How to spread your ego—& other essays
Friday Flow, Issue #38
Hey.
Write of Passage finished this week—with a bang! The final session was emotive, with lots of people sharing stories of how the course changed them. A major theme of this cohort was the idea of intellectual isolation. For most of us, we have no one in our physical lives regularly writing online—together we remind each other we’re not crazy.
Does the idea of intellectual isolation resonate with you too?
One of the beautiful things about the internet is that we don’t have to be limited to the the connections in our physical space. We can all find each other: me and all my wonderful fellow writers—and you and I, right now. Thank you for being here. 🤗
Atomic essays
Yep, it’s not one essay this week, it’s a collection of mini-essays. And not just this week either—it’s for a month. See, I joined something called #Ship30for30, which is exactly what it sounds like: a challenge to ship a daily piece of writing for 30 days.
It’s kind of anxiety-inducing, even though I’ve been writing weekly for nearly a year now. But that’s also exactly why I’m doing it.
It’s meant to be only a small enough essay to fit into a screenshot (so not more than 250 words), but you have to do it daily. I thought it’d be a great way to explore many different ideas over the course of the month, so I signed up and it kicked off Monday.
I’ve written five so far. Here’s the first one.
You can catch the rest of this week’s essays on my Twitter, where I’ve created a thread of every single one as similar downloadable graphics. If you would like to read them as text though, I got you: you can do that on the website. Here’s a quick rundown of this week’s essays.
Tuesday: “Culture” is all the things we take for granted. None of us really knows our cultures: it takes someone breaking cultural rules for us to even see them…
Wednesday: Diversity isn’t for the “other” people. We can’t really "eliminate" bias—our best chance is to throw all available biases into a giant pot…
Yesterday: Good or bad? Wrong question. We’re obsessed with hierarchies. We see thing A and thing B and instinctively wonder which comes first…
Today: Words are a superpower. It’s never just words. Words themselves are just sounds. Except we’ve attached meaning to those sounds…
Proverb
You do not look for a black goat at night.
I mean, right? You can do whatever you want any time you like, but it can save you a lot of grief to pay attention to how suitable the time is. And that applies as much to finding black goats as to doing our best work or being fully present to our relationships.
Look for black goats while it’s still daytime.
Talk soon,
Doc Ayomide
PS. The Being Human website and the Friday Flow weekly newsletter are both completely free, but if you’d like to buy me a coffee—or more!—you can use the button below.