On Facebook I quietly unsubscribe from friends who regularly make angry issue-related posts, even if they’re right. I don’t want to be pummeled by “truth,” no matter how true it is.

I understand why they do it. I’ve done it. Ignorance — of overfishing, of puppy mills, of normalized sexism, of what vaccines can and can’t do — can be genuinely dangerous, and wanting to reduce this ignorance is understandable.

Some are able to do it carefully and diplomatically, and I have learned a lot from these people.

But most internet activists let contempt seep into the message. It becomes about making others wrong instead of trying to help them be right. Just visit virtually any issue-related message board. It’s adversarial. It’s normal to blame people for their ignorance.

Ignorance, if that’s what it really is, isn’t something people can fairly be blamed for. We don’t choose what not to grasp, what not to have been taught, what not to have understood the significance of.

Ignorance is blind to itself. When you’re trying to rectify ignorance in someone else, it’s easy to forget that you’re ignorant too, in ways you can’t know.

Whoever you are, you have to admit there’s a hell of a lot you don’t know, and you don’t know that you don’t know it. None of us are free of ignorance. So in our attempts to reduce ignorance we ought to approach others as fellow learners, rather than people worthy of blame.

The worst thing a person can do for their stance is to deliver it packaged with a moral judgment. This effectively eliminates the other person’s freedom to agree, and may even create a committed opponent to their cause. Doing this to a lot of people reduces the public’s receptivity to the cause altogether. Even if it is the truth, when you hurl it at someone it will bounce rather than stick.  Read More

As some of you know, I’m going to be speaking at a week-long retreat in the foothills of Ecuador in late August. The one last year was a huge success, and after reading about it on Mr Money Mustache I wished I had been there.

I wasn’t though, and so I couldn’t give a lot of details earlier. So I’ve asked Cheryl Reed (the proprietor and one of the presenters) to talk about what the trip entails. At the end of this post I’ll go over what my presentation is about.

Cheryl first visted Ecuador seventeen years ago on a volunteer trip. She was extremely moved by both the exceptional hospitality and incredible poverty she witnessed there.

“I worked with disabled children whose parents couldn’t afford diapers, so they used sweaters covered by plastic bags. I watched as one father carried his 14-year old child with cerebral palsy on his back eight blocks to the center every day because she didn’t have a wheelchair. I returned to the States and nothing made sense to me anymore, especially my consumerist lifestyle. Six months later I left everything and moved to Ecuador and it was the best decision I ever made.”

Here’s Cheryl:

My dream since then has been to host week-long retreats in Ecuador in order to share her beauty, as well as what I’ve learned about following your dreams and finding happiness. Serendipity has always been on my side, and a financial blogger named Jim Collins contacted me and suggested adding bloggers to the list of presenters for the retreats.

Last year was our first chautauqua and it turned out better than I could have hoped. It was the perfect combination of twenty-seven like-minded people, spending time together in one of the most beautiful areas of Ecuador, discussing freedom, happiness and financial independence. I knew I was onto something special when people said it was life-changing.

This year, I decided to hold two chautauquas. The first one has a financial independence focus, with Jim Collins and Mr. Money Mustache (and is sold out.) For the second retreat, I wanted to delve more deeply into the topic of happiness and freedom, and to share the area where I live.  Read More

Beside me on my desk at all times is a pad of sticky notes, which was the size of a Rubik’s cube when I bought it. Now it’s the size of a Melba Toast.

Whenever I think of something I might have to deal with, I write it down on one of these squares. The sheets alternate yellow and hot pink, so my inbox always looks like a tropical salad.

Every few days I process these little notes, which means I look at what I’ve written and decide what to do about it. Sometimes I neglect this duty for a while, and end up with a week’s worth (or two) of sticky notes.

I end up throwing most of them right into the recycling bin, because when it comes time to look at it, the thing I wrote down is no longer relevant, or I’ve already done it, or I don’t feel like anything has to be done about it.

Yet almost all of those notes were scrawled in a moment when I felt some kind of urgency or worry about something, as if my life was suddenly becoming more difficult. I have to ______! I need a new ______! What am I going to do about _____?!

We have these kinds of moments all the time. Things are going fine, and then they’re not, because you think of something you might have to deal with. The moment goes a bit dark. You wish you hadn’t thought of it. Another thing on your plate.

Problems emerge like that: a mental tapping on the shoulder, and a darkening of the emotions. I’ve become really interested in the exact moment this reaction happens, and watching what physical feelings creep in. It almost always does something to the body: the jaw hardens, the skin flushes, or a pit grows below the ribcage.

In those moments, it can be easy to forget (assuming you realize this in the first place) that most of these apparent problems will never have to be solved. They’ll never ripen into real-life dilemmas that require anything difficult from you. Chances are they’ll be sticky notes in the bin at the end of the week (if you’re organized enough to write them down.)

Over and over and over in my life, things that I think will be a big problem turn out not to be. Something else happens instead. Or, a moment I’m dreading comes and goes and it’s not that bad.

Most of the time, the only difficulty posed by a problem is dealing with the moment in which it occurs to you that you might have a problem. After watching thousands of my worries go straight to the bin, I’m getting better at noticing the “shoulder tap” when it happens, and reminding myself that this problem probably isn’t a problem.  Read More