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Josh Knox

Just Joshin' #189 (Share)

Published 6 days ago • 5 min read

Family Photo:
Share

When you share Stuff, you split it into halves. Or, for Lawrence, some other set of fractions.

Ideas aren't the same as Stuff. Ideas don't have to be divided up to be shared. Economics has this fancy word, non-rivalrous, to describe goods whose consumption by one person doesn't diminish how much they can be consumed by other people.

Ideas are even better than non-rivalrous. Sharing ideas, putting them out in the world, pinballs them around the minds of everyone else who shares them. Responses bounce shared ideas back to us in new and unexpected ways. Unshared ideas never get feedback.

Shared ideas get to be examined, evaluated, and refined by the whole group. Science is all about sharing ideas, then figuring out where or how they might be true.

Life too.

--

Evaluating my media usage, there's been too much fluff lately—too much Reddit, Twitter, Facebook.

Ironically, these are all "Sharing" sites.

I don't use them for sharing anymore. I hardly even leave comments these days...just consume.

That habitual consumption isn't productive. I want to contemplate new and interesting ideas. Sharing sites are mostly an empty calorie information diet—mindless scrolling to feed the digital advertising machines.

This week, I downloaded ScreenZen to help cut down on those empty calories. The app adds little bits of friction to access the sharing sites. It disrupts the dopamine pathways that make using the sites habitual.

That's the hypothesis anyways...we'll see where this experiment goes.

2 Dad Jokes:
Over/Under Sharing

Selfies with Superman

Source: My Brain+ChatGPT​

Family Business

Source: Old Joke+Nano Banana​

Highlights:
Share What You Know

​Idea by Michael Dean​

My best recommendation is to write down every mild epiphany you have, ideally in prose, ideally legible enough to share with a friend, ideally 3 times per day, and if you’re crazy and jobless, 100 times per day.

​How to live a meaningful life by Daniel Schmachtenberger​

1. Appreciate the beauty of existence. Beauty doesn’t exist in objects. It arises from the relationship of the subject appreciating the object. Meaning is inherently relational.
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2. Add to the beauty of existence. Picking up trash, creating art, complementing someone, alleviating poverty, inventing technology that improves life, expanding the field of what we know about reality, raising children lovingly, planting trees, sharing things of value we have learned…are all ways to add to the beauty of existence. This is inherently meaningful. The beauty of reality evolved through your action. This is the mode of doing.

​on being known by Ava​

I’ve always identified as not wanting to be known, as fearing it deeply because I’m a self-protective, sensitive person, but that’s obviously not the complete picture. Why else would I share my writing, why would I tweet or update this blog, why would I fall in love or nurture my relationships with my friends? Of course I want to be known and to be seen.
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Two nights ago I was talking to a friend about why I tweet. He said that the idea of sharing things about himself online makes him uncomfortable and he couldn’t be as public as I was, but also pointed out that he also thinks I’m not sharing all of myself online, either—you’re not taking that many risks. I think he’s right, in the sense that the real-life version of me is obviously different from the curated version of myself I present online. I’m performing—it’s impossible to not to.
...
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When you share things about yourself willingly—posting pictures of yourself online, writing a blog—you’re making criticism inevitable. You’re releasing information into the wild and people can respond to it however they want. They can approach it with the right context, or absolutely no context. You’re allowing yourself to be seen, to be known, and in return you might be seen in ways you realllly don’t want yourself to be seen.
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This is what I love about the Internet and what I hate most about it. It’s taken some time for me understand that it’s natural to be ambivalent about exposure: that you’re opening yourself to both good feedback and bad feedback, and you can’t have one without the other. If you’re trying to curate and control everything, you’re not really taking any risks in life or in art: you’ll never feel that good about being seen because what’s being seen isn’t you.
...
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Of course, even if you don’t want to be online at all—even if you want to share as little of yourself as possible—you can’t escape the mortification of being known. It’s only by risking something important that we can produce good work and form meaningful relationships. The possibility of judgment is the price we pay for real love.
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I used to find it hard to relax in relationships because I hated the idea of being seen in all my hideous imperfection, my anxiety and neediness. I think one of the most helpful things I’ve realized over time is that I don’t need to be perfect to be loved. That what I actually need is to allow myself to be known, to let someone see as much of me as possible. That what binds two people together is seeing all the ugliness and still miraculously, improbably, choosing each other.

​Resonance by Chris Barber​

For couples and families: Doing a 2 minute daily resonance circle - where one person shares what's going on for them or how they're feeling, and the other people just reflect it back with zero advice, zero fixing, is a nice way to create connection and help people emotionally sync. Resonance helps you dissolve bad vibes or feel good vibes even more deeply. It's like some mix of an emotional processing method and a listening method and a conflict method and a connection method and an emotional regulation or co-regulation method. It’s about how to feel your feelings or help someone else feel their feelings. It’s how to help someone vent their emotions get back to peace and connection.

​An Audience of One by Kevin Kelly​

My hypothesis is that in the near future, the bulk of creative content generated by humans – with the assistance of AI – will have an audience of one. Most art generated each day will be consumed primarily only by its human co-creator. Very little completed art will be shared widely with others – although a small percentage of it will be shared widely.
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If most art created in the future is not shared, why is it made? It will be chiefly made for the pleasure of making it. In other words, the majority of all the creative work in the future will be made primarily and chiefly for the joy and thrill of co-creation.
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Right now there are roughly 50 million images generated each day by AIs such as Midjourney, Google and Adobe, etc. Vanishing few of these 50 million images per day are ever shared beyond the creator. Still image creation today already predominantly has an audience of one.

iamJoshKnox Highlights:

The Art of Interview with Adam Montiel

video preview​

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Something to share with you: Adam Montiel, a local radio and podcast host, presented "The Art of Interview" at the this year's Central Coast Writer's Conference. Adam's a great guy, and was nice enough to let me interview him about interviewing as a follow-up to his session. He let me do a deep-dive into his interview process and his (patent-pending) ICE-T method.

Want to Be Interviewed?

I am still trying to flex my interviewing muscle:
​Please REPLY if you'd like to do a 30-minute interview with me for a Podcast that doesn't yet exist.

Or book some time on my calendar if there's anything else you'd like to chat about:
​https://calendly.com/iamjoshknox​

Until next week,
​iamJoshKnox​​

Thoughts? Feedback?
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Josh Knox

Hi! I am Josh Knox. Read more of me here: 👇

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