Distractions From The Main Plot

It always feels like such an odd exercise to diminish the importance or usefulness of certain conversations or topics, and yet to the end of effective resource management such a task seems necessary. In this short piece, my hope is to illuminate some of how I think about choosing topics and also cover issues that strike me as distractions from the real bedrock problems that I care about. The slew of things that I’ve written both on the blog and now in my books is actually only a much smaller piece of the world of issues I sometimes ponder on. The crucial element for me, that I’ve talked a little bit about on an old podcast, is that I do not generally spend resources on things other people can or will do. If for some reason I believe an important issue is missing an important angle I may add it, or if I think I’ve stumbled upon an observation no one else is likely to make I’ll comment on these sorts of things. The relatively straightforward reason is that real innovation, growth and building my tallest tower to my mind, comes from tackling the stuff other people are not or could not take on for whatever reason.

Part of the reason that I’m writing this is because much of what I’m saying here really comes down not only to the philosophy and direction of FourthEye but also my perspective on the common threads between bedrock issues in our world at the moment. While many people spend all of their resources on making marginal improvements in the current paradigm, I think most of the real progress to be found is in bringing in other paradigms. Instead of talking about racism or race relations, what if we changed the way we measured racism and determined what set of problems are actually in the domain of things affected by racism? Instead of getting everyone off social media, what if we spent our energy building alternatives without the same inherent flaws? Instead of talking about free will or lack there of, what if we figured out what is in our circle of concern versus our circle of control and optimize our approach with that information? My point is not that conversations of philosophy or talking for the sake of talking is not an allowable hobby, but none of that debate actually gets us to something we can use. No one is made less racist by presupposing all world problems are in some way connected to some form of covert racism, likewise all the world’s geniuses telling us social media is bad doesn’t remove the addiction or the business need fulfilled by these platforms.

The last thing that I want to talk about here is what types of things I will personally not be engaging in. Even if someone or some idea set is popular I won’t debunk it if I believe others are capable of easily doing so. Dismantling something that is fragile to begin with doesn’t make me feel like a champion, it makes me feel like I won a karate competition with middle-schoolers. It doesn’t make me better in any real way, my audience would probably share my boredom and frankly I’m trying to create something really different and special here. I don’t want to do stuff here that has been done a million times, I really want to express and bring what I’m capable of and my vision for a more interesting world. This isn’t an attack on anyone else’s way of operating but the need for debunking the low hanging fruit is something that I don’t also need to work on. What I talk about will be ideas that I think are really interesting, and powerful such that when we discuss and develop these ideas both my audience and myself will level up significantly and actually gain a useful tool.

Sort of a piece that I wanted to get out of the way, hope it helped somewhat to illustrate how I think about what work I find worth engaging with. Be well.

Orion Aeneas Webster,

FourthEye author