The House Is Haunted by the Echo of Your Last Goodbye
This shouldn’t have surprised me. The point of social platforms is to immerse us in immediacy, dilate our sense of attention and relevance by fracturing it and scattering it into a million distractions. No one on social media is speaking to the future. At best they are speaking to the future machines that will process what they have said into a way of dooming them to repeat it forever.
The Moral Peril of Meritocracy
If the first mountain is about building up the ego and defining the self, the second is about shedding the ego and dissolving the self. If the first mountain is about acquisition, the second mountain is about contribution.
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I can now usually recognize first- and second-mountain people. The former have an ultimate allegiance to self; the latter have an ultimate allegiance to some commitment. I can recognize first- and second-mountain organizations too. In some organizations, people are there to serve their individual self-interests — draw a salary. But other organizations demand that you surrender to a shared cause and so change your very identity. You become a Marine, a Morehouse Man.
