Category: Tuesday Book Club
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Day 449 of 1000: America’s Military Weakness
While modern war is fought with drones and AI, Hegseth fixates on the shape of men’s bodies. Are we going the way of the late Roman empire?
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Day 442 of 1000: Integrating My Animus to Become One-in-Herself
A woman becomes one-in-herself — psychologically whole — only when she fully integrates typically masculine powers (physical, intellectual, adventuresome, spiritual).
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Day 435 of 1000: Creative Death before Rebirth
The life of author Rachel Cusk, its peaks and valleys. And her latest book, The Life of M.
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Day 428 of 1000: Climbing a Mountain vs Chilling at Basecamp
We’re always training for something, writes Peter Sloterdijk in You Must Change Your Life. Are you training for chilling in basecamp or climbing a mountain?
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Day 421 of 1000: Rigid Trading Rules and Flexible Expectations
Mark Douglas writes that “we have to be rigid in our rules and flexible in our expectations” in trading.
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Day 414 of 1000: Courage, Creativity, Contemplation
In yesterday’s Tarot reading, I pulled the Judgment, Eight of Cups, and Six of Wands cards. How these guide me towards an inspired and inspiring life.
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Day 407 of 1000: Conditions for Infidelity
How author D.H. Lawrence sets the stage for Constance Chatterley’s adultery in Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
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Day 400 of 1000: Hawthorne’s Heroine Hester
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s emergence as a bestselling author in his forties, and how he introduces his heroine Hester Prynne.
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Day 393 of 1000: The Narrative Laziness of Addiction Memoirs
Elizabeth Gilbert’s All the Way to the River treads familiar, and tedious, ground.
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Day 386 of 1000: Transforming into a Single
My experience of becoming a confirmed single has been similar to L.A. Paul’s vampire thought experiment. I couldn’t forecast what it would be like.
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Day 379 of 1000: Responding to Losses in Trading
Tom Hougaard says that how you feel about failure will define your life trajectory. How trading helps develop your ability to respond to losses.
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Day 372 of 1000: The Probabilistic Reality of Financial Markets
Ideas from Mark Douglas’ book Trading in the Zone. Fully accepting that anything can happen in the markets.
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Day 351 of 1000: Stumbling into the Second Half of Life
In his book Falling Upward, Rohr says that stumbling and falling down (to later rise up) is the key to midlife transformation. Applying it to my midlife journey.
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Day 330 of 1000: Vision Quest, part 2
Ideas from Frank’s The Wounded Storyteller, and reflections on my visual disability.
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Day 323 of 1000: The Vita Negativa
Taleb says “knowlege grows by subtraction.” Expanding upon this to a sovereign lifestyle of saying no to the achievement society.
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Day 316 of 1000: Transcending Self and Culture
Flow psychologist Csikszentmihalyi’s ideas about how individuals can influence cultural and social evolution. I’m skeptical.
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Day 309 of 1000: Inefficient Preparation & Accepting Incompetence in Midlife Reinvention
Ideas from Henry Oliver’s book Second Act about midlife reinvention. On not having goals and objectives and accepting a lack of expertise when you start.
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Day 302 of 1000: Modelski’s Long Cycles Theory
George Modelski proposed that world leadership plays out in long cycles of roughly 100 years each, divided into four phases. We’re in the last phase.
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Day 295 of 1000: Everydayness vs. Festiveness
Byung-Chul Han on Heidegger’s concept of everydayness, and how it should be complemented with festiveness.
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Day 288 of 1000: Time to Be Defensive with Investments
In Mastering the Market Cycle, Howard Marks writes that calibrating between aggressiveness and defensiveness is a key decision for investors.
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Day 281 of 1000: Identifying a Stock Market Top… or bottom
How to identify a stock market top, from William O’Neil’s How to Make Money in Stocks. Also, how to know when to get back in.
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Day 274 of 1000: Cultivating the Excluding Instinct
Learning to exclude crowding and intrusive stimuli so as to live the vita contemplativa. Ideas from Han and Nietzsche.
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Day 261 of 1000: Hopefulness and concrete Goals
Nietzsche and Han on how hope turns our thoughts to concrete goals as a way of composing the story of the future.
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Day 254 of 1000: Reason vs. Hope – Spinoza vs. Han
Early modern philosopher Spinoza said if you live according to reason, you need not depend on Hope. Byung-Chul Han says hope takes you places that reason cannot.
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Day 247 of 1000: Why the U.S. Needs the Fourth Turning
Contemplating Neil Howe and William’s Strauss’ The Fourth Turning as a dialectic. The dollar as reserve currency, and the problems therein.
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Day 240 of 1000: Seeing Justly and Lovingly
British philosopher Iris Murdoch proposed that morality lies not in what actions we take but in how we cultivate a just and loving gaze.
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Day 233 of 1000: Is Japan Going Broke?
Ray Dalio’s How Countries Go Broke would seem to apply to Japan. Or does it?
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Day 226 of 1000: Against Buy-and-Hold Investing
Why I use market timing rules to limit losses in my investment portfolio rather than just doing buy-and-hold.
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Day 219 of 1000: The Joy of Giving
Erich Fromm on giving as a relational process, with nods to Erik Erikson’s generativity and Nel Nodding’s definition of care.
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Day 213 of 1000: Dropping your masks at midlife
The Chariot, as an auspicious card for a road trip departure, and a caution at midlife, reminding you to end reliance on personas developed for earlly adulthood.
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Day 206 of 1000: Flawed or unlucky?
From Lily King’s novel Heart the Lover, some ideas about hamartia, a core concept in Greek tragedy. The problems of causal reductionism.
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Day 199 of 1000: Iris Murdoch on art as an entryway into virtue
Iris Murdoch on art as a way of overcoming self-absorption and purposelessness. How art evokes both truth and compassion.
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Day 192 of 1000: The safety of elders
Thinking about elder care issues including dog care and driving. The tradeoff between safety and independence.
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Day 178 of 1000: Learning to love, and to care
What is our purpose here as human beings? I propose it is to learn how to love, and how to care.
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Day 171 of 1000: Remarriage, symbolically or actually
Exploring the idea of living my unlived life symbolically, following suggestions from Robert A. Johnson’s Living Your Unlived Life.
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DAy 164 of 1000: On border situations
Karl Jaspers’ concept of border situations, in which you extraordinary demands or dilemmas.
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Day 150 of 1000: Love as negation
To love, you must strip away your self and your ego, writes Simon Critchley in Mysticism. Iris Murdoch believed this too.
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Day 143 of 1000: Charles Taylor on authenticity
An exploration of Canadian philosopher Charles Taylor’s The Ethics of Authenticity. How he seeks to rescue a moral ideal of authenticity.
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Day 137 of 1000: The aesthetic life vs the ethical life
Kierkegaard’s aesthetic life vs ethical life. Applying the concept to the movie High Fidelity.
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Day 130 of 1000: Developing a business model not a hobby
In This Is Strategy, Seth Godin advises against trying to turn a hobby into a business. My writing hobby vs my writing business.
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Day 123 of 1000: World construction from the point of view of two
Quotes and thoughts from Alain Badiou’s In Praise of Love. A report of how world construction when you’re in love takes place.
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Day 116 of 1000: Romantic imagination in a consumer society
In the modern society, daters look for romantic fantasy using rational, scientific means. Implications for my book project.
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Day 109 of 1000: Writing useful nonfiction
Some ideas from Rob Fitzpatrick’s Write Useful Books guide to writing nonfiction. Most important: make your book solves a problem effectively.
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Day 103 of 1000: Making it easy is not enough
Oliver Burkeman suggests you ask yourself, when facing a daunting task, what if this were easy? I want my memoir rewrite to be fun too.