The topic for this blog is folly, also to be realized as forms of self-deception, lapses in critical thinking, giving in to your less-worthy motivations, allowing yourself the luxury of illusion, and so forth.<\/p>\n
In some roles, illusion is just fine, very adaptive, mature, poetic, sublime. It is the mythic foundation that makes our life juicy, funny, astonishing, and in other ways supports a wide variety of experiences that make life meaningful. I\u2019m all for cultivating imaginativeness, playfulness, creative mythmaking, and so forth\u2014but it\u2019s better to recognize when and how these functions are being used. For many people, it blurs over into roles where it would be better to be more clear, to penetrate illusions. So I work in both areas: I want to actively promote imaginativeness and spontaneity in contexts where that is what\u2019s needed, and also to promote acute perceptiveness and hard-headed critical thinking in other contexts where that\u2019s what\u2019s needed.<\/p>\n
Now there are certain kinds of relaxation in your thinking that are just fine. I like to recognize proportionality. If you do some things a little, that\u2019s okay, but if you do them a lot, that\u2019s foolish. Then you might want to ask yourself, in terms of your life goals, what\u2019s the right amount for you?<\/p>\n
Distractions<\/strong><\/p>\n Say, allowing yourself to be distracted. This involves computer-based social connections, emails, tweeting, Facebook, and so forth; or television; video games or internet-based multi-player games or activities. You may be on \u201cSecond Life,\u201d one of these kinds of programs in which you create alternative adventures for your alter ego \u201cavatar,\u201d but how much time will you give yourself.<\/p>\n In the olden days before the onslaught of the information-overload media-saturated postmodern era, there was even a slight value in staying up with what\u2019s going on. You might have expected yourself to be current with fashions and the news, and to disdain those who were \u201cout of it.\u201d All this has changed, flipped: It is impossible to keep up, other than in a very narrow field of interest or endeavor. Too many people have gotten aboard, and most activities can be found to have sub-groups and often even they have become sub-divided and too big to know most of the major players. So what then does it mean to \u201ckeep up\u201d in a narrow field? Does it get you any actual status points?<\/p>\n What I\u2019m getting at is the need to criticize old values that have become unworkable. Being knowledgeable, able to answer trivia questions, was admirable, worthy of awards on quiz shows. Now it\u2019s becoming laughable, and made more so by the relatively immediate access to knowledge by web-browsers and Wikipedia.<\/p>\n The new skill is to learn to contain, turn away from, resist the temptation of, or more accurately perceive the limitations of potential distractions. Folly entails believing in the absolute nature of obsolete ideas and values. They just don\u2019t apply anymore.<\/p>\n More about folly will follow in the coming days.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The topic for this blog is folly, also to be realized as forms of self-deception, lapses in critical thinking, giving in to your less-worthy motivations, allowing yourself the luxury of illusion, and so forth. In some roles, illusion is just fine, very adaptive, mature, poetic, sublime. It is the mythic foundation that makes our life […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-95","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-follies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=95"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/95\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=95"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=95"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blatner.com\/adam\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=95"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}