Creating Good or Value

 Today I got kind of excited about the idea of getting competitive about creating Good or Value. I was thinking about how in life it is really pretty open about how you create Good or Value and everybody does it in different ways. But I was also thinking that there are some principles. So I was sort of interested in some principles for this generalized notion of value. One thing I have kind of thought about a fair bit is that it seems like Good or Value comes about through coherence. What I mean is that you create Good or Value by making choices that add up. That goes for writing a novel or poem or whatever as well as in games where you create value in your position by making choices with your moves. But of course it also goes in life where we make value by making coherent choices over the course of time.

Then I was thinking that in a lot of ways the notion of value ultimately has to do with other people. At the end of the day, the notion of value I had was generating happiness for other people. That could be in a variety of ways. For some people it is just in terms of in the world immediately around them with the people that they encounter on a daily basis. For other people they generate value for other people by creating or performing. Unfortunately, there are people who create a great deal of value for people they don't know through art or performances or activities at a high level but who create a lot of suffering for the people around them in their daily lives. Even if you imagine yourself as a servant of a higher power, that work is done in the context of generating value for other people...

However, as an introvert, I feel there is a lot of value in maintaining my inner world in a healthy and harmonious way. But I kind of realize that at the end of the day, the real measure of that is how my practice of maintaining my inner organization benefits others in my interactions with them.

 But then I came back to the idea of competition. My whole life I have been attracted to competition and excellence, even though I have never really excelled at any of the competitive activities that I have engaged in. So part of me would really like to combine the idea of competition with the idea of generating value. But in some ways there seems to be a bit of a contradiction because competition easily slides into egoism and selfishness. So the trick is to somehow find a way of channeling competition into good for other people. One of the things I have thought about along these lines is the notion that by offering people good competition you encourage them to improve themselves. So in the sense that by being good yourself, you present a challenge to others to improve themselves.

But it seems to me there is some way that you can compete to create value, in the sense of like a subtle competition to generate happiness in the people around you. But I want to be clear that what I have in mind is different from people pleasing or pandering. And that is why it is subtle. The idea is not to curry favor with people but through your interaction with them to generate true good. To influence them for the good. Not in a manipulative way but in the sense of trying to generate true happiness for them. Sometimes this could involve resisting them somehow or rather resisting their negative impulses.

Then somehow I took a left turn and started to think about the idea of subtlety. That somehow there is something valuable about subtlety. But I always feel kind of conflicted about that because sometimes subtlety seems kind of exclusionary. But there seems to be something at some level where subtlety is beneficial in a way. But that is something I need to think about more

But then I was combining that with the idea of resistance and the idea of resistance was to value capture in many ways. Value capture is the notion that you try to measure and quantify value in a way that ultimately destroys true value and substitutes the measurement. This idea is from C. Thi Nguyen. So somehow the idea is to resist this value capture process.

And that brought me back to something I have been thinking a lot about lately and that is the notion of the weird. I mean this is in sort of like the whole Weird Tales kind of horror sort of mentality but also in the whole "Keep Austin Weird" kind of mentality. That somehow weirdness is a way of resisting value capture. And like how weirdness has both a horror dimension and like a beauty dimension.

So, for me in some ways I would like this blog to be a way of creating value for other people. Value that somehow comes out of my own inner weirdness.