{"id":13628,"date":"2022-09-09T16:17:00","date_gmt":"2022-09-09T16:17:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/?p=13628"},"modified":"2023-05-07T16:25:08","modified_gmt":"2023-05-07T16:25:08","slug":"external-meaning-structures","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/2022\/09\/09\/external-meaning-structures\/","title":{"rendered":"external meaning structures"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">(<a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/visakanv\/status\/1568105870629941250\">og thread<\/a>) people who are bad at generating their own meaning get much more troubled by disruptions and turbulence in external meaning structures<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">no man is an island. complete self-sufficiency is an illusion, and a potentially dangerous one.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">still, there\u2019s an obvious spectrum re: how dependent one is on external sources beyond one\u2019s immediate control\/influence<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">this is broadly true of probably all domains:<\/p>\n\n\n\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-rich is-provider-twitter wp-block-embed-twitter\"><div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\">\n<blockquote class=\"twitter-tweet\" data-width=\"550\" data-dnt=\"true\"><p lang=\"en\" dir=\"ltr\">Steve Jobs emails himself<br><br>September 2, 2010 <a href=\"https:\/\/t.co\/Amn8tTTrlH\">pic.twitter.com\/Amn8tTTrlH<\/a><\/p>&mdash; Internal Tech Emails (@TechEmails) <a href=\"https:\/\/twitter.com\/TechEmails\/status\/1567712985979707393?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw\">September 8, 2022<\/a><\/blockquote><script async src=\"https:\/\/platform.twitter.com\/widgets.js\" charset=\"utf-8\"><\/script>\n<\/div><\/figure>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">contrast Steve\u2019s above reflection on the interdependence of things with how he talks abt NeXT\u2019s relationship with their suppliers \u2013 negotiating from a place of strength. There\u2019s an ayylmao dynamic here abt dependency. You can achieve a kind of independence THROUGH interdependence<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">they\u2019re not in conflict. it\u2019s about being very mindful, identifying and focusing on the things that really matter. most of everything in the human realm is overwrought, tedious, lossy, messy. if you cultivate taste and discernment you can do more with less, and walk through walls<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">my hope is to help more people get better at managing this stuff so that they can in turn help more people do the same. greater \u201cmeaning independence\u201d helps people unplug from the \u201cprimary grid\u201d, which has all sorts of negative externalities &amp; side-effects if its the only source<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">restated without the word: people who struggle to situate themselves in the world, in history, to make sense of who they are and what they\u2019re about, to contextualize their lives \u2013 are overly dependent on other people telling them how it is<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">restated again: people who can\u2019t edit their own stories are mercy of external storytellers. the people who seek out those storyteller roles end up passing on their personal anxieties, neuroses, etc to the masses. and the pedestal dynamic itself introduces unhealthy effects<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the hardest thing to talk about with sensitivity and skill is that sometimes, no matter how good you are with your own stories, you might still be somehow targeted or victimized by some other external story-lattice beyond your control. This is a very very hard problem<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">I\u2019ve tried thinking about it from many different angles, looked to history, etc\u2026 what can you do when the wider world you\u2019re in is messed up? I\u2019ve come to prioritize trying to help individual people first. it\u2019s not perfect, but it\u2019s the best I know how to do with current config<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">once you have a cluster of people, you can do more together than any one of you can do alone. and then hopefully you can have bigger and bigger positive impacts. that\u2019s the dream\u2026<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p class=\"wp-block-paragraph\">the tricky thing <em>there<\/em> is to always respect the sovereignty of individuals, such that you don\u2019t end up just becoming another oversimplistic demagogue imposing their story, values and meaning onto everyone else. Each person\u2019s self-authorship and sovereignty comes first<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>(og thread) people who are bad at generating their own meaning get much more troubled by disruptions and turbulence in external meaning structures no man is an island. complete self-sufficiency is an illusion, and a potentially dangerous one. still, there\u2019s an obvious spectrum re: how dependent one is on external&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[733],"class_list":["post-13628","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-twitter-thread"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-3xO","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13628","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13628"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13628\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13629,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13628\/revisions\/13629"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13628"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13628"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13628"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}