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Two views from the Annual JP Dog Parade - JP honk was able to muster a quintet- the first is actually a screenshot from a video I took at the head --



Not sure who took the second, but they say it's #nofilter - lovely foliage and vibrant band outfits...

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14 years ago I posted this Laffy Taffy joke:

Q. What kind of tea can be hard to swallow?
A. Reality

"The Tea" is such a meme now - even the center of frickin RCN ads - and it's probably unrelated, but I could see it coming from this kind of wordplay. (Hell, I'm not sure I believe bae's commonly received origin story...)

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I'm not trying to argue in the book that the scarcity mindset is either shallow or completely useless. If you're caught in a warzone, if you're in a poverty-stricken area, if you're fighting for your survival, if you're in a competitive sport like boxing, the scarcity mindset does play a very important role.

Most of us are the products of people who survived in what was for a very, very long time, in our evolution as a species, a scarcity-oriented universe. Food was scarce, resources were scarce, fertile land was scarce, and so on. So we do have a very hard-wired tendency to be scarcity-oriented. But I think what has happened over time is we don't have to literally fight for our survival every day.

I think that as intelligent beings we need to recognize that some of the vestiges of our evolutionary tendencies might be holding us back. If I'm at an advertising agency, for example, or in software design, those are the kinds of fields where it is now being shown in quite a lot of studies that you actually perform better if you don't put yourself under the scarcity mindset, if you don't worry about the outcomes and enjoy the process of doing something, rather than the goal.

I'm wondering if that scarcity mindset tends to amplify the tribalism we see in politics now. Even folks who have pretty comfortable clouds of privilege and relative comfort, there's this human tendency to raise the stakes about everything, make everything urgent. I wonder though - that kind of contradicts this idea that life was pretty good and maybe easy for humans when we were small groups of hunter-gatherers. I wonder if people in groups were most often what we'd see as relaxed, or if it was constant stress.

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Some interesting thoughts on stadium design - how it's about community and thoughtfulness...