Another World Is Probable

Fear is an interesting emotion. In our society, we treat it like a plague – something to cure, attack, avoid. We say, “Screw fear,” or, “Don’t let fear get in the way.” Oftentimes our message about fear is simpler: “Don’t be scared,” as if telling someone to stop being scared could stop them. More in this week's post.

I’m a little bit pedantic and feel irritated whenever someone says something like, “Remember, pressure is what turns coal into diamonds.” Friends, it does not. Diamonds are pure carbon, whereas coal is carbon mixed with other elements like sulfur, nitrogen, hydrogen, and oxygen. Also, their location is different. Diamonds are between 90 and 190 miles underground. Coal is much closer to the surface. In other words, no amount of pressure is going to turn coal into a diamond.I appreciate the sentiment. When we’re suffering, or life is stressful, it’s nice to believe it will mold us into something. That all the trouble won’t be for naught. I have good news for you – there are some examples where this does work scientifically.

I keep thinking about the Sirens from Homer’s The Odyssey. Hollywood and fantasy books paint the Sirens as beautiful monsters who lure men to their deaths with pretty faces and melodious songs. But in the original Greek, the Sirens are grotesque bird-women with human heads. And rather than singing like Ariel from The Little Mermaid, the Sirens sang about knowledge.

Sometimes I think the expression, “Don’t just do something, sit there,” was made for me. I’m not prone to inertia and people often describe me as “tenacious” and “hard-working.” If something doesn’t work, I’ll try something else. And then something else. And then something else. I’m not tapping into intuition – I’m throwing spaghetti at the wall and seeing what sticks. That works for some people. It does not work for me.

I notice in myself and others the desire for certainty, resolution, simplicity. This means this, and that means that. We like binaries: heroes and villains. Black and white. I don’t know about you, but I’ve literally never encountered anything in real life without complication and nuance. More in this week's post.

As a journalist, and maybe because of my psychological makeup, I care a lot about the truth. It irks me when people repeat false information, or they declare something as fact without citing any evidence. I also notice when an issue stirs passion in people, or presses their buttons, they’re more apt to gloss over the truth because it doesn’t fit with what they want to be true. More in this week's post.

I’ve seen a few posts on social media about planting trees because it helps future generations, and it got me thinking about how there are other examples of that too, particularly in social justice movements. What follows is a post from December 2017 about the #metoo movement. While the struggle continues, we aren’t in the pre-2017 world because the legal and structural architecture of the workplace has fundamentally changed. The movement successfully passed systemic protections that cannot be easily undone. And essentially it asks, what if we are the ones making things better for future generations?

I don’t work in AI, so I haven’t felt qualified to weigh in on Evan Hubinger’s post on X about the risks of AI. As a refresher, he’s a top safety researcher at Anthropic, and he said AI is advancing so quickly he believes there is a greater than 10% chance it "could kill all humans" within the next decade.Again, I don’t work in AI, but I have opinions too, and they’re based on research, observation, and lived experience.

I’m not a true crime or horror kind of gal. I don’t enjoyblood or guts or gore. I don’t derive pleasure from other people’s suffering so it was curious to me why a new friend sent me a podcast about the wreck of the Grafton. The Grafton was a ship that crashed onto one of the islands near New Zealand in 1864 resulting in four men becoming stranded.

It’s been interesting to see the public discourse around Dolly Parton’s death. As much as people are lamenting the loss of a great songwriter – she wrote around 3,000! – they’re mostly speaking about her kindness and lamenting how we lost someone almost saintly.

Sometimes I get in a nihilistic mood and think it doesn’t really matter that I’m alive, that I exist. In the grand scheme of things, I’m a speck, a peon, a flash in the pan of life. Furthermore, I think of myself as expendable and exchangeable in the sense that if I wasn’t here, someone else would accomplish what is required of me; that the universe would work through someone else.The other day, though, I read something in Richard Tarnas’ book Cosmos and Psyche that had me rethink my perspective.

I have a funny story to share since my last post. I wrote that I have a juicer that’s been languishing on Facebook Marketplace and Craigslist for months. I did all the right things, included all the right keywords, posted the right pictures, and even published the ad at a time when I “should” have received the most traffic. People would message me about it and then disappear. I kept my hopes up, kept renewing the listing, but eventually I just gave up because it had been months and I still had the thing. Weeeeeell. . .

If you’re on social media, you may have noticed that “whimsy” is trending. It’s become a thing where people share videos of themselves wearing long, flowing dresses and fairy wings while shopping for groceries. Or they’ve begun sending postcards or scrapbooking. Some people are encouraging adults to build forts.As a super serious lady, I love whimsy because it’s the counterbalance that I need.

You can’t throw a rock without hearing someone or something say, “Be present. Stay in the moment.” It’s one of the most frequent pieces of advice. There are books about it. Courses. Practices. I, myself, have written about it. I find it’s a lot easier for me to stay in the moment when I enjoy the present moment, but what about when I don’t?

I am charmed by an article I read in the Guardian recently about a fascinating discovery. Scientists detected a natural sugar found in raspberries in an enormous cloud of dust and gas that’s near the heart of the Milky Way. I know I’m the one making this leap and this isn’t how chemistry works, but I imagine that if I were in space, and presuming I wouldn’t freeze to death, I could stick out my tongue and the air would taste faintly like raspberries.

Members of my spiritual community are at the age where they’re starting to die. It seems like every three months or so, someone passes away. Some people I’m closer to than others, but regardless, each death leaves an impact. More in this week's post.

I keep thinking about the cycle of luck. If you take a snapshot of an event, it might initially seem like bad luck. But if you widen your lens, so to speak, that unlucky event can become lucky.

I’m finally watching The Wolf of Wall Street because I’m doing research for my next book. It’s safe to say the movie is a study of excess. The characters want more, more, more. More money, more power, more prestige, more sex, more drugs. They are never satisfied. It’s easy to believe that’s only true for the likes of greedy capitalists, but not so.

I’m still entranced by Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass and am thinking about how animacy/animism dovetails with a concept from philosopher Martin Buber. He wrote a book called I and Thou, which I haven’t read, and I only conducted a cursory search on the internet about it, so my apologies to the philosophy nerds who know way more about this than I do.

I can’t not talk about how Elon Musk is the world’s first trillionaire. He’s a trillionaire, but in the U.S., 47.9 million people lived in food-insecure households in 2024, the highest since 2014, according to the Washington Times. He’s a trillionaire, but 181 million children will only eat one meal today, according to a UNICEF report. You and I are much closer to being homeless than we are to being a trillionaire. For context, someone earning $50,000 per year would need to work for 20 million years to become a trillionaire, and that’s assuming they don’t spend any of the money they earn.