Woolgathering #155: Try Not to Laugh Too Hard
Also: 98 years' worth of advice, the benefits of disrupting routines, and what we get wrong about distraction
They say laughter is the best medicine. And while one’s own laughter can certainly heal, others’ laughter at someone can actually hurt.
But the source of laughter—namely humor—is what I’ve been thinking about lately. We all make jokes at one time or another, and in many cases the jokes come at the expense of someone or something.
How that all shakes out is what helps identify some humor as irreverent. Irreverent humor is the kind that supposedly pulls no punches. It takes swipes at everyone, including the joke teller themselves. In other words, nothing is sacred.
To revere someone or something means to hold it as sacred. Irreverence is usually considered to be the opposite. And that always made sense to me.
But then I stumbled upon a story of Groucho Marx tripping on LSD for the first time in 1967—as preparation for a film.
And that forever changed how I thought about the topic of irreverence.
This one seems to be getting quite a lot of views on Medium, so perhaps I’m not the only one…
Help Me Help You…Help Me!
The primary home for my articles is Medium—as it has been for the past 7 years. Medium supports independent writers by giving each writer a monthly slice of their membership revenue. And that slice is bigger when members sign up because of a specific writer.
$5 per month for access to tens of thousands of great pieces of writing on a wide range of topics (including mine) is a great deal. And if you sign up using the link below, I get a little slice of that—which I would appreciate.
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In Favor of Disrupting the Daily Routine
You’ve probably read a lot about how having routines has made people extremely successful. There’s the morning routine, the nightly routine, and weekly and monthly routines. And there are many articles that sing the praises of having these routines as a corner stone of productivity. But this article comes at things from a slightly different angle. It argues that there is value in regularly disrupting those routines, as a way to continually improve your workflow.
“Harder Than it Looks, Not as Fun as it Seems”
Morgan housel writes eloquently about our tendency to curate our own public image, but forget that everyone else does the same thing. Which ends up making us think that other people are much better at things then we could ever become. But that’s the wrong way to view things. And social media only makes that worse. Just imagine if we acknowledged and acted on the reality of things…
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Nir Eyal on What Distraction Really Means
Nir Eyal has become the expert on distraction. In this interview, he makes the (very appealing) point that all distractions are actually internal. Even when we think the phone or Twitter is the problem, it's actually something within us that needs addressing.
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70 Over 70 Podcast: Norman Lear on the “Foolishness of the Human Condition”
Norman Lear is the brains behind some of the greatest television shows of all time. He’s 98 years old, still working, and still is lucid and insightful – not to mention productive – as ever. In this interview, he lays out a delightful definition of what it means to live in the present moment. He likens it to laying in a hammock between two words: “over” and “next”. It’s as funny as it is enlightening, and full of some great stories and pearls of wisdom from a very full life.
A Question to Think About
Should I really expect them to see it my way?
We all have the desire that others see things our way. But how realistic of an expectation is this?
After all, everyone has their own point of view—the place where they see things from. It provides the basis for their entire picture of reality.
But they’re called points of view because, like geometric points, they are infinitesimally small, and incredibly numerous. And like points on a graph, many of them can exist very close to one another without touching or overlapping. And the view from each of them is slightly different from one another, despite how close they may seem to one another.
But those slight differences in perception can make a huge difference in belief—which translates into huge differences in action.
Be mindful of the expectations you bring to your interactions. We each have our own point of view. And it may take more time to reconcile the differences that stem from them than we expect. We simply need to remember that our incredibly small points on the graph of human existence can be much farther apart than we would initially think.
A Quote
“Humor is reason gone mad.”
- Groucho Marx