Freedom

I love developing resilience and strength: AI version, part 1

Addiction / Artificial Intelligence / Awareness / Creativity / Freedom / Hands on Practical Experience / Perception

I love developing resilience and strength: AI version, part 1

A recent article on artificial intelligence in the New Yorker wrote about how people who are suffering from loneliness are finding help from artificial intelligence. Some people can't help loneliness, not out of character defect but circumstance. It gets the reader thinking about the elderly, for example, who outlive everyone they've been close to, or it describes as worse, if those who remain are senile. Sorry to give away the ending but it suggests that for however it helps people who can't escape, it will create dependence in far more. The article is A.I. Is About to Solve Loneliness. That’s a Problem: The discomfort of loneliness shapes us in ways we don’t recognize—and we may not like what we become without it. by academic psychologist…

July 15, 2025

I love where I live. A perk of volunteering: July 4th fireworks up close (also Thanksgiving)

Freedom / Volunteering

I love where I live. A perk of volunteering: July 4th fireworks up close (also Thanksgiving)

Common roles for auxiliary police officers include crowd control and traffic control during big events, like parades. July 4th fireworks is another big one (scroll down for pictures from last year's Thanksgiving parade). This year my patrol during the fireworks was right next to the water. I took a video toward the beginning (after ensuring it was okay with the officer I report to). Should I say it's only a minute because the fireworks went for half an hour, or it's a full minute, because even a few minutes would seem long for fireworks in most places. In any case, I love volunteering, all the more when I'm fulfilling what feels to me like civic duty. Here are two pictures from before the fireworks started.…

July 14, 2025

A broad outline of my vision and mission for the workshop and alumni community I love

Entrepreneurship / Freedom / Leadership

A broad outline of my vision and mission for the workshop and alumni community I love

About a month ago, the core organizational team behind the workshop I lead and its alumni community had our quarterly meeting. I shared my vision and mission. I thought everyone knew it, but when I finished, they said, "You have to share this message with the alumni community." I was wrong: everyone didn't know it. It was my responsibility to share it. I didn't want to impose my views on others, but my history having started many of the projects and exploring the frontier of leadership in this area, I could see how my views could help others see beyond their horizons. Future vision 1 year: thriving online community, self-sustaining. A core team will still manage things like the online site and new initiatives, but…

July 10, 2025

I love how hurting others less (ie living more sustainably) teaches me more about the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

Freedom / SIDCHAs / Visualization

I love how hurting others less (ie living more sustainably) teaches me more about the Declaration of Independence and Constitution.

I keep my working spaces clean, including clearing my desktop every evening before going to sleep. I try to keep files off my computer desktop too. Working on my next book has me referring to and learning from the Declaration of Independence and Constitution so often, I decided to put them on my computer desktop. Many sites online carry their full texts, but I couldn't find any with a file to download that looked clean and simple and that was easy to search. No big deal, but I copied the texts into files and formatted them simply. You can see them in screen shots below. I'm not looking to show them off. I'm making it easy to refer to them, quote them, and read them.…

July 4, 2025

Why I love the heat, even when it’s 95F (35C) on the way to 102F (39C).

Freedom / Hands on Practical Experience / Nature

Why I love the heat, even when it’s 95F (35C) on the way to 102F (39C).

New York City is supposed to hit 102 F (39 C) today. So far it's 95 F (35 C) and since my battery was drained and the rest of the week is forecast to be cloudy, I'm out in the park charging. The park is mostly empty. Here's my view right now, showing a fraction the number you'd see when the temperature was lower. You can also tell I'm sitting in the shade. It cools me probably ten degrees. Yes, I'm more lethargic and less active than usual because I overheat fast if I move around. My burpees this morning I did significantly slower than usual and felt well more winded. I could go on about how much less comfortable I feel. I'll also probably…

June 24, 2025

I love how much leading in sustainably leads to learning the history of liberty and freedom

Freedom / Hands on Practical Experience

I love how much leading in sustainably leads to learning the history of liberty and freedom

Pollution destroys life, liberty, and property. Depletion violates the principle of leaving enough as good in common for others. Basic principles of how people can live together include protecting life, liberty, and property and leaving enough as good in common for others are among the most basic and necessary. The language looks like it comes from Thomas Jefferson, John Locke, and their Enlightenment peers. I would say their Enlightendigenous peers to include the new world people who brought hands-on practical experience with democracy to the old world ones, who didn't. I knew some about them before starting to lead in sustainability, but now I'm learning more. I love learning about people who worked for liberty and freedom, including overcoming slavery, Apartheid, Nazism, caste systems, and…

June 23, 2025

Not hurting innocent people a “purity test”? I think your ignorance or internal conflict is showing.

Freedom / Leadership / Nonjudgment

Not hurting innocent people a “purity test”? I think your ignorance or internal conflict is showing.

Thomas Jefferson owning slaves, including his own children, wasn't an abstract immoral act. He hurt people. He took away their freedom and hurt them. It isn't a "purity test" to say that by owning slaves he hurt people. When people act like living more sustainably is a "purity test" I see two possible causes. The generous one, which I find implausible in today's world, is that people don't know polluting hurts people. People often tell me "Josh, they really don't know. " When I respond that they know enough and if they pretend not to know, they're deliberately keeping themselves ignorant, people generally agree, and intentional ignorance doesn't make you innocent. It means they knew enough to know they're hurting people, they just want to…

June 22, 2025

How we act when at the top of a dominance hierarchy: Learning from Thomas Jefferson

Freedom / Leadership / Relationships

How we act when at the top of a dominance hierarchy: Learning from Thomas Jefferson

I've written many times about Thomas Jefferson embodying American culture today. He said all the right things about freedom and liberty. He considered slavery wrong. He still practiced it. His rationalizations and justifications are ours. I link to a bunch of those posts at the bottom of this post. I recommend them. If you want to understand how you sound to someone who lives by values you likely say you do, like do unto others as you would have them do unto you, live and let live, leave it better than you found it, and love your neighbor as yourself, read Jefferson's rationalizations and justifications. You know they're bogus. He knew they were bogus. He just about said he knew he would go to hell…

June 16, 2025

My first Hillsdale College online certificate and why I took the course

Education / Freedom / Nonjudgment

My first Hillsdale College online certificate and why I took the course

June 14, 2025

More on “How the liberation of living more sustainably feels”

Freedom / Models / Perception

More on “How the liberation of living more sustainably feels”

I have to add to what I wrote last month on How the liberation of living more sustainably feels. In that post, I wrote To describe what living more sustainably feels like, imagine one morning you walk out from your home and step into a puddle, drenching your feet. Imagine further that you’re in such a hurry that you don’t have time to change so you end up wearing wet socks the entire day. Living more sustainably is like taking off wet socks that have been making you miserable all day, the awareness of which you tried to repress but you never did. It’s like that but many times stronger. It feels like freedom and liberation. I left out scope and scale I left out…

June 12, 2025

I increasingly feel like I’m in Monticello listening to Thomas Jefferson

Freedom / Leadership / Models

I increasingly feel like I’m in Monticello listening to Thomas Jefferson

I feel increasingly like an abolitionist or anti-slavery politician around 1800 living in Monticello. Mainstream culture looks and sounds like Thomas Jefferson: He said some of the most important words in history on liberty and freedom. He knew how wrong slavery was. He knew owning people corrupted him. He knew he was violating his own values. Likewise, we all say we don't want to drive a system that hurts and kills people (in orders-of-magnitude greater numbers than slavery did in the US). We know we're violating our values. We know paying for gas, plastic, and services based on them cause death and suffering, which corrupts us. We know we're violating our values. Yet, like Jefferson not freeing his slaves, we don't stop driving today's system…

June 9, 2025

How easily industry can be corrupted, often willingly and enthusiastically

How easily industry can be corrupted, often willingly and enthusiastically

I've read several books on racism lately. One of them, I think The Myth of Race, remarked how American soldiers after D-Day found Nazi vehicles had GM and Ford engines in them. I found it hard to believe, but possible. I looked it up and found this 1998 Washington Post article, Ford and GM Scrutinized for Alleged Nazi Collaboration: When American GIs invaded Europe in June 1944, they did so in jeeps, trucks and tanks manufactured by the Big Three motor companies in one of the largest crash militarization programs ever undertaken. It came as an unpleasant surprise to discover that the enemy was also driving trucks manufactured by Ford and Opel---a 100 percent GM-owned subsidiary---and flying Opel-built warplanes. This part of the article was…

May 31, 2025

How the liberation of living more sustainably feels

Freedom / Models / Perception / Visualization

How the liberation of living more sustainably feels

Want to know what living more sustainably feels like? Our culture is so dependent and addicted to things like takeout, cars, and flying that pollution and depletion enable, we forget that using them destroys life, liberty, and property. We don't notice that our government benefits and grows in money and power from licensing and promoting one of its few core responsibilities nearly everyone agrees on. We don't notice that they have corrupted us from our deepest values, such as the Golden Rule, as far as I know found in every culture we've looked at. Living more sustainably brings mental freedom from the internal contradictions of living contrary to our values. Corruption doesn't feel good. I know from experience. I lived in accordance with mainstream culture…

May 26, 2025

A quarter million burpees

Fitness / Freedom / Habits / Hands on Practical Experience / SIDCHAs

A quarter million burpees

Regular readers know what a sidcha is and that my second daily habit that both became a sidcha and helped me conceive of the concept began with doing ten burpees a day. I think I started my burpee habit in early 2012. In time, that habit evolved into a twice-daily set of calisthenics. I agree that discipline equals freedom, so more than the sizeable gains of saving money, saving time, strength, balance, flexibility, mental acuity, cardiovascular health, self-awareness, humility, and all the other usual benefits of physical fitness, I've gained freedom, mainly mental. I haven't missed a day since I started. Since I do a fixed number, I don't have to keep track daily. I update a spreadsheet I created and it tells me how…

May 25, 2025

It’s not your job to end pollution and depletion. It was nobody’s job to end slavery or fight the Nazis either until it was too late. (Or maybe it’s everyone’s job)

Freedom / Leadership

It’s not your job to end pollution and depletion. It was nobody’s job to end slavery or fight the Nazis either until it was too late. (Or maybe it’s everyone’s job)

Everybody acts like sustainability is someone else's job. Sure, they'll avoid straws or get triple pane windows on their third home, the one in Tuscany that they fly to a couple times a year (I sat next to someone at a dinner recently who was doing so), but actually changing culture? That's too much to ask of anyone. Everyone acts like it's not their job. Whatever their job is, they act like doing that work is all they can do. To do more outside what they get paid for would distract from them doing their job. And what job today doesn't rely on extraction, pollution, and devices made by coerced labor if not outright slavery? It was nobody's job to end slavery either Say you…

May 23, 2025

The necessity of the APPLE PIE Amendment

Choosing/Decision-Making / Freedom

The necessity of the APPLE PIE Amendment

For those who haven't read Sustainability Simplified, one of the main things it builds to is something that I thought crazy when I first thought it. The idea is a constitutional amendment in the style of the thirteenth, but instead of banning slavery, two main clauses, both traditional, both Enlightendigenous. One protects life, liberty, and property when the threat to them came through the environment. The other disallowing making property out of nature unless you leave enough as good in common for others, quoting John Locke. I call it an APPLE PIE Amendment for reasons you have to read the book for. The more I thought about it, the less crazy it felt, no more than the thirteenth must have before its passage. Now I'm…

May 21, 2025

Signs you’re not traveling even if you go far

Signs you’re not traveling even if you go far

Travel used to mean something. You had to work to go somewhere. In many places you could find a different culture. Today, you just pay money and go from one airport to another. The concept that "it's the journey, not the destination" is over. For most people the journey is passive. Going across the world takes marginally more effort than going across town. I've written before that “Traveling” with roller suitcases isn’t what traveling used to be. Today, most places are just slightly different versions of the same global culture. Again, going across the world takes you to people little different than you can find across town, and I don't just mean in a place as diverse as New York City. Signs that your travel…

May 14, 2025

More cultural exchange because of not flying: plinking and target practice

Freedom / Hands on Practical Experience / Nonjudgment / Relationships

More cultural exchange because of not flying: plinking and target practice

I don't know your views on guns, but I value both exploring different cultures and not polluting, which destroys life, liberty, and property. When my friend invites me to go to target practice at his shooting range outside the city, I'm happy to explore a culture as different from Greenwich Village, NYU, and Columbia as most places on earth. Unlike nearly anyone I know, I find cultures as diverse as any without flying and polluting. Many people I know look the other way at polluting, depleting, and homogenizing other cultures. Flying detracts from the values traveling is supposed to deliver. This one remains a constitutional right too, and I only took commuter rail to meet my friend. I didn't have to work months to save…

April 22, 2025

Addiction by chance versus Addiction by Design with Intent

Addiction / Freedom / Habits

Addiction by chance versus Addiction by Design with Intent

That something in poppy can be extracted into something that addicts (opiates), that fruit and grains can be fermented into something that addicts (alcohol), or smoking tobacco can addict, or that gambling addicts are all chance results from nature. People may have found ways to capitalize on and profit from that addiction, but no one created the effect. Evolution did. By contrast, we now know how to addict people to things like video games. We know how to make substances that addict and to lower the costs of making them. We know how to refine addictive things to make them yet more addictive. I see a major difference between the first type and the second. I'm starting to distinguish them by name: addiction by chance…

April 19, 2025

Why treat doof as second hand smoke

Addiction / Doof / Freedom

Why treat doof as second hand smoke

If an adult wants to smoke in their home, that's their business. If they give themselves lung cancer, that's their choice, assuming their sickness doesn't tax others who didn't choose. Likewise, if people want to consume doof, that's their business too. But if someone smokes where others who don't or can't consent to breathing that smoke, or if someone too young to know the long-term results of their choices smokes, then I consider a role of a government to protect the life, liberty, and property of those people who don't consent. Also, if smokers litter cigarette butts and packaging, I see it the responsibility of government to protect the rest of us from their destruction of our lives, liberty, and property. Likewise for doof. Unlike…

April 11, 2025

You are as much an expert in sustainability leadership as anyone, or can be

Education / Freedom / Leadership

You are as much an expert in sustainability leadership as anyone, or can be

People seem to want to defer to "experts" in sustainability and sustainability leadership. Many people know about science, technology, economics, legislation, and places where we might apply sustainability, but nearly no one knows anything about leading people or cultures to enjoy living more sustainably. Telling people facts or what to do or cajoling or coercing them isn't leading them, yet it's what nearly everyone does. It doesn't work. It frustrates nearly everyone, at least as far as I can tell. I'm not complaining or judging. I'm just describing our culture. You are as much an expert in sustainability leadership as anyone, or can be. I'm not saying you're skilled at it, but whatever skills you have are as good as nearly anyone's. I'm also not…

April 2, 2025

Their conflict is with Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and the Founding Fathers, not with me

Their conflict is with Adam Smith, Milton Friedman, Friedrich Hayek, and the Founding Fathers, not with me

People complain if we don't use energy sources like fossil fuels we'll collapse or return to the Stone Age. That's a failure of their imaginations, but more. Do we need to grow? Milton Friedman hardly promoted regulating markets. He said: “We have no desperate need to grow. We have a desperate desire to grow, and those are quite different. I believe that the level of growth in this country ought to be whatever people want it to be. If the people at large—if each and every person separately was satisfied with where he is and didn’t want to grow, fine. I have no objection. I don’t want to impose growth on anyone. I want people to be free to pursue their own objective.” Should we…

March 25, 2025

“These are the times that try men’s souls”

Freedom / Leadership / Nature

“These are the times that try men’s souls”

I confess I haven't read Thomas Paine's The American Crisis, but I'm working so much on opposing coercion and tyranny, I keep coming across him. I'm trying to learn more about the conditions that led to the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Learning history is one thing. Getting inside the hearts and minds of the people acting is another. What values were they acting on or not? If you see pollution and depletion as destroying life, liberty, and property, then you see much of our culture as depriving people of freedom. It creates tyranny, what this country was founded to oppose, yet it's everywhere. It pervades so much, few have the insight, vision, or courage to oppose it. They benefit from it. With that…

March 19, 2025

Replacing “comfort and convenience” with “the perks of being at the top of a dominance hierarchy” or “the perks of being a tyrant”

Choosing/Decision-Making / Freedom

Replacing “comfort and convenience” with “the perks of being at the top of a dominance hierarchy” or “the perks of being a tyrant”

Word choice matters. Why speak if you don't want to be understood? It's not their responsibility for me to be understood, even if I get mad at them for not understanding me. I recently wrote how I was Replacing "sustainability" with "not hurting people" and "polluting" with "hurting people" since "sustainability" is too abstract in many cases, as is the "environment." I'm not trying to help some abstract environment. I'm trying to help people and to alleviate their suffering. (I followed up with the post Corollaries to my recent post: Replacing “sustainability” with “not hurting people” and “polluting” with “hurting people”.) I'm experimenting with another change of word choice. People talk about comfort and convenience and juxtapose these things with struggle and challenge. We treat…

March 17, 2025

Honoring fallen auxiliary police officers

Freedom / Hands on Practical Experience / Volunteering

Honoring fallen auxiliary police officers

I'm approaching one year training for and participating in the NYPD auxiliary police program. I wrote earlier about mustering for the September 11 service. Tonight I walked in the annual memorial service for two auxiliary officers who were killed on duty on this day in 2007. I took this picture as we were starting. Here's a picture another auxiliary officer took from inside the group. I'm not sure if I'm in front of or behind the picture-taker, but one of those hats may be mine. As I've served more, I'm not learning as big things as fast. I've learned that a lot of police work includes standing around or waiting. Sometimes after standing at a post not doing much, when I walk away, I say…

March 14, 2025

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