Four Fourths

Portrait of Michel de Montaigne by Salvador Dalí “On the highest throne in the world, we still sit only on our own bottom.”― Michel de Montaigne Michel De Montaigne, skeptic, writer, & haver of thoughts, writes about almost anything that crosses his mind, from his painful goes with kidney stones, to cannibalism. What is so admirable about Montaigne is not what he understands but how he respects what he finds incomprehensible. He treats the mysterious with care & doesn’t attempt to explain it away. After all, it is said that he coined the phrase, “but what do I know?”.

Pro's of being a useless idiot.

If you are explaining, you are losing.

Otium is Hard Work - The Original Affluent Society

Deconstructing a Faith I Didn't Know I Had

Don't be a non-king, kings.

The example of Fyodor Pavlovich Karamazov

& It's Paradoxical Nature.

Rebelling as a coping mechanism

Leisure. What Does It Mean and Where Does It Lead?

We are all insane because of it. All the evidence I need.

I must admit: I watched the movie La La Land the other night. I know, but it gets worse; it wasn’t the corn fueled dumpster fire I expected it to be. I actually found it strangely relatable and inspiring. The movie follows the story of two disagreeable creatives. One more disagreeable than the other, both disagreeable nonetheless, and both worth admiring in their own right. The character I found particularly revealing was Sebastian Wilder, played by Ryan Gosling. A jazz musician and piano aficionado with great taste who often finds himself ranting on and on about - what seems like from the outside - abstract nonsense (wonder why I found this character relatable?). He talks about everything from what exactly the birth of jazz music is, its philosophy, and even how jazz is intellectual compromise between the members of the band. This is a guy so passionate that if there is even a fraction of a

Larping is fine, so embrace it.

This is more for me than anyone else, while I don’t know if others have had this experience, it has been mine. Think of it as a thought experiment. Try to imagine of all the advice that has ever been given to you. Now, picture your life if you had taken and acted on all that advice and followed it to its end. Doesn’t seem like much of a life at all, and living in such a way is not sustainable – always waiting for the next step. If you constantly chase advice and recommendations you’ll end up on a path with a bunch of ideas that aren’t innately familiar to you. So if taking

The best part of the chaos during this pandemic has been watching the reactions of celebrities and huge corporations. And when I say best I mean so pathetic that it’s terribly embarrassing. These have to be the most out of touch and delusional people to have ever drawn a breath. What is even worse is there are “consumers” who are so entranced with these global brands that they defend them. Defending a multinational global faceless organization that doesn’t care anything about you or your well being. Asinine.

There is only one way to put this… skateboarders don’t get enough credit for their smarts. Though never articulated, it’s shown. I can’t think of a better example of teeth grinding toughness and balls to the wall commitment. Usually not “formally educated”, it’s not uncommon for them to come from rough backgrounds with complicated upbringings, parental voids, drugs, general loneliness and outcast-ness, the list goes on. These guys are total redemption stories, who made it in a world that is certain they wouldn’t. If it weren’t for skating these guys would be totally written off by society. But in their expertise they are the most talented there are, and the mainstream writes them off as uneducated, unrealistic and immature anyway. You don’t get to be a professional in such an intense field like this without understanding some sort of eternal truth. Professional skateboarders understand life lessons that a majority of us are never taught.

There are people I know personally who have been going emotionally berserk from being "trapped" inside their own homes and from not being able to go into work, which they saw before as a positive. These same folks must toss and turn at night with the thought of malls being closed, causing them to stay home. ... Imagine such injustice and such horror.

Hello friends, I am currently taking a break from the newsletter to finish the book on leisure I have been writing, which is in its final stages & will be coming soon. I am going to be taking a break from that break by doing something I usually don’t do, which is comment on current events. But this won’t be about any particular event, but more about my frustration in how we handle tragedy. This will be clumsy & not polished, but I feel was something that needed to be said.

Specializing isn't a task that man has always done, it is still a relatively new concept we are still seeing unfold in front of us as we get better at it and as we continue down its path. I have been interested in this general idea of specialization lately. My journey so far of looking into this has brought me to two intellectual giants, Jacques Ellul and Wendell Berry. These two have similar thoughts on the matter. These two offer a different seeing the effects and possible consequences of specialization as we know it today.

It is quite clear that we live in an anxious time. Individuals are anxious, the culture is anxious, everyone is on edge. Amongst other things, I believe this is a spiritual problem, I also believe that proper leisure - understood & attained - can help us ease some of that anxiety, if only briefly.

There is a way that you can win, and it's by losing. But not losing alone, it's also knowing how to handle the loss. What to do with it. Through which lens to dissect it. There is a certain perspective and a certain point of view someone can train themselves to have.

One of the most unsettling and yet important things about life I have learned is that the way things are and the way I have been learning my whole life can be undone, mixed up and pieced back together. Life and ideas can be viewed from many different perspectives, each of which have their benefits and pitfalls. What I have learned recently is that the way things are is not necessarily the way things were meant to be and the way things are might not be the best, most effective or healthiest way to achieve certain objectives, which is what I wish to investigate. This personal discovery has been been endlessly fascinating and has been a portal for me to discover other ways of thinking, and a source of many different lenses through which one can see the world. I consider this to be of great benefit to me personally that has helped me psychologically in countless ways.

+ The heated Drake rivalry