

    Please refrain from showing my mother this post, but in thinking back at the times I was at Church with her, there is one thing above all else that I am thankful it brought me:

    The ability to be bored.

    Don’t get me wrong. There were many wonderful things being a part of a Church community brought me and I certainly felt an overwhelming sense of joy at being a part of it, hence why I teach Religion today, but a child sitting in the second pew of a Catholic Mass just cannot comprehend what’s going on: 20 minute homilies, litany of saints, monotone readers… all of this added up to my brain working out every conceivable way to keep myself entertained without the sharp eye of an Italian mother ready to put me in my place if I acted out.

    It was always a sigh of relief when the ushers gave the bulletins beforehand because I would have it memorized by the end of the hour. Also, it’s no wonder meditation was an easy transition for me.

    More than that, however, are the studies out today on creativity that point towards boredom as the catalyst for sparking new thinking. It’s also a great workout for the brain and forces it to do some thinking and reflecting, which are two critical points we’ve given up on today in lieu of getting the machines to do that for us.

    While I’m not against some assistance in filtering the noise in our heads, I take serious issue with failing to do the work itself.

    And while I tongue-in-cheek pointed towards Church as the foundation for learning to be bored, we used to have many other natural moments in place to help with this cause: boring classes forced very creative solutions on how to pass notes, doctors/dentists offices with their grossly outdated magazine subscriptions had you thinking about other parts of your life and sitting in your friend’s basement with no screens forced some ideas to promulgate about what to do (which was the entire basis of “That 70’s Show”).

    Unfortunately, we are stuck in a society with aggressive marketers and Napoleon-syndrome tech-bros preventing boredom from happening with their design principles of hijacking our attention for their monetary benefit. Despite knowing the need for boredom and the extreme mental, and physical, health benefits of forcing time away from their devices, they are determined to prevent any sort of boredom that might result in seeing through their smokescreen.

    Now, the Church of my childhood is not the same as it is now and therefore, not my prescription (for boredom, anyway). However, I think we can dare ourselves to be bored a little more often and see where it leads.

  • “Just Finishing”

    Thanks to a martial arts injury as a teenager, I spent decades with tendinitis in my knees and an inability to do anything high impact with them. No matter how much I rested, stretched or did something worthwhile, they always gave out.

    The more I read about the permanency of knee injuries, the more I resigned myself to thinking there was nothing I could do aside from low impact activities such as biking or yoga. Swimming seemed to be the only thing that I could feasibly do beyond that.

    By the time I hit 40, it got to the point where I dreaded stairs. The pains were sporadic up until that point, but came with more consistenty the closer I crept to that “middle age.” Then, a few years ago, a friend of mine challenged me to do a virtual exercise challenge.

    He had gotten into running as a way of staying healthy and losing weight, and wanted to take on something that we could do together. The challenge was to virtually walk/run the same distance as The Camino di Santiago, keep track of our distances and add it to the total. I told him in support I’d help him, but I’d have to walk.

    Then something happened.

    The effort to walk was feeling better on the knees each day I did it. The walking turned into periodic moments of jogging, then full on running. The one exercise that was supposed to damage me further was giving me new life.

    Then I started setting my goals higher.
    • Run a full 5k
    • Run that 5k in half an hour
    • Break the thirty minute barrier
    • Run outside
    • Complete a 5k race

    This eventually led to outdoor runs where the kilometres kept going up and the feeling of it all just got better. That 5km led to 10km and is now leading to 22km.

    However, I fell into a trap that many people do once they take on a new initaitve that was just for themselves:

    I started researching metrics and comparing myself to others. Specifically, other runners who have been training for many years, if not most of their lives.

    That moment hit me when I was finishing up a run and ran into my neighbour. He asked what distance I went that day.

    Me, feeling slightly sheepish about my amateur number, said “Only 5k.”
    He laughed.
    “Only 5k,” he mocked. “I have asthma. I wish I could run more than a kilometre without it being an issue.”

    To further solidfy the point, when I was gearing up for 10k run, I allayed my concerns to a friend about my pacing and finishing time. He asked if I knew what the world average was for finishing a run of that length.

    “Before you think too long about it, the answer is zero because most of the world can’t run that long. You should be proud for just finishing it.”

    Pardon the long garden path to get to my point, but the further entrenched we become in whatever it is we’re doing, the more we can lose sight of all we’ve done. There is no shame in telling people your goal is to “just finish” a run in the same way there shouldn’t be shame in “just finishing” any other project.

    When you compare metrics against yourself, it should be a proud moment. In this case, I’ve been accomplishing something I have never been able to physically do and have been incredibly supported by my friends and family along the way. It’s not fair to compare myself against elite, sponsored athletes who spend all their time in training.

    As that same friend who called me out also likes to say, “I’d rather be the world’s worst runner than its best couch potato.”

    It’s easy to get sucked into a small bubble and think that’s indicative of how the entire world thinks and judges. Most people simply don’t care.

    However, if you do have that competitive edge to you, then cooperate with others and compete against yourself.

  • Living in the World of Ayn Rand

    For the longest time I put off reading the self-indulgent fantasies of Ayn Rand. A big part of that had to do with reading Terry Goodkind’s “Sword of Truth” series that started as an interesting fantasy adventure; then devolved into stream-of-consciousness prostelyzing of the virtues of selfishness.

    In modern nomeclature, the series “jumped the shark” pretty quickly and never recovered. Feeling I had enough of Randian philosophy (“objectivism”), I had no interest in looking at the source material.

    It wasn’t until the last decade that her work has come forward again and preached by advocates all over the social spectrum (teenage self-interest to senators in the highest levels of government), that I took a serious look at it. Perhaps it’s my attachment to the wonders of community and seeing how it benefits all of us that gave me difficulty with believing anybody could take this seriously. I mean, the basic summary is that selfishness is a virtue, we should all act in our own rational self-interest, altruism is for suckers and the only role of government should be to protect private interests.

    In Rand’s dream world, private industry is the reason for innovation and would produce wonders for society while also extolling the achievements of humans. Ideas like romanticism, abstraction and subjectivism are tossed aside because they are not grounded in an objective world. It’s at this point that I could perhaps forgive Rand for what I assmume to be purposefully tone-deaf to the world around her and the very basics of human history that showcases how easily we are corrupted by power. She also didn’t have the foresight to know that she would eventually draw upon government assistance for her health issues late in life.

    Rational self-interest depends on people acting… well… rationally.

    I mean, if everyone acted rationally, we could just about make any system work just fine.

    Unfortunately, this leaves us in a situation in a world where we celebrate the individual and denigrate the collective for our own personal gain. It also resulted in a system where people take advantage of the collective while also harshly judging it. I believe we call this talking out of both sides of your mouth.

    “The government is inefficient and gets in the way of my progress…” while also begging government for subsidies to get this “private pursuit” going and providing a safety cushion in case it fails. This is why I roll my eyes when the financial industry tells us that we need to teach people financial literacy because they are the worst example of it. Wouldn’t we all love to just go YOLO on investments and then get a bailout in case it doesn’t work out?

    All this to say, well done Rand. In your wild swing away from communism as a corrupt and wicked form of government, you’ve persuaded us to move towards a corrupt and wicked form of individualism.

    How’s that working out for most of us?

    It’s time for a new icon. We no longer need another Howard Roark or John Galt sounding the alarm of the downfall of society because we decided to help each other out, and we certainly no longer need the narcissism this type of behaviour brings.

    What we need, is each other.

  • The Spa and the Community

    My wife and I were gifted a certificate to visit a nearby spa. It’s one of those nordic ones with various hot/cold water baths, saunas, hammocks, hot beds and a salt water pool. Extravagance, for sure, but something to excite people for a restful experience.

    Except, that’s not what happens there.

    Groups show up and jabber away in “quiet” zones while so-called “influencers” spend the day finding spots to take pictures and videos of themselves, just to post about their “relaxing time.”

    It reminds me of what’s happening in gyms today where weights/machines become a scarce commodity because someone decides to film themselves or sit there for twenty minutes on their phone between sets. The people who go there to focus on their workout have to fight this endless charade, making the experience horrible.

    The mental state you’re in at these places matters just as much as the physical one, and it’s hard to get in a good mindset when surrounded by nonsense. Circuses are meant to be entertaining, not a frustrating challenge to block out wherever you go.

    It’s not even something to get upset over—just sad.

    Then we attended a local community event.

    Our volunteer community association puts on a winter festival at the local school where there’s skating, sledding, wagon rides, coffee, hot chocolate, snacks, music and whatever else they can get in there. They also build and maintain outdoor ice rinks every year, and put on movies in the summer.

    Kids show up and run off together.
    Adults catch-up with each other.
    Everyone is soaking in the outdoors and nobody is distracted by their devices.

    It’s absolutely a lot of work, but everyone leaves there happier, while also, wait for it, feeling a stronger sense of community.

    It finally occurred to me that this is what we’re missing in our world today.

    The word “community” has been hijacked by tech companies to give a false impression that digital spaces can replace the physical ones. Psychologically, they have us all fooled on this idea and we wonder why our trust in each other has plummeted.

    People thrive in community.

    Monks, who choose a life of seclusion, must do so in a community of other monks.

    People praise Thoreau for building a cabin in the woods to escape society, but always miss the part where he moves back after a few years.

    And then there’s the tragic tale of Christopher McCandless (“Into the Wild”) who gets to the brink of death before realizing that happiness is only real when it’s shared.

    The community is energizing. Enjoyable. Relaxing, even.

    It’s also frustrating, but that’s part of what community does for you. Teaches you how to be with other people and find ways around that frustration.

    That’s because when people gather in community, they do it for a unified purpose. There’s a physical synergy that happens when you’re around others and get swept up in the energy. The digital landscape is a pale imitation of this idea because:

    a) people lie
    b) people exaggerate to the point of lying
    c) people are passively engaged

    The spa works if people are in community to relax, not isolating themselves to stress out about fake social validation.

    The gym works if the gym community is working together to push each other and not individually trying to escape the space they’re in.

    And, as a Religion teacher I can’t resist, the spirituality of a Church is dead if it doesn’t have an active community.

    I will also point out my observations of my students, who, over the past five or six years, speak about their happiest moments when they are with their community (sports, friends, etc.).

    We are hungering for it and now is the time to reclaim what makes us great as a species.

    Let’s build more community and protect them by actively blocking those who would invade those sacred spaces for their own vices.

  • An Act of Rebellion

    All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.

    Blaise Pascal

    Pardon my cadence, but I’ve stopped caring about the mouth-breathing morons spouting their putrid nonsense in the hopes of getting attention in our overly-abundant world.

    Algorithms have hijacked our collective attention (among many other environmental factors), forcing a race to the bottom of the gene pool in the hopes that we can all swim there. I have refrained, for almost a year, from adding any more noise into this black hole and focused on just living my own life.

    There was a time when depth, nuance and careful consideration were applauded. When intelligent conversation was the goal for the public sphere, leaving the rest to social get togethers or the inane ramblings of a minority of people that we could casually ignore.

    However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to ignore.

    Attention-seeking behaviour, regardless of how idiotic it may be, is now rewarded. It’s rewarded in (fake) social validation, which may prove financially viable if it goes far enough. It’s now “cool” or “fun” to be a troll in real life because doing something that might actually contribute something to your community doesn’t feed the narcissistic values the Internet now thrives on.

    It is also exasperated by new tools that can present any narrative someone chooses and hell, it doesn’t even have to be true. Just compelling.

    BUT—it all looks the same and it’s flooding our senses.

    • Most social media posts are now the same variations of AI slop.
    • Bots fill the comment sections.
    • Video is being replaced by “clips.”
    • The goal is to elicit anger (“ragebait”)
    • Philosophies that used to defend against this are being simplified and commodified (Stoicism, I’m looking at you!)
    • Movies and shows are now being written with the assumption the audience is distracted, eliminating any chance of immersion.

    The list keeps going and at the sake of sounding like an old man yelling at kids to get off his lawn, I’m writing this because I see a backlash and I want to amplify it in my own way.

    People across all generations are sick of it, but you don’t hear about it. After all, it doesn’t serve the commercial interests of those who have weaponized this mess to spread the word.

    Thus, it is time to declare an act of rebellion.

    While the obvious choice is the proverbial “cabin in the woods,” let’s take a more realistic approach. After all, there’s barely any woods to build a cabin in and we don’t need to throw out the baby with the bath water (that whole nuance thing I mentioned).

    The act of rebellion is simple to understand, but painfully difficult to execute:

    Slow down and quiet down.

    Slow down: seek the longer path, ignore the shortcuts, spend more time thinking, planning, conversing, resisting the instant gratification and need to react right away.

    Quiet down: let your mind be bored, forcing it to cry out to you until it gives up lets you be while avoiding the spaces that fill it with noise.

    Oh, and one more thing…

    assume everything you see, hear and read today is utter bullshit until proven otherwise.

  • A Renaissance in Philosophy

    “Ignorant men raise questions that wise men answered a thousand years ago.”

    – Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

      In 1999, there was a string of movies revolving around the theme of the disenfranchised middle-aged man, coming to terms with the monotony of life. Consider films like Fight Club or American Beauty. Of course, the characters in the movie clearly had their issues, but it presented an alternate escape route from this feeling that it’s all worth nothing.

      Fast-forward to today and I see the same theme play out, albeit with a younger demographic. Except instead of movies that tell us to be alive by beating the hell out of each other, we have combat sports and echo chambers on the Internet to affirm this feeling. 

      However, the danger this time around is instead of taking the difficult task of actually exploring this and working through it, those fallen to this feeling are blaming parts of society. Whether that be government, women, or the systems in place that they have decided only specifically targets them because, as you learn quickly in Theology, when you look for demons, you will find them wherever you’d like… as long as it suits your narrative.

      If only these guys could pick up a damn philosophy book and discover this feeling isn’t new. There is an entire history of philosophers, from the absurdism of Albert Camus, the eternal recurrence of Nietzsche, the wisdom of Marcus Aurelius, all the way back to Socrates, that were obsessed with this very idea. 

      It. Isn’t. New.

      Life is the toughest, most beautiful and longest experience you will have. It’s going to challenge you in ways that are always new and just when you think you’ve hit a plateau, something new comes around the corner. Yesterday’s crisis will seem silly in light of today’s understanding and through it all, you will never feel like you have it all together.

      This feeling of insecurity, anger and general existential dread isn’t a new moment in the human experience. It’s the same moment, played out over thousands of years by anyone who stopped to consider their own existence. How you work through it is the real work of life.

      We are at another pivotal moment in human history where the very purpose of humanity is in question in light advances in technology—specifically AI. It isn’t the time to gather in corners of the world and worship any voice who offers a new target to blame. A cursory glance in the history of human thought will show you this moment, this feeling, isn’t special.

      The problem isn’t new, the answer is old and a renaissance in philosophy is on the horizon. Focus your energies appropriately.

    • What’s the Real Miracle?

      The very word, miracle, is a dangerous one. It’s loaded with connotation of people’s hopes, projected on a blind belief towards a magical wishing god.

      There are points where we all want miraculous things to happen, but consider that even Jesus didn’t do miracles for the sake of healing people. Each one came with a lesson, all of which culminated when the world didn’t end when he was gone.

      It was up to us at that point. 

      I think the most telling remark on this subject came during a panel I once introduced on the relevance of Religion to the world today. One of the panelists was the head of the school of medicine at Queen’s University, who was hired by the Vatican to investigate claims about medical miracles (she was an atheist). One summer she got to explore the Vatican archives and read up on all the claimed miracles in history.

      Her findings was being able to explain 97% of all claimed miracles through medical means. What about the last 3%? Isn’t that evidence that miracles can happen?

      In her words:

      “That just tells me that there’s a 3% chance that a miracle can happen in nature.”

      I have no doubt that as we continue medical research, that percentage will go down, but it does say something about our collective desire for placing our faith in something other than each other. Why do so many people make pilgrimages to Lourdes to be healed in the waters, carried by many others, but so few are willing to support each other in society?

      I think often about Peter Singer’s argument that we would instantly run in and save a child in a pond, ruining a $300 pair of shoes in the process, but hesitate to spend that $300 to save a child overseas. 

      It’s telling that when we watch people treat each other individually, they carry the traits of what we want to see everywhere. Yet, when it comes to their attitude towards a larger group, that suddenly breaks down. It feels as though the reason people seek these miracles in the first place is because we’ve abandoned them to think this is their only recourse. 

      A 3% chance for divine medical intervention.

      The real miracle we seek should be a collective will to build heaven on earth. It’s not magical—it’s work. 

      But in that work, we’ll actually see real miracles happen.

    • The Algorithm Decides?

      I’ve noticed in the emailing of my posts, some end up in the Junk folder while others cleanly arrive in the Inbox. I’m sure it has something to do with the titles and keywords within, but I find it frustrating an algorithm gets to decide what is junk instead of the reader.

      Artists, if they’re not full of hubris, know they don’t get to dictate what people will like. They often experiment and create for their own satisfaction, giving a bit of their soul into every project they tackle. Often, they’re usually surprised at what resonates with people and sometimes, they get overwhelmed at the response and shy away from having to explain their process (e.g. J.D. Salinger).

      But yet,

      “The algorithm is good at recommending…”
      “May we suggest…”
      “The people who liked what you’re listening to also listened to to…”

      My younger self would often spend hours in the library, wandering around the stacks and pulling random books to see what was inside. It was this serendiptiious discovery that led me to a Monopoly game guide, which had me thinking about statistics in a whole new way. Or, in any way for that matter. However, while sitting in the aisle and reading through the pages, getting ready to borrow the book, I also noticed a section of books that would become my life for a few decades: magic.

      Sure, I had seen David Copperfield specials on TV and had an interest in learning, but I couldn’t know that taking one of those books out would lead to a career out of it over a decade later.

      Another time, a random conversation with a stranger led me to Terry Goodkind, which then led me to Robert Jordan and my love of the fantasy genre.

      A conversation with a friend led me to music I still listen to today. As did conversations with students at the beginning of my teaching career.

      Some recommendations of “massively popular” art (books, movies, music, etc.) were not my cup of tea. I didn’t see the appeal and would never recommend them to others. Some of my absolute favourites are too specific and niche to recommend to anyone, but the specific people I know would love them, do.

      The issues of the previous generations were breaking into the mainstream media, who dictated popularity. If it was on the radio, or on television, it was ordained. While the Internet was meant to break us free from that funnel, we are right back to where we started.

      Except this time, we can ignore what’s offered and decide for ourselves and we should never forget that.