“If the doomer truly believed that life had no meaning, they would not hold fervor around the world collapsing. They care. The loss is the meaning.” Nailed it! 🎯🤔👏
My favorite excerpt: The whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts can illuminate the whole… The world we experience — which is the only one we can know — is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it… Attention is not just another “cognitive function”: it is… the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets.
It is so dazzling to read the thoughts of a beautiful mind. Thankyou Kyla
May 11, 2023·edited May 11, 2023Liked by kyla scanlon
I've seen bears a few times. I saw a cub in the Smokies when the little fur ball popped out on the trail I was hiking just in front of me. I froze and watched his little behind bop down the trail. I didn't see mama bear but I turned around and bopped my little behind back to the trail head.
And in Pisgah National Forest I was hiking back on a forestry road, turned a corner and a mama bear and two cubs were straight ahead having just come over a ridge. This time there was plenty of distance between me an the bears. I just watched them, they figured that out and went back over the ridge in the direction they had come.
And I was in Cade's Cove in the Smokies in my pickup driving the loop and got in a traffic jam- in the Smokies! What causes traffic jams in Cade's Cove? A black bear in the top of a tree waiting for dark and all the traffic to clear out.
More economics writing needs to reference bears. Outside of, you know, bear market. Bear as an actual bear, not a market direction.
I think the bear is Kyla's totem. And it came to either warn her (if before car hit), or to let her know everything would be okay (if after car hit). I don't think her bear was an economic bear because that's not how real bears work. And bears don't give a $h!+ about doomerism. They just bear.
Great post! I am graduating college in the summer. Looking for a job has been tough. It is definitely hard not to have a doomer mindset. This post definitely help me with my perspective of what I need to be focusing on. Thank you for the great post!!
As always, I love your insight, and you're devastatingly correct. The gamification of disaster and strife is disgusting in our era. The internet gives everyone a front row seat to each and every disaster and conflict, that they've become accustomed to trying to predict the outcome like it was a TV-Sitcom.
And maybe that coping mechanism, to de-reality reality, is one born from the Information Era, but it's just so plainly useless and to easy to parrot.
Everyone can see the car is missing a tire, and they congratulate each other and consider it a job well done because they can identify the problem, and see it as an attack when people ask "So... how do you fix it?"
Excellent as always Kyla! We can’t predict the future, however I think we are seeing “birthing pains” to major positive changes. And with AI and the advancement of technology since the turn of the century we have the capability to completely change the human experience in a positive way for future generations. All of us need to apply our individual brush strokes to that painting and we can make something beautiful. The Doomerism is real and is such a headwind, but there is so much to be hopeful about.
Hello Kyla, I'm wondering if you'd consider writing a guest post for my Newsletter A.I. Supremacy. Specifically relating to "How Generative A.I. Might Fuel Productivity and the Future Macro Economy" - if that topic interests you? I realize you are a very big influencer and likely won't have time for this. But just in case you do. https://aisupremacy.substack.com/p/guest-posts-on-ai-supreamcy
… except that all our received belief systems, our received notions of history, place and purpose and our received conceptual / emotional patterns, no matter how comforting / conforming or how much these support our unconscious psychological defense mechanisms, our much cherished ‘personal identity’, our all-about-me dreams, are fast collapsing as the thin / fragile layer of life here in Earth and this rickety civilization are fast collapsing too. This is good thing.
It is those that deny collapse that are the actual doomers because without a clarity of what is actually happening and what will inevitably happen, there can be no adaptation to collapse. To deny what is happening is to exist at the effect of what is being denied.
These two essays look a bit closer at the denier perspective and at what is being denied:
“Americans and Westerners in general are suffering from a pandemic of denial, wishful thinking, and toxic positivity. It impedes us at every turn, on almost every serious issue. It exacerbates our existing anxiety and contributes to our sense of despair about the future of the planet.”
Kyla I’m so happy I was introduced to your work yesterday, I love this essay. I realized that I’m allergic to Doomers, those who delight in the tragedy of others, the I-KNEW-it spewers. When I was scheduled to speak on financial tv my head analyst would always tell me to point out the light, the positive. There are always things that are here to delight, make it your job to find them and point them out for others. Xo
“If the doomer truly believed that life had no meaning, they would not hold fervor around the world collapsing. They care. The loss is the meaning.” Nailed it! 🎯🤔👏
Dream Within a Dream
BY EDGAR ALLAN POE
Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow —
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.
I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?
My favorite excerpt: The whole illuminates the parts as much as the parts can illuminate the whole… The world we experience — which is the only one we can know — is affected by the kind of attention we pay to it… Attention is not just another “cognitive function”: it is… the disposition adopted by one’s consciousness towards the world. Absent, present, detached, engaged, alienated, empathic, broad or narrow, sustained or piecemeal, it therefore has the power to alter whatever it meets.
It is so dazzling to read the thoughts of a beautiful mind. Thankyou Kyla
I've seen bears a few times. I saw a cub in the Smokies when the little fur ball popped out on the trail I was hiking just in front of me. I froze and watched his little behind bop down the trail. I didn't see mama bear but I turned around and bopped my little behind back to the trail head.
And in Pisgah National Forest I was hiking back on a forestry road, turned a corner and a mama bear and two cubs were straight ahead having just come over a ridge. This time there was plenty of distance between me an the bears. I just watched them, they figured that out and went back over the ridge in the direction they had come.
And I was in Cade's Cove in the Smokies in my pickup driving the loop and got in a traffic jam- in the Smokies! What causes traffic jams in Cade's Cove? A black bear in the top of a tree waiting for dark and all the traffic to clear out.
More economics writing needs to reference bears. Outside of, you know, bear market. Bear as an actual bear, not a market direction.
I think the bear is Kyla's totem. And it came to either warn her (if before car hit), or to let her know everything would be okay (if after car hit). I don't think her bear was an economic bear because that's not how real bears work. And bears don't give a $h!+ about doomerism. They just bear.
Probably up near the beginning the thing you don’t like about Doumer ism is not lack of initial “in action” but “Action”.
Great post! I am graduating college in the summer. Looking for a job has been tough. It is definitely hard not to have a doomer mindset. This post definitely help me with my perspective of what I need to be focusing on. Thank you for the great post!!
Oh, Kyla, this is a delightful post. Is it ironic to delight in your ditty on doom? lol
Take care and thank you for this.
Boy, that last poem hit like a tonne of bricks.
As always, I love your insight, and you're devastatingly correct. The gamification of disaster and strife is disgusting in our era. The internet gives everyone a front row seat to each and every disaster and conflict, that they've become accustomed to trying to predict the outcome like it was a TV-Sitcom.
And maybe that coping mechanism, to de-reality reality, is one born from the Information Era, but it's just so plainly useless and to easy to parrot.
Everyone can see the car is missing a tire, and they congratulate each other and consider it a job well done because they can identify the problem, and see it as an attack when people ask "So... how do you fix it?"
Excellent as always Kyla! We can’t predict the future, however I think we are seeing “birthing pains” to major positive changes. And with AI and the advancement of technology since the turn of the century we have the capability to completely change the human experience in a positive way for future generations. All of us need to apply our individual brush strokes to that painting and we can make something beautiful. The Doomerism is real and is such a headwind, but there is so much to be hopeful about.
Everytime i hear 'vibesession' I think you should get a royalty. Mostly as I listen to Josh Brown who is a fanboy of yours. Deservedly.
Tell me you’re a shill for CBDCs and central banking without telling me.
Hello Kyla, I'm wondering if you'd consider writing a guest post for my Newsletter A.I. Supremacy. Specifically relating to "How Generative A.I. Might Fuel Productivity and the Future Macro Economy" - if that topic interests you? I realize you are a very big influencer and likely won't have time for this. But just in case you do. https://aisupremacy.substack.com/p/guest-posts-on-ai-supreamcy
… except that all our received belief systems, our received notions of history, place and purpose and our received conceptual / emotional patterns, no matter how comforting / conforming or how much these support our unconscious psychological defense mechanisms, our much cherished ‘personal identity’, our all-about-me dreams, are fast collapsing as the thin / fragile layer of life here in Earth and this rickety civilization are fast collapsing too. This is good thing.
It is those that deny collapse that are the actual doomers because without a clarity of what is actually happening and what will inevitably happen, there can be no adaptation to collapse. To deny what is happening is to exist at the effect of what is being denied.
These two essays look a bit closer at the denier perspective and at what is being denied:
“Americans and Westerners in general are suffering from a pandemic of denial, wishful thinking, and toxic positivity. It impedes us at every turn, on almost every serious issue. It exacerbates our existing anxiety and contributes to our sense of despair about the future of the planet.”
https://jessicawildfire.substack.com/p/youre-not-a-fearmonger-youre-an-orchid
“The last remaining iteration of ‘human’ is in a very real existential crisis.”
https://www.facebook.com/Jeff432Miller/posts/pfbid0dLorCvwC1TRKTVxF4gnFgF3kpZzcN2konNvSTj7JZeCWomUSQSJbhZchxrn6UxCyl
I'm in love with Kyla's brain and eloquence.
Kyla I’m so happy I was introduced to your work yesterday, I love this essay. I realized that I’m allergic to Doomers, those who delight in the tragedy of others, the I-KNEW-it spewers. When I was scheduled to speak on financial tv my head analyst would always tell me to point out the light, the positive. There are always things that are here to delight, make it your job to find them and point them out for others. Xo