Here’s an example of how the “inactivity before activity” method works.

My whole life I’ve found it very hard to get myself together after waking up in the morning. It doesn’t matter if I sleep 10 hours or 4. It doesn’t matter if I get up at 7 am, 9 or noon. I wake up feeling chewed over and spit out. For an hour or two, I drag myself around feeling like an invalid, and then I’m fine.

It’s not even an age thing. I was exactly like this at 14. But it’s definitely not getting better with age, that’s for sure.

So I came up with a plan. If I get up 40 minutes earlier than usual, go for a run, breathe deep on the veranda while having coffee, and then take a shower, I’d short-circuit the waking up issue, and avoid the problem.

It sounds good but utterly fantastical from my perspective. I feel really shitty in the mornings. If you haven’t experienced it, you wouldn’t get it. My knees shake, I drop things, my head feels like it’s been filled with damp cotton wool. “Get up earlier and run” sounds akin to “sprout wings and fly.”

But I did it. Today is the second day I’m getting up early, running, going on the veranda, the whole thing. It happens easily, as if I’ve always done it. And it works. At 7 am, I feel almost as good as I do at 7 pm. (People like me are at our peak between 7 and 11 pm).

The way I did it was that after making the decision, I didn’t try to get directly into putting it into practice. I would have failed if I had. Instead, I did a lot of silent contemplation. Staring at the crowns of trees really works for me. Looking at the clouds. Observing how the wind moves the flags. I wasn’t thinking about my plan. Or anything specific. I let my mind and body catch up with my rational decision-making process. They did, I felt ready, and the plan worked out easily.

I also didn’t believe the method would work before I tried it. It sounded kooky. But it costs nothing, and I was kind of desperate. I’m stunned at how well it worked.

There’s something disturbing cropping up around the story of the Texas mall shooter. People keep saying that what we hear about the shooter from the media can’t be true because it’s too inconsistent.

This makes me want to ask, have you actually met any people lately? Or do you interact solely with curated social media profiles anymore? People are inconsistent. Unexpected things happen. Life is complicated, and if that’s too scary, grow up.

I have no idea what’s true in the mall shooting situation. But I do know that expecting life to arrange itself into a simple, clean, straightforward story and pouting when it doesn’t is the favorite cope of first-level people. “This is too confusing for my brain, so it must be fake” is their standard mode of operation. The problem can never lie inside themselves. It’s always somewhere out there.

Let’s say you want to make an important change in your life. You make a resolution: that’s it, a new life begins tomorrow!

Of course, you then proceed to break the resolution.

OK, you say. I’ll go with the method of small steps. I’ll do x tomorrow, y the day after, and little by little, these small changes will bring big results.

A year passes, and you are exactly where you were before.

The reason for this failure is that you forgot to let the inner change happen before plunging into action. It’s like throwing yourself into a swimming pool without first becoming a person who knows how to swim.

A philosopher said, “at the threshold right before great actions lies inaction.” It’s great that you made the decision to seek positive change. Now you need to stay still for a bit to let yourself become the person who is capable of those changes.

Another philosopher said, “Change isn’t born when you decide to act. It’s born from your unconscious transformation during times of inactivity. Without that, you are bound to repeat what you’ve been doing until now.”

[These are German philosophers whom I’ve read in Spanish and am translating into English, so don’t search for these exact quotes].

So if you are looking for a big change, take some time to stay quiet, walk aimlessly, stare at the ceiling with no purpose in mind, study your eyebrows in the mirror, pick a flower and contemplate it.

And then the change will happen as if by magic.

The main selling feature of neoliberal states is supposed to be that they don’t wage war against each other. This might be true but only because they are too busy waging war against their own populations.

Look at the homeless encampments in Philadelphia, or the bombed out villages in rural Spain, among many other examples.

China voted in the UN to recognize Russia as the aggressor in its war against Ukraine. Two days later in the same UN China explained that “yes, we voted for the resolution but we don’t really believe it, yet we still voted but we don’t agree with our own vote.”

These are people who can’t defend their own opinion even at the stupid UN. Nobody cares about what the UN says. Only a total weakling goes into such a state over a UN resolution.

This kind of weak, childish flimflamming brings to mind a country that allowed a virus to escape from a lab because of complete ineptitude, then tried to conceal what happened, then started abusing its own population to conceal that it concealed what happened. It also reminds of a country that hasn’t been able to figure out which Western system of thought to adopt and never even attempted to develop its own.

Is global dominance on the cards for people who can’t make up their own minds on anything?

The West, by the way, totally led during COVID. It led first into a stupid place, then out of the stupid place. But everybody dumbly repeated everything that the West did.

In any case, the talking point about China seeking global dominance is almost as stupid as the talking point that “we need to prevent World War 3.” The latter is aimed at first-level people (the most primitive) and the former at the second-level (somewhat less primitive).

The saddest thing is that Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán does have some talent. Unlike its neighboring countries, Chile doesn’t have much by way of literature, and one doesn’t want to see a literary gift that finally cropped up in the country go to waste. Unfortunately, Trabucco Zerán got an MFA at a woke US school. And now she’s trying to squeeze her talented writing into the Procrustean bed of social-justice dogma.

Limpia is narrated by a live-in maid of a professional couple in Santiago. She’s a resentful, first-level kind of person, and it’s interesting to see her try to make sense of the lives of people who are less primitive than she is. But Trabucco Zerán can’t leave well enough alone and tries to massage the story into a tedious class struggle narrative. As a result, the novel ends up being a lot more boring than it needed to be.

Trabucco Zerán is young for a writer, and one does hope that she stops writing for woke, rich Americans and starts noticing her own large Spanish-speaking audience. Of all the ills that the US inflicted on Latin America, the woke garbage is the worst, and that’s in spite of stiff competition.

Out of a lifetime of reading, I can recall no other book in which a tone of overriding arrogance was so implacably sustained. Its shrillness is without reprieve. Its dogmatism is without appeal. In addition, the mind which finds this tone natural to it shares other characteristics of its type. 1) It consistently mistakes raw force for strength, and the rawer the force, the more reverent the posture of the mind before it. 2) It supposes itself to be the bringer of a final revelation. Therefore, resistance to the Message cannot be tolerated because disagreement can never be merely honest, prudent, or just humanly fallible. Dissent from revelation so final (because, the author would say, so reasonable) can only be willfully wicked.

https://www.nationalreview.com/2005/01/big-sister-watching-you-whittaker-chambers/

This quote is from Whittaker Chambers’ famous review of Atlas Shrugged, but things have changed since 1957, when the review was written, and now much of writing is like this.

Today N was some years old as he went to the first double date of his life. Not that he talked to anybody except me but still it happened. I’ll ask tomorrow if he noticed the other people there.

We had Syrian food. It’s outrageously good.

Rejoice, everybody! The austere religious scholar has competition:

Apparently, Bill Gates has never met any human children. This explains a lot.