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How will the miracle happen today?

kk.org

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Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#171

I couldn't help but focus on the vicarious adventure aspect Kelly mentions which was the "payment" he offered drivers in exchange for the ride. This is a mechanism that has largely been deprecated by the modern attention economy. In the era of hitchhiking, the bandwidth for novelty was low. A driver on a long commute had no podcasts, no Spotify or audiobooks. A stranger with a story was high value. The transaction wa…

> Today, we have near infinite content in our pockets. The marginal utility of a stranger's story has plummeted because the competition is Joe Rogan or an endless algorithmic feed. Not just strangers. The content tentacle reaches even deeper. You can go to a restaurant and see two people (presumably partners, who know and love one another, or friends who at least like to hang out together) sitting together separately…

Put another way, we are all competing with professional entertainers now. Sink or swim...

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would encourage people to test this out for themselves, I think you will find a different result. People today are starved for in-person connection, but are afraid to initiate the conversation. This doesn't come naturally to me, but after working on it over a few years, 95% of the time strangers are excited to chat and say hi and make a friend.

You mentioned working on it — do you have a particular strategy, venue, or opening line/guiding ethos that you find works well? I love making friends with strangers, but usually rely on the "handshake protocol" of a casual observation or small talk that is then accepted (with a similar slight-deepening or extension of the thought) or rejected (casual assent or no response at all), until the bandwidth opens and I can…

> "Oh I don't know much about $LOCATION_YOURE_FROM."

I always love the most to chat with strangers in line or wherever when I'm in a foreign country, as there's so much good dirt for digging with someone from a far away place. It's funny, though, the number of times I strike up a conversation with someone halfway around the world only to find out they live within a few miles of me. Last time I was in London, for example, the lady in line in front of me had an Australian accent, and I always enjoy talking to Aussies. Yep, she was an Aussie... Who lives a few towns over from me in the US, in the same apartment complex my wife lived in when I met her.

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#173

I couldn't help but focus on the vicarious adventure aspect Kelly mentions which was the "payment" he offered drivers in exchange for the ride. This is a mechanism that has largely been deprecated by the modern attention economy. In the era of hitchhiking, the bandwidth for novelty was low. A driver on a long commute had no podcasts, no Spotify or audiobooks. A stranger with a story was high value. The transaction wa…

> Today, we have near infinite content in our pockets. The marginal utility of a stranger's story has plummeted because the competition is Joe Rogan or an endless algorithmic feed. Not just strangers. The content tentacle reaches even deeper. You can go to a restaurant and see two people (presumably partners, who know and love one another, or friends who at least like to hang out together) sitting together separately…

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Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#174
post #164

I couldn't help but focus on the vicarious adventure aspect Kelly mentions which was the "payment" he offered drivers in exchange for the ride. This is a mechanism that has largely been deprecated by the modern attention economy. In the era of hitchhiking, the bandwidth for novelty was low. A driver on a long commute had no podcasts, no Spotify or audiobooks. A stranger with a story was high value. The transaction wa…

It's a choice. I go to the supermarket twice a week, not shopping for much. I switched the store I use three, four months ago, but I can already talk about some of the employees at the store I visit. Louis is back where he grew up right now because his 97-year-old grandfather died. Among other things, he feels lucky grandpa's passing came after the new year because of his time-off allotment. Nikki had great holidays,…

Ahhhhhh I love this and love that you referenced This Is Water something I've held dear to me as my default perception of life. There's so much to the world which we can access on our very doorstep, we just need to open up to it.

It's an easy thing to forget if you don't do it consistently enough to be 2nd nature.

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#175
Radical openness can slide into naïveté if it ignores power, incentives, and bad actors. “Be vulnerable and good things will happen” is only true in constrained contexts, where norms, reciprocity, and consequences exist. Outside those, vulnerability can absolutely be exploited.

Ina perfect world openness is not surrender; humility is not passivity; trust is not indiscriminate access.

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#176
In summary, a wealthy westerner travels the world, asking the poor for favors. He eventually comes to believe that enlightened spirituality rests primarily on gratitude. (One can't imagine why.)

He then proceeds to passive-aggressively browbeat readers who aren't as grateful as he is for the "lucky ticket called being alive."

Has it occurred to him that perhaps it was his ticket that was lucky? It certainly seems luckier than that of the Filipino family who opened their "last can of tinned meat" to feed him, a volitional vagabond.

If there's anything worth reading here, it's the reminder that altruism is more prevalent than individualists sometimes expect. The rest is frankly stomach-turning.

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#177
More so about this thread than the post, but I think it's a shame that so many immediately go to the edge cases of safety concerns (parricularly for women) or strangers with difficult mental illnesses. I don't want to belittle or dismiss those concerns, as they do exist, but letting that limit potential possibilities feels like a unnecessarily limited life.

Granted I'm lucky enough that in my travels and general life nothing awful has happened to me but opening yourself to your fellow peers on this tiny planet is such a core part of existence that we should find ways of making this happen. It doesn't need to be picking up hitchhikers, they're millions of relatively risk free interactions out there. Dive in.

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#178
post #5

This reminds me of a video I watch recently of a comfortably off guy who decided to try and do a long-distance cycle with just £100. He could afford not to rely on others, but instead he let people buy him food, give him a bed, etc. This didn't sit well with me. If you can pay your own way, but choose to instead let others pay for you, you're just sponging off people.

> If you can pay your own way, but choose to instead let others pay for you, you're just sponging off people. I was particularly perturbed at the mention of someone emptying their bank account to help this guy, who has more money than the person emptying their account. I'm no ethics expert, but there is an idea that the unbounded acceptance of generosity becomes a form of exploitation, which I agree with.

I thought the eaay was creepy but that section just gave me the heebie-jeebies. "Sympathy vampire" is the term that came to my mind unbidden. It reads like an essay by someone aromantic describing love purely in terms of going to restaurants to eat exquisite food, and the mutual benefits of filing taxes jointly.

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#179
Okay, I will take the contrarian position. As I read this I kept waiting for the part where he somehow repays all the hospitality he has received, if not directly to those who gave it, then forward, somehow. Instead, all I got was new-agey rationalization.

To solicit a gift from a stranger takes a certain state of openness. If you are lost or ill, this is easy, but most days you are neither, so embracing extreme generosity takes some preparation. I learned from hitchhiking to think of this as an exchange. During the moment the stranger offers his or her goodness, the person being aided can reciprocate with degrees of humility, dependency, gratitude, surprise, trust, delight, relief, and amusement to the stranger. It takes some practice to enable this exchange when you don’t feel desperate. Ironically, you are less inclined to be ready for the gift when you are feeling whole, full, complete, and independent!

The things he lists are not reciprocation. The paragraph strikes me as a long-winded way of saying, "It takes a special mindset to beg from others when you're not actually needy." Indeed it does.

One might even call the art of accepting generosity a type of compassion. The compassion of being kinded.

Not only does he rationalize a life of asking for and taking from others, even the very poor, without any material reciprocation, but even admits that he is not sure he would have done the same for another person in his position.

When the miracle flows, it flows both ways.

No. The attitude of humility and gratitude with which one is obliged to receive another's charity is not itself a repayment. The social contract around this kind of hospitality is that everyone gives and receives materially; if you are taking now because you have nothing to give, then the expectation is that you will give to someone else later, not simply walk the earth taking and taking. It's a prisoner's dilemma, and we only all benefit if we all cooperate. Calling a person who takes but never gives back in a material way a "kindee" is just sanctifying the defector.

(EDIT: please note that I'm not advocating against offering hospitality, only against taking it with an attitude that you will neither repay it nor pay it forward, because just the act of accepting it is somehow holy.)

Re: How will the miracle happen today?

#180
post #164

I couldn't help but focus on the vicarious adventure aspect Kelly mentions which was the "payment" he offered drivers in exchange for the ride. This is a mechanism that has largely been deprecated by the modern attention economy. In the era of hitchhiking, the bandwidth for novelty was low. A driver on a long commute had no podcasts, no Spotify or audiobooks. A stranger with a story was high value. The transaction wa…

It's a choice. I go to the supermarket twice a week, not shopping for much. I switched the store I use three, four months ago, but I can already talk about some of the employees at the store I visit. Louis is back where he grew up right now because his 97-year-old grandfather died. Among other things, he feels lucky grandpa's passing came after the new year because of his time-off allotment. Nikki had great holidays,…

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