“Moreover, the listening society is necessary as a competitive edge in the global economy. The regions that will be able to create the most fertile soil for the blooming of human relations and wellbeing, are also likely to have much higher productivity in the postindustrial economy. It is well established that things such as flow state and intrinsic motivation are conductive to creativity and performance of complex tasks. Confident, happy people, who can manage more abstract and long-term goals, and who are more self-secure and thus better at taking in negative feedback (and adjusting to new information), will simply outcompete other people in the scramble for capital and central positions in the new world economy.”
Excerpt From
The Listening Society: A Metamodern Guide to Politics, Book One
Hanzi Freinacht
Deep alignment
Making thoughts thinkable
Accepting all feelings
Fall in love
10x productive
Following aliveness feels great
Sasha Chapin → Healthy people have mystical experiences (Substack)
- Listen: when you hate yourself, or are otherwise completely neurotic, there are wounded parts of you that want absolute dominion. Their goal is to take over the agenda. They insist that there can be nothing bigger, nothing in the universe more significant than your homeliness, clumsiness, lack of talent, current social conflicts, whatever. You get so welded to these parts that they seem like the whole of you, the essential truth.
- When you release this conflict, it’s not that you move on to having different, but equivalent, conflicts. It’s that these knots of self-conflict simply disappear. That energy stops being expended. The self at the center of your perception, which was so muddy and thick and tangled, becomes clearer, more prismatic. The idea that you are composed of some sort of special, unique pollution, separate from everything else, becomes laughable. In place of that delusion, something else can be realized. When it appears, you see why people did such a bad job of describing it to you previously, although they may have been trying hard. In the words of Wittgenstein: “There are, indeed, things that cannot be put into words. They make themselves manifest. They are what is mystical.”
Transition to clean fuel
# Honest preferences, integrity
Effortless productivity
- Sasha Chapin → “What maximum productivity looks like for me” (Substack)
At times, I am astoundingly productive. During the most productive year of my life, I wrote a book, while being a full-time freelance copywriter, and traveling the world and studying chess, while still having a fair amount of free time, somehow. But when I am most productive and happy, my days look nothing like what I’ve heard a productive person’s do. Meanwhile, when I’m trying to be a productive person, like, trying to assume the normal trappings of productivity, I don’t get anything done.
Maximally productive Sasha looks like this:
I have no routine. The closest thing I have to a daily structure is that I usually “meditate,” which is, for me, just sitting mostly still allowing myself to feel whatever it is I feel, either while drinking coffee, or right after it. Sometimes I skip this, when I’m really excited to work on something immediately.
I organically do what seem like the most important actions on my most important projects. Sometimes, I am best at creative projects while multi-tasking, in spite of everything I’ve heard. When I’m staring at the word processor, occasionally my thinking becomes too strained, because I am trying to think. So, when this happens, I’ll click back and forth between Pages and a YouTube video of a chess streamer, or a professional chef being upset about something.
