A while ago, Duncan Sabien wrote a Facebook post about a thing he called “aliveness”, and presented it on a single spectrum with something called “chillness”. At the time I felt that aliveness seemed sort of like obviously-the-good-one, and like I was obviously-bad-for-being-more-chill, and I felt sad because I think there were a lot of pressures when I was younger to optimize for chillness.
But recently I’ve been in a couple of scenarios that have changed my views on this. I now think that aliveness and chillness aren’t quite opposite ends of the same axis in person space. It seems instead like they’re anticorrelated features of a given person in a given situation, and many people live their lives with a nearly-fixed level of each. But there are also people who can control their levels of aliveness or chillness, as the situation demands.
And it isn’t the case that chillness is worse. I think it is much, much easier to coordinate large groups of chill people than not-chill people. I think that these people can also definitely be “alive” in the relevant way.
My intuitive feeling is that this ability to control your chillness and aliveness is strongly related to “leadership qualities”. And, at least for me, noticing that these might not be opposite ends of a fixed spectrum makes me feel a lot more hopeful about the possibility to grow in aliveness-capability.
A while ago, Duncan Sabien wrote a Facebook post about a thing he called “aliveness”, and presented it on a single spectrum with something called “chillness”. At the time I felt that aliveness seemed sort of like obviously-the-good-one, and like I was obviously-bad-for-being-more-chill, and I felt sad because I think there were a lot of pressures when I was younger to optimize for chillness.
But recently I’ve been in a couple of scenarios that have changed my views on this. I now think that aliveness and chillness aren’t quite opposite ends of the same axis in person space. It seems instead like they’re anticorrelated features of a given person in a given situation, and many people live their lives with a nearly-fixed level of each. But there are also people who can control their levels of aliveness or chillness, as the situation demands.
And it isn’t the case that chillness is worse. I think it is much, much easier to coordinate large groups of chill people than not-chill people. I think that these people can also definitely be “alive” in the relevant way.
My intuitive feeling is that this ability to control your chillness and aliveness is strongly related to “leadership qualities”. And, at least for me, noticing that these might not be opposite ends of a fixed spectrum makes me feel a lot more hopeful about the possibility to grow in aliveness-capability.