Rand McNally Best of the Road
Category Archives: Miscellany
Your ability to imagine the future
“Your ability to imagine the future is what drives your decisions today. If your imagined future looks like a big foggy nothing, you might as well enjoy today because tomorrow is unknowable. But if you can vividly imagine your future under different scenarios, you’ll make hard choices today that will, you hope, get you to the future you imagine and want.”
— Scott Adams
Magnificent Flying Machine
Rolla is a medium/small town in central Missouri. I drove through it countless times during my affiliate relations days with Learfield. Just north of town is the municipal airport where, for as long as I can recall, a half-dozen vintage airplanes were parked near the runway. I was always curious but never stopped.
Today — for the first time in years — I drove past the airport and noticed most of the old planes had been moved built there was still one I could see from the highway so I stopped and asked if I could get a look at these magnificent machines. An airport employee said most of them had fallen into such disrepair they’d moved them to a remote corner of the airport and I couldn’t see these because I’d have to cross the runway and that was a no-no.
But one plane was still (barely) standing. My but how I would have loved to crawl through one of these. Imagining where they’d been and who had flown in them.
The ego is what you think you are
“The face in the mirror, and the haphazard story we associate with it, is the ego. (But) what we think of ourselves is constantly changing, not just day to day, but moment to moment, and mood to mood. At different times, I have thought of myself as anything from an insufferable loser, to a freaking genius, to a guy who can never quite get his shit together, to a guy who’s never had a serious problem in his life. What I think I am is so fickle and so dependent on moods and circumstances, that it can’t possibly be right — ever!”
This is what is people mean when they say the self is an illusion. It is a fictional character that is constantly changing. Therefor, not a real thing in the permanent, unchanging sense of the word real.
David Cain comes closer to explaining this than anyone I’ve read.
Working for The Man
David Cain — once again — delivers The Most Interesting Thing I’ve Read Today. From his interview with The Man:
“Do you know how people with hoards of money get to have those hoards of money? They make some money, and then they don’t spend it all. They keep some each time it comes in, and they use it to make more come in next time. That’s how power is accumulated. Instead of accumulating power, most of my employees accumulate objects in their homes, or they just burn the money as it comes in, on booze and expensive sandwiches. What I see is people setting up their lives such that they become dependent on powerful people like me, which is exactly the opposite of how one ought to build wealth. That’s why I’m The Man and they work for The Man.”
And how did The Man deal with rock and roll’s threat to The Establishment?
“I killed John Lennon. I bought MTV. And, thank God, Bob Dylan went and found Jesus.”
And one more…
“People in the US, more than anywhere else, respond to personal inadequacy by buying stuff or trying to get in a better position to buy stuff later. This is great, because buying stuff eventually creates disappointment, which creates more buying.”
Best “desk” ever?
More photos of this endlessly flexible work-space.
I can’t fit this sofa in my backpack
This post by Leah McClellan “spoke to me” (as the saying goes.) Like so many of us, she “fell into the rabbit hole called stuff” and her house was “bulging and sinking at the same time.”
I still have way too much stuff in my life but I can do something about that. (Barb, on the other hand, likes her stuff and plans to keep it). From Ms. McClellan’s post:
1. The stuff you can buy is a distraction that won’t help you reach your goals
2. Stuff creates a false sense of self
3. Stuff can blind you
4. Material stuff keeps you busy with…material stuff
5. Stuff distracts us from ourselves
Give-A-Fuck-O-Meter
One less decision
For the past two weeks, breakfast has been cereal with fruit, OJ and (sometimes) toast. This didn’t seem like an important decision until I read David Cain’s post: Why the minimalists do what they do.
“After years of being confronted with a decision shortly after waking, I decided to be done with deciding what was for breakfast. My usual is now the only thing on the menu, and since I stopped deciding what’s for breakfast, mornings have had a significantly different feel. They are clearer and more spacious.”
And it’s about more than what we have for breakfast.
“When we’re faced with a number of options, we’re always going to assume that one of them is better than all the rest. This means the more options there are, the more likely we are to choose one that isn’t the best one. […] Our satisfaction with what we have shrinks as the number of things we don’t have — or could have — grows.”
This notion resonates with me. Even to having fewer shirts or pants to select from each morning.