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How to Deal with Incompetence: The Role of Malice

July 3, 2023

Society

ignorance, responsibility, social masses, society, stupidity

2 comments

You might have seen some memes going around claiming “Idiots, everywhere!” or something of the sort. As George Carlin famously said, imagine how dumb the average person is, then realize half of them are even dumber. But to deal with incompetence (which isn’t quite the same as stupidity, which isn’t quite the same as ignorance), we need to also take something else into consideration: the role of malice.

There is a world of difference between an incompetent person who, still, has good intentions, and one who is malevolent. In other words, the saying “the road to hell is paved with good intentions” is seriously misleading.

Why?

But because benevolent incompetence will want to rectify its repercussions, whereas malevolent will not even recognize there is a problem.

Let’s try to categorize all this and come up with a theoretical framework, to see where (if anywhere!) it gets us.

deal with incompetence cats
“Let me handle this, Jim” (as I’ve said before, whenever I don’t want to spend much time finding a more suitable image, you get a cat; this time, you get two)
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Expectations vs Reality, Writer-Style

April 17, 2023

Writing

book, creativity, fiction, literature, social masses, society, writing

4 comments

So, you too want to “become a writer”, right? You’re in good company! You and another 5 billion people apparently want the same. But this, too, is a club where expectations and reality don’t quite match.

Inspiration for this post came when Alicia, a friend of the blog, shared with me a map that shows what is the dream job of people by location. As you have perhaps guessed it, people from Finland to Algeria and from India to Trinidad & Tobago answered that their dream job is writer. Other popular choices were “pilot” and “influencer” or “youtuber”.

As someone who has experience of… one and a half of those professions, I feel it’s important to talk a bit about the “expectations vs reality” factor of our choices.

The key takeaway here is, we are very often attracted to certain activities and we’d like to make money out of them. That we enjoy doing them is precisely the reason why we should never attempt to bring money into the picture – or, in any case, not so before we fully realize the repercussions of such an action.

expectations vs reality
“You are special, just like everybody else”
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Embrace Failing, or How to Live Free

March 6, 2023

Experiencing, Society

capitalism, experience, experiencing, mediocrity, social masses, society

6 comments

I’m deliberately provocative, I fully admit. I’m asking you to embrace failing, supposedly promising you this will let you live free. Though the title isn’t a clickbait (in the sense, I really do mean it and I will argue for it), there is more nuance involved.

If you’re a thinking reader, you should first and foremost identify the ambiguity involved in this title. “Embrace failing” doesn’t quite reveal anything, in the sense that it doesn’t communicate what “failure” really is. Just think of how difficult success is to define, and you’ll see why. “Live free” contains similar problems.

I’ll try to unpack all this, but here’s a word of warning: In a truly meta- kind of way, it’s likely that I’ll fail in my attempt. That is, I don’t feel I’ll be able in this post to properly explain why you should embrace failing, let alone why it should help you live more freely.

Why I still go along with it is part of the lesson, of course.

embrace failing
“I again failed to stay awake today. I’ll embrace my failing and enjoy my dreaming”
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