My personal canon

18 Oct 2024

An encapsulation, in list form, of things that have most shaped me.¹

These are things that I continue to return to, things that have influenced how I think about myself, people, life, and the world around me.

Books

• Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

  • A little boy mourns his father's death. He meets so many kind strangers.

• Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

  • He got away with it, but his own heart condemns him.

• 1984 by George Orwell

  • A society that manipulates reality.

• Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

  • A society that values happiness above all else.

• The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald

  • He loves an imagined woman.

• Flatland by Edwin A. Abbott

  • Limited in their perception and experience, they resist new perspectives.

• Story of Your Life by Ted Chiang

  • Instead of changing the present to avoid a tragic future, she embraces both.

Writings

• How to be perfectly unhappy by The Oatmeal

  • "I'm not happy, and I don't pretend to be. Instead, I'm busy. I'm interested. I'm fascinated."

• Impact statement by Chanel Miller

  • "I sleep with two bicycles that I drew taped above my bed to remind myself there are heroes in this story. That we are looking out for one another."

• The MacPhersons: Week 53 — Deceived? by Malcolm MacPherson

  • "How can they be happy with nothing, and we are looking for happiness with everything?

• J.S. Park's writings on mental health, forgiveness, grief, and faith

  • "I used to believe forgiveness meant friendship and even a flicker of pain meant I hadn’t forgiven my abusers—but I found I can forgive from afar, over a lifetime, and that the pain was not my lack of forgiveness but how deep the wound was carved."

• kfwyre's comment on intellectual curiosity and empathy

  • "I think this sort of thing is often benign -- people pursuing an intellectual curiosity -- and I think a lot of valuable understanding can come from it. But I also encourage anyone who's never faced that kind of widespread scrutiny to consider what it feels like to constantly be a specimen -- to have people looking down at you on the table and talking about you with an authority that they never yield to you."

• On a technicality by Eevee

  • "The trouble with not ejecting a jerk — whether their shenanigans are deliberate or incidental — is that you allow the average jerkiness of the community to rise slightly. The higher it goes, the more likely it is that those really nice people will come around less often, or stop coming around at all."

• Deimos' comment on giving less time to internet things that make us unhappy

  • "if spending time on it right now is making you unhappy, you shouldn't keep visiting"

• Bogleheads® investment philosophy on building long-term savings

  • "Using these principles can make it simple to invest successfully."

• Romans 14, the New Testament

  • "Happy is he who does not condemn himself in what he approves."

• My product is my garden by Herman Martinus

  • "I want to putter about, feel connected to the process, and have fun doing so. I want to make things that don’t scale. To see people tuck into them and enjoy them as people, not as stats."

• The pressure to stay genteel by Watts Martin

  • "There’s going to be, in other words, pressure to be genteel. That means not calling people out when they deserve to be called out. It means looking the other way. Maybe there are times in history where that’s fine, or at least not harmful, but we’re not in such a time. We’re in a time where staying above the fray, where tut-tutting people sounding the alarm for being so uncouth about it, is choosing a side."

Films

• Arrival, 2016

  • When everything is a competition.

• Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, 2004

  • Trying again anyway.

• Inside Out, 2015

  • Sadness is okay.

• Don't Look Up, 2021

  • That pin that points both up and down. Sometimes there aren't two sides.

• Advantageous, 2015

  • When women are disposable.

Videos

• Survivor bias by 2Veritaseum

  • "It's only because you're successful, because you survived, that the world seems fair. And if you had worked equally hard and just not gotten anywhere and not become successful, then the world would feel much more unfair."

• The price of admission, Q&A with Dan Savage

  • "I pretend every day that my boyfriend is the lie that I met when I first met him, and he does the same favor to me. He pretends I'm that better person than I actually am, even though he knows I'm not. Even though I know he's not. And we then are obligated to live up to the lies we told each other about who we are. We are then forced to be better people than we actually are because it's expected of us by each other. And you can in a long-term relationship really make your lie self come true."

• Why you will marry the wrong person, presentation by Alain de Botton

  • "Everyone we love is going to disappoint us. We start off with idealization and we end up often with denigration. The person goes from being absolutely marvelous to being absolutely terrible. Maturity is the ability to see that there are no heroes or sinners really among human beings, that all of us have this wonderfully perplexing mixture of the good and the bad."

• Forget the pecking order at work, TED Talk by Margaret Heffernan

  • "After six generations had passed, what did he find? Well, the first group, the average group, was doing just fine. They were all plump and fully feathered and egg production had increased dramatically. What about the second group? Well, all but three were dead. They'd pecked the rest to death. The individually productive chickens had only achieved their success

by suppressing the productivity of the rest."

TV series

• The Good Place, 2016-2020

  • People can change and be better.

Games

• The Evolution of Trust

  • People make mistakes; it pays to be more forgiving.

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