The Caring Catalyst

Who Cares - What Matters

WHEN YOUR PLANTED FEET SOAR

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THE COLOR OF YOUR FLAG

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SO JUST WHAT COLOR IS YOUR FLAG.        .        .         ?

IMG_2385.JPG
Everyone knows about
RED FLAGS
No one wants to know about
WHITE FLAGS
But maybe it’s the
GREEN FLAGS
we need to be seeking and flying.        .        .
I recently had this feed from Tashin Rose (no I don’t know her and have never remotely purposely or accidentally followed her) seemingly pop up on my feed and I don’t see those as
FLAGS TO IGNORE.         .         .
Maybe for just here, just now, you shouldn’t either.       .       .

What just screams
GREEN  FLAGS
about someone?

  • When they don’t hold grudges , communicate clearly and sort out things as soon as possible.
  • When they do anything and everything to make you feel loved.
  • When they understand your love language and try to make you feel loved in your way.
  • When they are honest and you don’t have to worry about their loyality for not even a second.
  • When they don’t make you feel insecure in any way.
  • When they include your name in room full of opportunities.
  • When they want to see your growth, your success and do anything possible to help you out in your way of success.
  • When they make you feel heard, seen and understood.
  • When they make effort to make the relationship better than yesterday.
  • When they give you time not only when their mood is to give but when you need them the most too.
  • When they respect you always and also no matter how bad the fight is they never disrespect you out of anger. They know how to control.
  • When they do mistakes and also accepts it and try to fix it.
What color Flag are you flying.          .          .            ?
RED
WHITE
GREEN
Pssssssssssssssssssssssssssssst:
Color Blindness has nothing to do with it

DREAM ON

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So here’s the tragedy about
D R E A M I N G
.        .       .we only think it’s for the young
that it has an age limit attached to it
that after a certain time, a certain age
it’s no longer viable
a               n                d
we do little to
DISPROVE IT.            .            .

AND WHAT WOULD YOU DO

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What would you do?
o  r
is it
WHAT DO YOU DO.          .          .          ?

It’s the First Lecture of a brand new semester.       .       .

The professor enters the lecture hall.  He looks around.     .     .

“You there in the 8th row. Can you tell me your name?”  he asks a student.

“My name is Sandra” says a voice.

The professor asks her, “Please leave my lecture hall. I don’t want to see you in my lecture.”

Everyone is quiet.  The student is irritated, slowly packs her things and stands up.

“Faster please” she is asked.

She doesn’t dare to say anything and leaves the lecture hall.

The professor keeps looking around.
The participants are scared.

“Why are there laws?”  he asks the group.

All quiet.  Everyone looks at the others.

“What are laws for?”  he asks again.

“Social order” is heard from a row

A student says “To protect a person’s personal rights.”

Another says “So that you can rely on the state.”

The professor is not satisfied.

“Justice” calls out a student.

The professor smiling.  She has his attention.

“Thank you very much. Did I behave unfairly towards your classmate earlier?”

Everyone nods.

“Indeed I did. Why didn’t anyone protest?

Why didn’t any of you try to stop me?

Why didn’t you want to prevent this injustice?” he asks.

Nobody answers.          .           .
THE SILENCE LITERALLY SHOUTS OUT A BLARING
W               H               Y  ?

“What you just learned you wouldn’t have understood in 1,000 hours of lectures if you hadn’t lived it. You didn’t say anything just because you weren’t affected yourself.  This attitude speaks against you and against life.  You think as long as it doesn’t concern you, it’s none of your business.  I’m telling you, if you don’t say anything today and don’t bring about justice, then one day you too will experience injustice and no one will stand before you.  Justice lives through us all.  We have to fight for it.”

“In life and at work, we often live next to each other instead of with each other. We console ourselves that the problems of others are none of our business. We go home and are glad that we were spared. But it’s also about standing up for others.  Every day an injustice happens in business, in sports or on the tram.  Relying on someone to sort it out is not enough. It is our duty to be there for others. Speaking for others when they cannot.           .         .

The difference is being a caring catalyst and
ACTING LIKE A CARING CATALYST
.            .            .which ONE are you

We’re all way past asking what would you do.           .           .
we are right here, right now, showing
WHAT DO YOU DO
(or.      .     .d o n ‘ t)

ALONE. . .WITH YOUR THOUGHTS

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Most of us feel like we just need to
STEP BACK
and take a moment to process
TO THINK 
and some of us do all we can
to make sure we don’t.          .          .
WHAT SAY YOU

How to Enjoy Being Alone with Your Thoughts

It’s hard to think pleasant thoughts—but a new study suggests a quick way to make it easier.     .     .

Kira M. Newman of the Greater Good Magazine took an inside peak of dealing with our THOUGHTS, Alone.

Be optimistic. Think happy thoughts. Lots of happiness advice makes it sound as if we could flip a switch and fill our heads with puppies and rainbows—and wouldn’t that be great?

But it turns out that positive thinking isn’t so easy. In an infamous 2014 study where people had 15 minutes to mentally entertain themselves, about 40 percent chose to help pass the time by—no, not meditating—receiving an electric shock.

In fact, a recent study found that only 13 percent of people’s thoughts are positive and inner-directed, and they enjoy those thoughts more when they arise spontaneously. (In other words, they prefer that happy thoughts come naturally rather than putting in the effort to “think positive.”)

Could this process be easier and more enjoyable? It’s not an idle question: According to the researchers behind the new study, if people were better able to generate pleasant thoughts, they might rely less on technology for constant stimulation. It could help those who have trouble falling asleep, or who start pounding the steering wheel in traffic.

The researchers didn’t find a magic switch. But they did discover a simple trick.

Across four studies, more than 250 college undergraduates and 800 online participants started by listing eight topics they’d enjoy thinking about, including memories, fantasies, and things they were looking forward to. People wrote down everything from their wedding day to Valentine’s Day, their family or the summer, eating decadent cake, or living in the World of Warcraft universe.

Next, participants (alone in a room) were instructed to entertain themselves for four to six minutes with thoughts about the topics they had listed. “Your goal should be to have a pleasant experience, as opposed to spending the time focusing on everyday activities or negative things,” the researchers advised.

That was it, except for one small difference: Half of the participants had access to their list of topics, either written on notecards or displayed on a computer screen one by one. The other half didn’t.

Afterward, participants rated how pleasant the activity was (how enjoyable, entertaining, and boring) and how cognitively difficult it was (how hard it was to concentrate, how much their mind wandered, and how much time they devoted to irrelevant topics).

Ultimately, the researchers found that the group who could look at their list of topics found the experience more pleasant and less cognitively demanding. All the participants had made lists in the first part of the experiment, but having access to that “thinking aid” was key.

“Often when we have a few free minutes, we reach for our cell phones to entertain us,” says Erin C. Westgate of the University of Virginia. “But with a little planning ahead of time, we might be able to use our own minds instead.”

She and her co-authors (including Daniel Gilbert of Harvard University) speculate that the list might have made it easier for people to concentrate; to remember their go-to, happiness-boosting topics; or to decide which one to think about when.

After reading this study, I’ve already  put up some kind of posters and art work in my little man cave, filled it with images of loved ones, surrounded by my favorite books, with a great sound system and yes, even a nice ECHO that allows me to listen to music that seems to fit my mood or my anxiety at any given time.  Those are certainly better than an electric shock!

 

MARY MERRY

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INVITATION

OH do you have time
to linger
for just a little while
out of your busy

and very important day
for the goldfinches
that have gathered
in a field of thistles

for a musical battle,
to see who can sing
the highest note,
or the lowest,

or the most expressive of mirth,
or the most tender?
Their strong, blunt beaks
drink the air

as they strive
melodiously
not for your sake
and not for mine

and not for the sake of winning
but for sheer delight and gratitude –
believe us, they say,
it is a serious thing

just to be alive
on this fresh morning
in the broken world.
I beg of you,

do not walk by
without pausing
to attend to this
rather ridiculous performance.

It could mean something.
It could mean everything.
It could be what Rilke meant, when he wrote:
You must change your life.

MARY MERRY

Mary has a way of 
making Merry
that allows a 
marrying between 
Who we are
and Who we’ve yet to Recognize
The Who we are now
in a Forest yet to be walked
A Lake yet to be swam
A bird, an animal yet to be 
Observed or named
A Universe yet to know 
Another Sun’s rays
A poem 
not yet to be written
even as it ever is being 
composed
not so deeply within us
as it rises to surfaces 
waiting to support
new Foundations

It was the birthday of best-selling poet Mary Oliver, on September 10; she was born in Maple Heights, Ohio (1935). As a child, she spent most of her time outside, wandering around the woods, reading and writing poems.

Oliver went to college in the ’50s at Ohio State University and Vassar, but dropped out. She made a pilgrimage to visit Edna St. Vincent Millay’s 800-acre estate in Austerlitz, New York. The poet had been dead for several years, but Millay’s sister Norma lived there along with her husband. Mary Oliver and Norma hit it off, and Oliver lived there for years, helping out on the estate, keeping Norma company, and working on her own writing. In 1958, a woman named Molly Malone Cook came to visit Norma while Oliver was there, and the two fell in love. A few years later, they moved together to Provincetown, Massachusetts.

Oliver said: “I was very careful never to take an interesting job. Not an interesting one. I took lots of jobs. But if you have an interesting job you get interested in it. I also began in those years to keep early hours. […] If anybody has a job and starts at 9, there’s no reason why they can’t get up at 4:30 or 5 and write for a couple of hours, and give their employers their second-best effort of the day — which is what I did.”

She published five books of poetry, and still almost no one had heard of her. She doesn’t remember ever having given a reading before 1984, which is the year that she was doing dishes one evening when the phone rang and it was someone calling to tell her that her most recent book, American Primitive (1983), had won the Pulitzer Prize. Suddenly, she was famous. She didn’t really like the fame — she didn’t give many interviews, didn’t want to be in the news. She once wrote in an introduction to a poetry collection, “I have felt all my life that I was wise, and tasteful, too, to speak very little about myself — to deflect the curiosity in the personal self that descends upon writers, especially in this country and at this time, from both casual and avid readers.”

When editors called their house for Oliver, Cook would answer, announce that she was going to get Oliver, fake footsteps, and then get back on the phone and pretend to be the poet — all so that Oliver didn’t have to talk on the phone to strangers, something she did not enjoy. Cook was a photographer, and she was also Oliver’s literary agent. They stayed together for more than 40 years, until Cook’s death in 2005.

Oliver said: “I’ve always wanted to write poems and nothing else. There were times over the years when life was not easy, but if you’re working a few hours a day and you’ve got a good book to read, and you can go outside to the beach and dig for clams, you’re okay.”

Oliver’s books of poems include No Voyage (1963), The River Styx, Ohio, and Other Poems (1972), Twelve Moons (1978), The Leaf and the Cloud (2000), Owls and Other Fantasies (2003), Red Bird (2008), Dog Songs (2013), and Velocity (2015). Her most recent collection, Devotions, comes out in October of this year.
#TheWritersAlmanac

 

I’ve always been a Mary Oliver fan
but I’ll also admit that I’ve read much more of her
now that she’s dead
than when she was alive
I suppose which not only makes her
not only more Alive
than ALIVE
but still doing
what she did the best
(and still is)
S      H      A      R      E
As I page
through this Anthology
I often have a rainbow of  feelings
as she gently pulls off the scabs
of some of my most tenderest wounds:

The Uses of Sorrow | Mary Oliver

(In my sleep I dreamed this poem)

Someone I loved once gave me
a box full of darkness.

It took me years to understand
that this, too, was a gift.


No matter what the poem,
Mary has a way of letting us know that
when you need a prayer
notice that nothing all around you
is miraculously short of that
with the worldly unspoken invitation:
WHEN YOU DON’T HAVE A PRAYER
B E
O N E
(The only true prayer you’ll ever need
is the one you are)

A MORE GENTLE, HUMBLE YOU

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Is today
T  H  A  T
D A Y
you’ll make a
DIFFERENCE
you’ll be a
DIFFERENCE
you’ll feel a
DIFFERENCE
Being a consistent CARING CATALYST 
is a great way to take the
MAYBE
of it all
out of the equation
for you making
for you giving
a great day
for Others
for Yourself.          .          .

A new study finds that when we practice intellectual humility, we have less animosity toward the “other side” of political debates.     .     .

 JILL SUTTIE from  Greater  Good  Magazine  recently  wrote  an  article  that  far  exceeds  our  political  differences.     .      .

But.     .     .when it comes to social and political issues, many Americans feel hostile toward those they disagree with. Unfortunately, those feelings of contempt can affect our ability to cooperate, keeping us from working together on solutions to the big issues of our day—like our economy, climate change, poverty, and racism.

How can we engage with each other with less rancor and hostility and all out hate? According to a new study, we might want to practice a bit more intellectual humility.

In this study, Glen Smith of the University of North Georgia analyzed data from surveys in 2020 (prior to the presidential election) and 2021, where over 1,700 participants reported on how strongly they opposed or supported political issues of the day (making college free, legalizing marijuana, imposing higher tariffs on foreign goods, and abolishing the death penalty). For each issue, the participants were also asked if they thought their views could be wrong, if they might be overlooking evidence that contradicts their position, and if they might change their view if presented with additional evidence or information—all questions related to intellectual humility.

Afterward, the participants also reported how they felt about people who had a different viewpoint from theirs on each topic—meaning, how warmly they felt toward opponents and how smart, honest, moral, and open-minded their opponents were.

After analyzing the results, Smith found that those who held more intellectually humble attitudes on a topic viewed opponents in a more positive light—more warmly and as more smart, honest, moral, and open-minded. In fact, their own intellectual humility was a better predictor of their hostility toward others than their own ideology, political party, political knowledge, or strength of their opinion.

This tendency held true even within an individual. If people held more humble views on a specific topic, they were less likely to dislike or dismiss an opponent in comparison to topics where they held more arrogant views. This suggests intellectual humility can be variable and context-specific, which could be a good thing for reducing political animosity.

“When people hold opinions with humility, they feel less hostility toward those who disagree, while the more people think they know about an issue, the less humble they are and the more hostile they are towards other people,” says Smith.

Why would being humbler affect us like this? Smith says that we tend to assign negative qualities in our minds to people who disagree with us—maybe thinking they’re less educated or have a moral defect—which, in turn, makes us dislike those people. But, when we hold some doubt about the rightness of our beliefs, we’re more open to listening to others without feeling hostile just because they see things differently.

“If I’m humble, there’s an implication there that I might be wrong and you might be right. And, if that’s the case, then why would I hate you? It doesn’t make any sense,” he says.

Nudging people to be humbler can lessen hostility

This finding doesn’t necessarily prove that being humbler causes less animosity. To get at that, Smith did an experiment where he tried to increase people’s humility.

In the experiment, 306 participants were asked to rate the strength of pro and con arguments on whether marijuana should be legalized, while told to ignore how they personally felt about the issue. In some cases, people read just one pro and one con argument; in other cases, they read a third argument in which the author expressed uncertainty about the potential effects of legalizing marijuana—saying they didn’t know enough about it—and, because of that, they were afraid of legalizing it.

Afterward, the participants were asked if the arguments they read changed their opinion. They also reported how humble they were around the topic of legalization and how they felt about people who were making arguments against their own position. Smith found that none of the arguments made a big difference in people’s opinions on the topic. But those who read the humbler argument felt more humility than those who read just the pro and con arguments, even though they rated the humble argument as the least convincing. And, as a result of feeling more humility, they also felt less animosity toward opponents.

“Humility doesn’t have to change your mind on the underlying issue, but being exposed to an expression of humility has an independent effect on how you feel,” says Smith. “It can make you both humbler and more accepting of disagreement.”

Perhaps this means that humility can be cultivated in particular contexts—at least to some extent. Nudging people toward expressing less certainty and more humility around their knowledge of sociopolitical topics might lessen other people’s defensiveness, leading to less hostility and more productive conversations.

Of course, Smith’s results don’t necessarily mean that intellectual humility will always be helpful. When it comes to other, more contentious issues—like climate change or abortion rights—it may be harder to encourage people to reconsider their position or listen to the other side without hostility. Nor do the results imply that politicians and others who benefit from increased polarization will be eager to embrace intellectual humility.

But it does provide some hope. By practicing more humility, we can foster more positive dialogue, at the very least, says Smith, and maybe make a dent in political polarization.

“If you can approach arguments by admitting that you don’t know everything, it’s contagious. Other people start to question how much they know and take a less defensive approach,” he says. “If we can become humbler and accept that people disagree with us for good reasons, we can reduce some of the acrimony.”

 

MET IN THE STAIRWELL

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I know it’s an occupational hazard, getting things others think you might like, enjoy, use because I’m a minister and a chaplain.  I’ve received this video dozens of times since it was released 11 years ago, and having been ordained now for a little over 43 years and a hospice chaplain for 29 years, I get asked this one question more than any other: “WHERE WAS GOD AT________________, you can fill in the blank, yourself; at 9/11, when a loved one was dying or going through a most horrendous time, when prayers don’t seem to be answered or can’t even be prayed, WHEN BAD THINGS HAPPEN TO GOOD PEOPLE.        .        .          ?

And YES, it’s a question we often ask during a tragedy, a sickness, an unanswered prayer, an unmet expectation but rarely during a celebration, an exceeded expectation, a painless, completely beautiful day.

As we remember, and we do, this 22nd anniversary of 9/11, WHERE WERE YOU AT ON that day.          .          .where are you NOW?  The GREAT WHOEVER doesn’t show up in Places; the SHOWING UP comes with People; in them and from
them.          .          .does the SHOWING UP come with you in the tragic/triumphant and all the seemingly inconsequential unnoticed times in between.          .         .          ?

And now, as we
R      E      M      E      M      B      E      R
(Who we are and Who we aren’t)
may I offer you one more special video from one of my favorite poets, Billy Collins

SOMETIMES
THE GREATEST GRIEF
IS MISSING 
WHAT WAS NEVER HAD
BUT ALWAYS WANTED.          .          .

MORE THAN A SINGER

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A          N          D

A          N          D

A          N         D

A          N          D

A          N          D

 

A          N          D

A          N          D

Ever since his death, all of the pictures and all of the tributes have been nonstop on Facebook, and so many other forms of social media. It’s almost as if he’s bigger than life, and in many ways he is, but in many ways, we don’t realize, so are we!

What we bring to this world continues way after we are gone, even if a name is not attached to it. I am not, and most likely you aren’t either, as famous as Jimmy Buffett, or ever will be, but each and everyone of us brings a song to this life.  The world may never recognize it as easily as CHEESEBURGER IN PARADISE or MARGARITAVILLE, but it’s still our’s not just to sing, but to share even with a very few limited but intimate ears.  Jimmy, admitted, even in his own band, he wasn’t the best singer or musician, but he knew how to share what he had and share he did, share he still does.  THAT is the lesson in itself, and also to grieve that what we have had is still very much what we still have if we but notice it in the new form it has taken.

 

So LISTEN
HUM ALONG
SING
S  H  A  R  E
RINSE  AND  REPEAT  OFTEN
and now if you’ll join me
how about we
CHRISTOPHER  COLUMBUS  UP
and go on a little
E X P L O R A T I O N.          .         .
LET’S  GO



 

 

T S U N D O K U

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THERE IS THE LITERAL VISUAL DEFINITION OF
T S U N D O K U:
A
S T A C K
O  F
B     O     O     K     S

The value of owning more books than you can read

  • Many readers buy books with every intention of reading them only to let them linger on the shelf.
  • Statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb believes surrounding ourselves with unread books enriches our lives as they remind us of all we don’t know.
  • The Japanese call this practice tsundoku, and it may provide lasting benefits.

Kevin Dickson recently wrote an article for BIG THINK that caught the attention of my friend, a fellow Book Lover like myself that immediately took the weight of a severe guilt I carry and am reminded of even as I type and watch the AMAZON person drop me off another book selection I just recently read about.

Kevin confesses: I love books. If I go to the bookstore to check a price, I walk out with three books I probably didn’t know existed beforehand. I buy second-hand books by the bagful at the Friends of the Library sale, while explaining to my wife that it’s for a good cause. Even the smell of books grips me, that faint aroma of earthy vanilla that wafts up at you when you flip a page.  Hmmmmmmmmmm.   .    .     .

The problem is that my book-buying habit outpaces my ability to read them. This leads to FOMO and occasional pangs of guilt over the unread volumes spilling across my shelves. Sound familiar?

But it’s possible this guilt is entirely misplaced. According to statistician Nassim Nicholas Taleb, these unread volumes represent what he calls an “antilibrary,” and he believes our antilibraries aren’t signs of intellectual failings. Quite the opposite.

LIVING WITH AN ANTILIBRARY

Taleb laid out the concept of the antilibrary in his best-selling bookThe Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable. He starts with a discussion of the prolific author and scholar Umberto Eco, whose personal library housed a staggering 30,000 books.

When Eco hosted visitors, many would marvel at the size of his library and assumed it represented the host’s knowledge — which, make no mistake, was expansive. But a few savvy visitors realized the truth: Eco’s library wasn’t voluminous because he had read so much; it was voluminous because he desired to read so much more.

Eco stated as much. Doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, he found he could only read about 25,200 books if he read one book a day, every day, between the ages of ten and eighty. A “trifle,” he laments, compared to the million books available at any good library.

Drawing from Eco’s example, Taleb deduces:

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. [Your] library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary.

Maria Popova, whose post at Brain Pickings summarizes Taleb’s argument beautifully, notes that our tendency is to overestimate the value of what we know, while underestimating the value of what we don’t know. Taleb’s antilibrary flips this tendency on its head.

The antilibrary’s value stems from how it challenges our self-estimation by providing a constant, niggling reminder of all we don’t know. The titles lining my own home remind me that I know little to nothing about cryptography, the evolution of feathers, Italian folklore, illicit drug use in the Third Reich, and whatever entomophagy is. (Don’t spoil it; I want to be surprised.)

“We tend to treat our knowledge as personal property to be protected and defended,” Taleb writes. “It is an ornament that allows us to rise in the pecking order. So this tendency to offend Eco’s library sensibility by focusing on the known is a human bias that extends to our mental operations.”

These selves of unexplored ideas propel us to continue reading, continue learning, and never be comfortable that we know enough. Jessica Stillman calls this realization intellectual humility.

People who lack this intellectual humility — those without a yearning to acquire new books or visit their local library — may enjoy a sense of pride at having conquered their personal collection, but such a library provides all the use of a wall-mounted trophy. It becomes an “ego-booting appendage” for decoration alone. Not a living, growing resource we can learn from until we are 80 — and, if we are lucky, a few years beyond.

T     S     U     N     D     O     K     U

I love Taleb’s concept, but I must admit I find the label “antilibrary” a bit lacking. For me, it sounds like a plot device in a knockoff Dan Brown novel — “Quick! We have to stop the Illuminati before they use the antilibrary to erase all the books in existence.”

Writing for the New York Times, Kevin Mims also doesn’t care for Taleb’s label. Thankfully, his objection is a bit more practical: “I don’t really like Taleb’s term ‘antilibrary.’ A library is a collection of books, many of which remain unread for long periods of time. I don’t see how that differs from an antilibrary.”

His preferred label is a loanword from Japan: tsundoku. Tsundoku is the Japanese word for the stack(s) of books you’ve purchased but haven’t read. Its morphology combines tsunde-oku (letting things pile up) and dukosho (reading books).

The word originated in the late 19th century as a satirical jab at teachers who owned books but didn’t read them. While that is opposite of Taleb’s point, today the word carries no stigma in Japanese culture. It’s also differs from bibliomania, which is the obsessive collecting of books for the sake of the collection, not their eventual reading.

THE VALUE OF TSUNDOKU

Granted, I’m sure there is some braggadocious bibliomaniac out there who owns a collection comparable to a small national library, yet rarely cracks a cover. Even so, studies have shown that book ownership and reading typically go hand in hand to great effect.

One such study found that children who grew up in homes with between 80 and 350 books showed improved literacy, numeracy, and information communication technology skills as adults. Exposure to books, the researchers suggested, boosts these cognitive abilities by making reading a part of life’s routines and practices.

Many other studies have shown reading habits relay a bevy of benefits. They suggest reading can reduce stress, satisfy social connection needs, bolster social skills and empathy, and boost certain cognitive skills. And that’s just fiction! Reading nonfiction is correlated with success and high achievement, helps us better understand ourselves and the world, and gives you the edge come trivia night.

In her article, Jessica Stillman ponders whether the antilibrary acts as a counter to the Dunning-Kruger effect, a cognitive bias that leads ignorant people to assume their knowledge or abilities are more proficient than they truly are. Since people are not prone to enjoying reminders of their ignorance, their unread books push them toward, if not mastery, then at least a ever-expanding understanding of competence.

“All those books you haven’t read are indeed a sign of your ignorance. But if you know how ignorant you are, you’re way ahead of the vast majority of other people,” Stillman writes.

Whether you prefer the term antilibrary, tsundoku, or something else entirely, the value of an unread book is its power to get you to read it.

Uhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh
Now if you’ll excuse me.           .           .
THERE’S 
THIS
B     O     O     K.     .     .

Eco stated as much. Doing a back-of-the-envelope calculation, he found he could only read about 25,200 books if he read one book a day, every day, between the ages of ten and eighty. A “trifle,” he laments, compared to the million books available at any good library.

Drawing from Eco’s example, Taleb deduces:

Read books are far less valuable than unread ones. [Your] library should contain as much of what you do not know as your financial means, mortgage rates, and the currently tight real-estate market allows you to put there. You will accumulate more knowledge and more books as you grow older, and the growing number of unread books on the shelves will look at you menacingly. Indeed, the more you know, the larger the rows of unread books. Let us call this collection of unread books an antilibrary. [Emphasis original]

 

 

Professional Speaker, Author, Assurance Man