Two interesting conversations lately

With heisenbug, on how I think our social spheres are going to shift within the next 10 years as some of our friends retire early and others don't (and heck, as one of us maybe retires early while the other doesn't). He seemed a little surprised by this thought at first, but we were pretty quickly able to go through a long list of friends who probably will and friends who almost definitely won't (in most cases because they can't). For so long now the great equalizer has seemed to be the cry of "I'm so busy", with time as the scarce resource, and that's been hiding some major differences in savings rates that will come into full view as schedule and priority differences.

With norwoodbridge on how scary-easy it really is to control how much you like someone by focusing on all their good qualities or focusing on the bad ones. Where attention goes, confirmation bias and emotion soon follow and take over. And it's interesting to note that some people make it really easy to go one way or another, by providing "handles" of a sort that one can obviously like or dislike -- think for instance of the "lovable rogue". Not loved, but providing lovability handles that are easy to grab onto. I'm starting to think of these as affordances that people offer. And I feel I've brushed against this topic many times before -- sometimes as in "she's such a lovable rascal" or "he's easy to hate", but also like "I don't have a crush on him, but I imagine if one did it could be powerful" and similar. Notably in the context of my current life, Lion has a lot of obvious handles on both the negative and positive sides. It's not my current intent, but I bet I could dial down my emotions on him pretty quickly if I resorted to the brutal tactic of purposely listing out and meditating on the negatives. A strange thing to think about. I wonder what people are glad to be rid of, when they're getting over me.