Being Reduced

My primary objection to hand-to-mouth living and anyone being reduced to a productive asset, is the inability to see each other. Whether it is reduction to money, muscles, and sperm. Or reduction to feeding, caring, and reproduction. Breadwinner. Homemaker. I don’t object to any of the things that need doing. Just to us being defined by the things that need doing, or forgetting the reason why we are doing the things that “need” doing. 

You may get marriages where the couple never see each other, but one pays the bills and the other holds their world together. Some would call that a good team. I call BS. Unless that is truly what you want… then I have no problem with that. Other than the risk involved if that world gets bumped. That is not what I want. 

I love deep conversations. I love “democratic goods”… things that are valuable but cost very little because they are plentiful rather than scarce. It’s not that I don’t like scarce goods or see their value. It is more the trade-offs that take the shine off. How much time do I sacrifice for those things? What conversations do I miss out on? What are the unintended consequences of choosing to work for that thing? What we do matters. 

Our actions have consequences. Consequences connect and build. Constraints, boundaries, and agreements create and destroy the worlds we experience, and how we see each other.

Reducing the Sauce

How to Learn

The French word for fate is sort. One of the worst mistakes we make is premature sorting. Deciding based on early information whether people have a particular aptitude for a group of skills or area of knowledge. Quite often the abilities needed to pick something up quickly, and the skills needed to master it are very different. I always remember a talk given to us at school by Professor Swart. He told us to treat every subject like History. Practice and Past Papers. He told the story of a girl who went from failing maths to getting an A simply by doing as many past papers as possible. Eventually, she started to see the patterns. The main skill you were picking up at school was how to learn, not who you are. One friend at school struggled along with the rest of us Durban Boys in Afrikaans. Now he is fluent because he met, and married, a girl. Mastery normally comes not from sorting, but from seeing a reason to put the sustained effort in. Find the why, map the process, and put in the work.

Education isn't for putting us in our place