Current location: Milwaukee, WI, USA
Reading: The Human Scaffold: How Not to Design Your Way Out of a Climate Crisis by Josh Berson
Listening: Forfolks by Jeff Parker(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status—via email or in the comments)
Gratitude
It’s relatively well-known, at this point, that allowing ourselves to feel gratitude is a calming, anxiety-reducing, happiness-inducing, overall psychologically healthful exercise.
Reflecting, meditating, praying, journaling—anything we do to remind ourselves of the wonderful people and things and experiences from which we’ve benefited can be a profitable use of time, even if just for a few minutes a day or periodically throughout the week.
Just as important, though, is what we do with that sense of gratitude once we’ve identified it.
Gratitude exercises are worthwhile unto themselves, but we can harvest even more upside from them if we take things a step further, allowing our gratefulness to inform our goals, beliefs, and behaviors.
Being thankful that someone is in our lives is different from making that person feel appreciated, loved, and respected.
Being thankful for the influence of a belief system, community, or even technology is not the same thing as helping such groups, philosophies, and tools to sustain, develop, and grow.
At times, reinforcing our own sense of happiness and possibility is more than enough: it’s maybe all we can muster, and that’s okay.
When we’re in the right place and mindset, though, using those thoughts, realizations, and findings to inform what we do next—where we spend our time, energy, and resources—converts gratitude into grace. It spreads those positive vibes and beneficial outcomes beyond the confines of our internal experiences, reshaping the world in humble, consistent, intentional ways.
If you found value in this essay, consider buying me a coffee :)
Some Things I've Made This Week
Aspiring Generalist: Reverse Mentorship
Brain Lenses (podcast): Depressive Realism
Climate Happenings: GM EVs Profitable by 2025
Let’s Know Things (podcast): Crypto Contagion
Interesting & Useful
Inventions and Ideas from Science Fiction
“Thermite allows operators to remotely operate the robot from a safe distance. The bellypack controller provides high-definition video feedback for ultimate maneuverability in difficult conditions.”
Archive of 7,000 Digitized & Free Historical Children’s Books
“We can learn much about how a historical period viewed the abilities of its children by studying its children’s literature.”
6 Common Problems to Avoid When Building a Strandbeest
“Perhaps you’ve seen videos of Theo Jansen’s Strandbeest, or “wind walker,” and have decided that you need your own. This happened to me several years ago, and after four ‘beest iterations, I finally have one that works fairly consistently…it took several years from inspiration to having a working model in my garage.”
Outro
I have zero plans for Thanksgiving this year, which is kind of nice?
I enjoy spending time with big groups of people (family, strangers, whatever) but it’s also enjoyable in a different way just to chill out, maybe paint more random objects from my living room, read a book, and probably eat some kind of home-made casserole (sharing it with no one but my girlfriend, after she gets home from work).
It’s also a good opportunity—as is the case with all holidays or other milestones, I would argue—to pause, reflect, smile at nice memories, learn from and then archive bad ones, and decide how those internal commemorations could and should influence possible next steps.
Any plans for the holidays (if you’re celebrating any of the upcoming, northern hemisphere-winter ones)? Working on anything you’re especially excited about? Thinking any big thoughts on which you’d like some outside perspective?
I respond to every email I receive, and you can reach me by replying to this newsletter or by writing to colin@exilelifestyle.com.
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Incomplete, interactive map of (roughly delineated) native peoples’ land.