No one reads blogs anymore. The world has moved onto newsletters. And yet my intermittent blogging continues. I signed up for Paul Kixx’s newsletter last year, which I recommend to anyone with a bent for creativity. His work has inspired me to write more often for myself, if nothing else than to just document where I’m at in my life, what I’m reading and thinking about, what’s ricocheting through my mind.
Yesterday was 9/11/21 and the U.S. just left Afghanistan last month. This Esquire piece from Tom Junod, The Falling Man, is far and away the best piece I’ve read about that fateful day. If I were to make a list, it would be one of the best magazine pieces I’ve ever read.
Then there’s this piece in today’s NYT. In response to suicide bombings at the Kabul airport allegedly carried out by ISIS, the U.S. struck back with what it called a “righteous" drone strike against a member of ISIS. The NYT reporting, however, showed that the strike targeted someone who almost certainly had nothing to do with ISIS and who was actually sympathetic to American interests. The strike also killed seven children. What’s more, when the decision was made to launch the strike, the Pentagon didn’t even actually know who they were targeting. The target just fit what the decision-makers determined to be the pattern of an ISIS member. Investigative reporter Barton Gellman wrote about this phenomenon in his 2020 book, “Dark Mirror, Edward Snowden and the American Surveillance State.” The U.S., many times, doesn’t know the identities of the people it’s targeting in the war on terror, they are just people who fit certain patterns deemed suspicious. Although the U.S. has now officially left Afghanistan, these actions will most likely continue with a muted response.
This is a hard right transition from Afghanistan, I read this personal development piece posted on Mark Manson’s website, and it’s had me pondering hard all day. I’m going to revisit it in a few days to really imbibe it. From what I’ve read, Manson’s a guy who basically felt lost about girls, work, and everything else in his early 20s. He gravitated to the (frankly weird) pickup artist niche, and later pivoted to deeper, more productive personal growth stuff. He sold his book, “The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck,” to like half the country.
Anyway, the piece is about truly becoming an adult (and guess what? By his definition, most of us probably aren’t). Adulthood, for Manson, is largely about how we handle pain. Some lines that especially moved me in his essay:
• "You didn’t fuck up because you caused pain. You fucked up because you caused pain for bad reasons.”
• “Adulthood occurs when one realizes that the only way to conquer suffering is to become unmoved by suffering. Adulthood occurs when one realizes that it’s better to suffer for the right reasons than to feel pleasure for the wrong reasons.”
• “And it slowly began to dawn on me that happiness was not the point — pain was. That the same way the struggle and challenge in my professional life made my accomplishments more meaningful, the willingness to face pain and discomfort was actually what made relationships feel meaningful.”