ImWritingABook

Your phrasing is so sympathetic to these people, even when they are basically wasting your time! Really lovely to see.

Do you have preferred language for discussing institutionalized power? A word like patriarchy is certainly very loaded, but it does seem to me important to be able to express the way that systems can sometimes be set up to favor certain classes of individuals, be it bankers protected by a too-big-to-fail system or creative careers increasingly requiring multi-year unpaid internships (after all the education costs) to get a real foot in the door. Or do you prefer to avoid discussion of "the system" and just focus more on common cause and and an intuitive sense of what compromise and decency would look like? Thanks.

Totally know what you mean. I think humility and sympathy are two of the things that brings out one of the absolute best sides of our humanity. One can be born with a little more or less, but really there aren’t a lot of shortcuts to earning them besides real (often bitterly hard) life experiences.

The amazing thing is how different the flavor of the two different refusals is. Billy seems a little wrapped up in personally controlling his own brand and Donald seems kind of corperate and overhandled. All with the perfect amount of snark and within the conciept of not giving away their identities. Really masterful.

Meh. “Single decision to commit to your plan”. If that worked, to-do lists would be fine ... they also always have something you know the plan calls for you to be working on.