Via negativa speech

Maybe a virtuous way we could approach speech is via negativa–> Truth be told, most people are like insanely basic, the best course of action is just don’t open your mouth.

 a lot of people talk about open communication or whatever… But honestly, perhaps it is more virtuous to figure out what NOT to communicate. 

For example, not to communicate pettiness, and actually even in terms of technology… The best technology is via negativa –> the only worthwhile things to install on your phone is pop up and advertising blockers, and also with headphones or whatever… The only useful ones are the noise canceling ones. Actually a very underrated technology is the simple earplug, I like the purple ones on Amazon.

So to prioritize peace quiet and tranquility.

So I suppose, the first thought is with communication or speech or talking with other people… Certainly there is certain banter you do when you’re with men versus women versus mixed groups.  certainly there is a different way you will talk to your childhood friends versus your priest.

communicate less

It’s funny… In today’s world where everyone is like always on… Even those home security devices or whatever… People are always plugged in, communicating too much of everything.

I think a virtuous way we could approach things it’s first, maybe just communicate less. I think… One of the funny ideas is that we are often trained to think that somehow… To always be accessible to always communicate and over communicate is a virtue. But there is a bizarre asymmetry here; let us say you are very insanely famous person, and you get like 1000 text messages and emails a day. Yet the person who sends you the message is not famous. And that person only gets maybe one or two emails or text messages a day.

So certainly it does not literally feasible for you to respond to each individual thousand messages a day. Even if you had 18 hours a day you probably cannot do it. Even if you had all the AI assistants on the planet, you could not.

As a thought experiment… Imagine you’re Elon Musk, does he have the time or the brain power or the whatever to respond to every single tweet that he gets on X, and actually another problem… In today’s world it is impossible to know who is a bot vs who is real. I would actually probably say that on social media, close to 90% of people are bots. If I waved a magic wand and magically deleted all the bots from the Internet, you would probably see your Instagram following drop by 90%, same thing goes with YouTube subscribers, as well as Twitter X followers.

Being friendly?

There’s all these annoying fake virtues like being kind or whatever… I myself always try to make it a virtue to be friendly and sociable to all these antisocial people that I meet. This includes now… Adults parents, random people on the street at the market etc.

Honestly the only people were talking to are young children. And teenagers. And also maybe college kids. The point in which people start to lose their social edge is typically post college when people start to work for a living or start to take drugs and consume alcohol and start streaming nonsense from their phones.

Negativity, negative speech

Certainly before you change the world, best you change yourself.

I suppose the first thing you could do is just remove negative with speech. And also other big ideas:

1. Don’t talk about the news, politics, entertainment stuff, TV shows or anything that does not pertain to you.

Even local politics, refrain.

Better to talk about yourself, how you feel.

Also, maybe my New Year’s resolution is to be less friendly?

ERIC

xxx

Maybe a virtuous way we could approach speech is via negativa–> Truth be told, most people are like insanely basic, the best course of action is just don’t open your mouth.

 a lot of people talk about open communication or whatever… But honestly, perhaps it is more virtuous to figure out what NOT to communicate. 

For example, not to communicate pettiness, and actually even in terms of technology… The best technology is via negativa –> the only worthwhile things to install on your phone is pop up and advertising blockers, and also with headphones or whatever… The only useful ones are the noise canceling ones. Actually a very underrated technology is the simple earplug, I like the purple ones on Amazon.

So to prioritize peace quiet and tranquility.

So I suppose, the first thought is with communication or speech or talking with other people… Certainly there is certain banter you do when you’re with men versus women versus mixed groups.  certainly there is a different way you will talk to your childhood friends versus your priest.

communicate less

It’s funny… In today’s world where everyone is like always on… Even those home security devices or whatever… People are always plugged in, communicating too much of everything.

I think a virtuous way we could approach things it’s first, maybe just communicate less. I think… One of the funny ideas is that we are often trained to think that somehow… To always be accessible to always communicate and over communicate is a virtue. But there is a bizarre asymmetry here; let us say you are very insanely famous person, and you get like 1000 text messages and emails a day. Yet the person who sends you the message is not famous. And that person only gets maybe one or two emails or text messages a day.

So certainly it does not literally feasible for you to respond to each individual thousand messages a day. Even if you had 18 hours a day you probably cannot do it. Even if you had all the AI assistants on the planet, you could not.

As a thought experiment… Imagine you’re Elon Musk, does he have the time or the brain power or the whatever to respond to every single tweet that he gets on X, and actually another problem… In today’s world it is impossible to know who is a bot vs who is real. I would actually probably say that on social media, close to 90% of people are bots. If I waved a magic wand and magically deleted all the bots from the Internet, you would probably see your Instagram following drop by 90%, same thing goes with YouTube subscribers, as well as Twitter X followers.