The most recent The Listserve message asked five questions:
- What sort of advice would you give a young adult?
- What is your favourite book? (Movie, TV show, etc.)
- Where is the best place you’ve lived or visited? Most interesting adventure?
- What is a something I should learn how to do?
- If you haven’t got anything to say to the above, then tell me a story about yourself! Anything at all, don’t be shy!
Here are my answers.
What sort of advice would you give a young adult?
There are three things I now believe that I wish I had been told when I was younger.
- Acting compassionate makes us compassionate - I learned this from a Buddhist text, and starting practicing it as an experiment, and have had great success. I had always wondered why some people where nicer than others, turns out it was environment and training; acting with compassion will change your environment.
- How we "love" is based on early childhood interactions - Folks get stuck in patterns, and often times feel like they are doomed to repeat their relationship mishaps. I've found that some (well, most) people define their love by how much they can mitigate being hurt. Humans learn risk aversion because we are excellent problem solvers and have really complex memory systems. Keeping this in mind helps me in matters of the heart.
- People regret not being happy in life - On the list of things that patients share with nurses as they are dying is the regret that they didn't let themselves be happy in their life (also, should have spent more time with family and should have worked less, make note). That is profound, because it means that folks who are older than you, hypothetical young person, figured out enough about life to know that they could have let themselves be happy, but for some reason didn't. Heads up, let yourself be happy.
What is your favourite book? (Movie, TV show, etc.)
Don't have favorites. But I like the themes of systems being so complex as to appear magical, but also ultimately insidious, and outlier individuals overcoming personal demons to become "saviors", whose behavior should be emulated to overthrow said complex system. Hence, I tend towards science fantasy, like Descartes, Ghost in the Shell, The Matrix, Inception, Scrapped Princess, Sword Art Online, etc.
Also, Wikipedia.
Where is the best place you’ve lived or visited? Most interesting adventure?
The internet, port of call: my head.
And despite sounding being a bit ageist, I wouldn't tell young people about my most interesting adventures, unless they were "well-travelled" in particular ways. Model by example, and all that.
What is a something I should learn how to do?
Write well, and on a broad field of subjects. Write a lot. And use WordPress, or something similar. Learning how to do basic markup on the web is more valuable than a college degree, because all those people with degrees pay me to do fairly basic things, and they will pay you, too.
If you haven’t got anything to say to the above, then tell me a story about yourself! Anything at all, don’t be shy!
Pass.