Life - Abstractionist by Keenen Charles

Abstractionist by Keenen Charles

Sign in Subscribe

Life

A collection of 23 posts

Screen Time

For the past two weeks, I've been trying to decrease the time I spend on social media. With so little else to do due to restrictions, I've found myself spending way more time aimlessly scrolling. It was never a huge problem for me before but it's grown now. On my

2019: Finding My Niche & Some Fun

2019: Finding My Niche & Some Fun

My journey this year has been to find my niche, the intersection of my interests, skills, and goals. I believe everyone has a niche and finding it allows you to create your best work. I haven't found mine just yet but I think I've gotten closer. The most impactful activity

Sincerity

Life can be a series of actions and reactions. You take action and the world reacts. You receive an action and you react. Those reactions are determined by our guiding principles, our virtues. Every action and reaction is processed through our unique lens. As a child, we're completely sincere but

Suffering For Art

Suffering For Art

A few recent events have got me thinking about our views of struggling and pain especially in art. Chance the Rapper released his new album this week and he's been the butt of a lot of memes and jokes because of the overall positivity and happiness of the album. It's

What Is Adulthood?

What Is Adulthood?

When you're younger you imagine that one day you'll be an adult. You'll know things. You'll know your path in life and be making steady progress. You'll be mature and wise in a way you never were before. Then the years tick by and you keep waiting. Waiting for that

Change is Good But Scary

Change is Good But Scary

Change is fundamental to growth. Life evolves due to changes in its environment. Those changes require lifeforms to adapt and grow to the new world they find themselves in. That growth can have useful and unintended side effects. Our ancestors began walking upright due to expanding savannahs and it freed

Trends

I think of myself as an optimistic cynic. I'm sceptical of individual motivations but overall I'm optimistic for the future of our species. This semi contradictory view mostly stems from my belief in positive trends over time. I like to think of human progress and individual happiness as a simple

What Are You Willing To Live With?

What Are You Willing To Live With?

I think most of us would like to believe if we have to decide between doing what's right and saving ourselves we'd choose the former. The reality of these decisions is rarely so easy. Who can really blame someone for hiding when they see someone waving a gun at another?

Being Human

"Because it’s okay to feel things. And be who you are about them." I re-read The Perks of Being a Wallflower today and that line really stuck out to me. It's one of my favourite books and it even has a movie adaptation that does the book justice. I've

Home?

Not fitting in is such a strong human fear. As children, we're afraid of not fitting in when we start a new school. And that fear is always present. We learn how to deal with it as we grow older. But our methods vary. Some will adjust their personalities to

Our Lack of Control

Our Lack of Control

Individually we have so little control of what occurs in our lives. The weather, the news, the actions of others, it's all out of our control. That lack of control is hard to accept for a species that has flourished because of its ability to control. We learnt to control

Needing A Break

Needing A Break

I haven't written in 10 days now. It's my longest no-writing streak since I started 200 words a day. But now it's time to get started again. The past 10 days have been hectic. The past month really. But every day, usually 20 minutes before midnight I'd force myself to

Maintaining New Habits

Maintaining New Habits

I have a deep fear of losing momentum when I've found some. It feels amazing when your efforts are paying off, you can see the rewards, and it all feels like it's been worth it. No matter what you're doing you still would like to see some quantifiable progress. It

Resisting Our Preconceived Opinions

Resisting Our Preconceived Opinions

A lot of time our opinions on things are formed before we ever experience them. It applies to new food, movies, and even people. The scraps of information we've gathered before experiencing something tend to shape our first impressions. Your experience with a new video game can start from a

This Ain't For You, This Be For My Health

This Ain't For You, This Be For My Health

After reading Sam Altman's post How To Be Successful [http://blog.samaltman.com/how-to-be-successful] today this section stood out to me. > The most successful people I know are primarily internally driven; they do what they do to impress themselves and because they feel compelled to make something happen in the

Don't Take The Money

Don't Take The Money

It's a privilege to be able to forgo money for less tangible things. Experience, passion, or duty. Not everyone has that luxury. Money is tempting even when you don't need it. It's no surprise that most of the wealthy seek to get wealthier. In your career, there's pressure to constantly

Accepting The Risk of Embarrassment

Accepting The Risk of Embarrassment

I recently finished Auston Kleon's Show Your Work and this quote he used stuck with me. > "Compulsive avoidance of embarrassment is a form of suicide." - Colin Marshall It can feel like embarrassment is the worst pain one could bear. You wish you could cease to exist until it's all

Happy Birthday Mac

Happy Birthday Mac

No celebrity death has ever affected me the way Mac Miller's did last September. I was in shock, I cried, I reminisced. I was surprised at how hurt I felt. I wasn't fully aware of how deep the connection created through music and art can run. When I first began

Switching The Schedule Up

Switching The Schedule Up

In our journey to get better every day, it's easy to get lulled into a false sense of complacency. You can feel like you've established one new habit and now it's time to move onto another. Truly forming a habit takes continued effort and surviving many unexpected obstacles. Even when

A Little Better Every Day

A Little Better Every Day

Becoming good at something can seem overwhelming, especially when you're starting at zero. The tutorials for dummies don't make much sense and there's a whole lot of new terms and skills to learn. You're struggling to get the vision in your head into reality. I've felt this way whenever I'm

Vocation Not Work

Vocation Not Work

The word 'work' comes with a lot of baggage. It instantly conjures the image of someone physically or mentally toiling at some task until it's thankfully over. This association comes from the most common form of work, a job that provides money for yourself and your family in exchange for

Finding Your Niche

Finding Your Niche

In Robert Greene's Mastery, he talks about strategies to finding your Life's Task. One of the strategies focuses on finding a unique niche to occupy. There are two paths to finding your niche, the second path he calls the connecting-widening path caught my attention. To follow this path you first

Naked Ambition

I've always struggled with my ambition. For as long as I can remember I've wanted a lot. A lot more than others seem to. Their contentedness made me a bit jealous. It's peaceful to know just how much you want and fewer existential crises seem nice too. There's a natural