There is this song that I like by Jackie Greene with a refrain in it that repeats "Oh, it's just as well." I think we should all be so lucky to have that be the chorus line after each event in our own lives. That our reaction to each occurrence is agnostic.

Marcus called it the Art of Acquiescence. Lincoln thought it that it was the one truly appropriate response for all situations. But this is too often misconstrued as "accepting" bad things that happen to you. Really the least important and easily accomplished half.

The idea is to take both the bad and the good equally, in stride. The subtle but critical difference between resilience and robustness is that resilience is about withstanding pressure while robustness - that is: vigor, strength, health - is the ability to withstand change.

When I see a restaurant with a flash heavy website, I see a web designer who tricked a company into paying for stuff they never needed. When I see roadblock ads and site takeovers and big network buys, I think about the lies the ad rep told the executive just trying to get people to hear about his product. I think about his 40% commission. When I read stories on blogs I can hear the few-thousand-dollars-a-month publicist breathlessly selling this inevitably defunct company he signed two days before. And every time someone calls themselves a 'social media expert' I know that what they really did was play some company's genuine desire to stay on top of things into a bullshit job where they don't do anything.

I see all sorts of web and PR companies that I could start and maybe turn into something. I know I understand the terrain better. But to do it, I'd have to traffic in the same deceptions and lies as everyone else. Fleecing real businesses out of their money for promises you can never deliver. Going door to to door rounding up clients you couldn't care less about. Taking credit for things that happened on their own, pretending that what you read on a tech blog was "research." Waking up each morning knowing that you're trading off ignorance and the survivorship bias.

There is a lot of money in it, for sure. It's seductive. You're supposed to envy those people and their ambition. But it doesn't matter about that. Or the coolness of doing your own thing. The cost of going down that path is enormous and you can only make the choice once. After it's paid you can never earn enough to cash out.

So what I can't see, when I look at myself, is ever becoming that person.

The Greeks believed in the telos, the idea that all things had a purpose. The way that this purpose was achieved, the way each objective was served, was with techne. Philosophers like Aristotle and Plato would sit and study something - like a chair - to discover its telos and the techne through which it is accomplished. This process, this intuitive understanding of what something is and why, was known phronesis. It is the method of real analysis and the mark of wisdom.

This is what we miss from blogs. We have plenty of discussion and speculation, but rarely any understanding of the issues at their most basic level. This happens because too often writers look only at the numbers and theory and never the underlying human transaction. I'm guilty of this too, this internet autism. I remember the time I spent days looking online for a college professor's info before I thought to try a phone book.

The debate about magazines and newspapers is a good example. Whether newspapers have a grim or bright future is irrelevant, but take note of how brazenly bloggers throw around the idea of going printless. They've examined a small part of the equation - that printing is an expensive economic model while digital is cheap - and assume it's all they need to know. What they've lost is that maybe the true telos of printed news isn't delivery but disposability. Ironically, the experts who coined the "attention economy" lack the human empathy to conceive what it's like to walk through an airport and pick up something to read, or to pay $80 a year to get the Wall St Journal delivered, even if you only read it maybe two days a month. Not once did they think of a doctor's office or a waiting room, the places where print media best fulfills its purpose.

Watch Jarvis throw around things like the death of real estate agents or the death of lawyers. He misses the currency that these professions trade on: unfamiliarity, convenience, deference, negotiation. That if you were a busy person looking for a new house, you wouldn't pay someone to put together a list of those that fit your criteria, drive you to each one and handle the paperwork? And why shouldn't they get paid proportionally to the size of the sale? Zillow, as great as it is, doesn't change the most basic underlying condition: that staring at a city of houses and finding the right one by yourself is a daunting prospect. It makes it worse.

It's funny because on the one hand, these types are incapable of seeing beyond their own reality. On the other, they don't intuitively understand that reality either. They never sat down like Aristotle and examined the aims and objectives. They used the "what" to distract themselves from the "why." Like Plato wrote, they grope around in the dark, confusing cause and effect and ascribing both where they don't belong.

Good analysis requires understanding. Understanding requires thinking beyond the superficial notions of what we think things are and looking at the assumptions and facts that undergird them. To understand news, look at the human and economic conditions that contributed to their evolution. Before you throw out revolution predictions or herald new epochs, ask yourself: which of them have changed? And evolution is a good frame of reference because what often happens in biology is that mutations introduce radical changes which are then worn and shaped by their environment, leaving us with small, incremental progress.

The important thing isn't that most blogs are worthless. They're just a good example of how important the right kind of information is - that the type of knowledge that translates into real insight is the type that delves to the core of the issue. And that since the Greeks, we've been struggling with charlatans who lack the ability to get there. We would all be better served to break things down, to discern a telos, isolate the techne, and build towards phronesis.

Richard Feynman's father taught his son one other important exercise. He would sit him down and they would go through the newspaper together. When they would come across a photo of pope blessing a group of people and he'd say "tell me the difference between these men." Before Richard would reply he'd say, the difference is the hat, he's wearing a hat. If the photo was of a general then it was the stars on his collar and if it was executive it was his suit. After years in the uniform business, Feynman's father knew that in it or out of it the man wearing it is the same. They get stuck in traffic, make mistakes and take shits just like everybody else.

Feynman's father probably had no idea that this was a deeply Stoic exercise. That although it's where they got their reputation for pessimism, it's the same freeing kind of objectivity. Epictetus told his students, when they'd quote some great philosopher, to picture themselves standing over the man having sex. Grunting, groaning and awkward; like the rest of us completely so detached from their 'philosophical' rhetoric. Marcus would deprive things of their euphemisms - roasted meat is a dead animal and vintage wine is old, fermented grapes. The aim was to see these things as they really are, to 'strip away the legend that encrusts them.'

We forget, I think, how often our perception puffs things up and embellishes them. We underestimate how this hurts us spiritually as well as strategically. It makes us weak and uncritical. It doesn't make us happy, in fact, it burdens us to take these things too seriously. Feynman and the Stoics exaggerated their objectively not to undermine but as a means to fight bad habits.

The exercise breaks apart the fantasy that names and uniforms mean anything. It proves the alchemy false. For instance: think of the companies that intimidate us or whose golden halo follows former employees for the rest of their lives. Look for their weakness and see how it defines them. How helpless it renders them. Google running 41 tests to figure out what color blue to use. Microsoft buying friends like a lame rich kid. Think of artists and politicians: An author and their divorces. George Bush, from the world's most powerful man to a sad, quiet desperation.

All that's left then, believe it or not, is a few cheerful prospects. One, that you're essentially no different than anyone else. The pope, a billionaire, a pariah - the same. Two, the chance to appreciate things as they actually are. The plain, inadvertent majesty of them. Finally, a complete rejection of the tendency for words and recognition to define reality. There is nothing anyone can say about you or what you do that changes whether it's right, whether it makes you happy, whether it's healthy.

I was talking with a incredibly smart lawyer yesterday, trying to draft a statement about what I'll lightly call a potential shitstorm. I wrote something and he sent back what I've found to be the standard legal response to these issues - the it's our policy not to comment on these matters but we dispute their validity. It was the only way to play it, he said, because a different response would encourage tabloid press. The more we give the more it will turn it into a feeding frenzy.

A tabloid cycle is propelled by news organizations scrambling for facts. The New York Post has this, the Times has that and they go back and forth battling for exclusives. To keep going they need someone's cooperation, be it with quotes or facts or accusations. They are stuck in this box, in other words, and the best response makes that box as small as possible. You kill the story by depriving it of air.

That ends with the internet because the web works on a different set of economic assumptions. The main one being that information scarcity is not longer a limiting factor. What a Gawker reporter writes is in no way boxed in by what he doesn't know. In fact, its in precisely in those grey areas that he is free to write and speculate as he pleases and where the best material comes from.

Obama understood this the way I am starting to understand this. We're coming upon a world where the feeding frenzy is no longer over bits of information but over the lack of it. The worst thing that can happen in this model is that you leave things open to speculation.

What I think this means is that you won't be able to kill a story the old way anymore. "No comment" gives the story life instead of taking it away. The new way will be to flood the market with facts and information, to root out grey areas and get the target off your back by taking the fun out of it.

I've been getting a few emails about what happened to the "What I'm Reading" posts since I haven't done one in a while. The format just wasn't working for me and I felt like it wasn't the best way to do it. I also tried messing around with Amazon reviews but I couldn't get into it.

What would you guys think of a reading newsletter? I'm still fleshing the idea out in my head but I think it could work as an email sent out every one or two weeks with a list of interesting books I've been reading and short reviews. I try to make connections between books or ideas or at the very least use one book to turn me on to another one. This could be a much better way to do that.

I'd like to know if this something people would subscribe to. I have all these really cool, obscure books that I've discovered over the last six months that I want to recommend and talk about but a blog is just not the right way to do it. People should be able to email me back and we could talk about them and we can work through the books together. Or if you're already doing this with someone else, send it to me because I'd like to sign up myself.

The painter Titian was a workhorse. As a teenager, he apprenticed for Giorgione, who taught him to paint by way of imitating his works. Titian, in other words, learned to paint by counterfeiting. He learned well, we know, because every now and then, a Giorgione piece is discovered to have been a Titian all along.

The next part of Titian's career - decades of his life - are marked by what seem like tedious, low level hustling. There is hardly a person in Italy whose portrait he didn't paint. He didn't just do nobles and kings but their families and friends. Charles V, alone, he painted at least five times. For years he had the standing right to paint the Doge of Venice, and did successive portraits of multiple reigns. Often, he worked not by the patronage system, but on contract. Doing so much a pop, churning out paintings like a machine.

Vasari remarked that near Titian's death, his style seems to change from a deliberate, painstaking technique to a loose, bold, even coarse series of brush strokes. Yet, from up close and afar, the works are still perfect - maybe better than what he did in his youth. Thinking that this was the key to his success, his imitators have tried to copy the style to mediocre and sloppy results. What they missed, Vasari realized, was that Titian's comfort concealed the labor beneath the work; it hid the years spent in repetitious portrait painting, of working on the wage system, of learning every variety of face and light and committing it deep into his intuitive memory.

I guess what I mean to say is that we're often like Titian's imitators. We perceive a freedom and ease that simply does not exist. In fact, it not only doesn't exist, but it obscures an effort we haven't even begun to conceive. I remember when I first left school, I would see people come and go into the office while I was stuck with a schedule and a desk. It felt like they were free and I was in chains. Like, what it must feel to come and go as you please. To feel so secure in your position.

Now I have all that and I realize I was chasing a ghost. I don't suddenly feel less constrained, I feel more. I'd seen the physical manifestations, what time they came in or where they answered the phone, and tricked myself into thinking that once you got there it all came easy. And of course, it doesn't, it gets harder.

But if you can rid yourself of the pressure, you can at least start to understand that each one of theses phases has a purpose, purposes that are critically reliant on the phase that came before it. And appreciate it instead of struggling with resentment or dissatisfaction.

"On the web, there's a certain kind of encouragement to never ask yourself how much information you really need," Merlin Mann says. "But when I get to the point where I'm seeking advice twelve hours a day on how to take a nap, or what kind of notebook to buy, I'm so far off the idea of lifehacks that it's indistinguishable from where we started. There's no shell script, there's no fancy pen, there's no notebook or nap or Firefox extension or hack that's gonna help you figure out why the fuck you're here," he tells me. "That's on you."

But see, the thing is that you couldn't walk into a book store without hitting shelves of authors trying to answer that question. Whether they succeed or fail, there is a concerted effort towards substance and meaning. Even movies - not all of them obviously - make statements or indictments or capture moments in time.

I hate that online we've just resigned ourselves to the fact that "it's on you." I can't think of one writer I read who I can honestly say is trying to make my life better - efficient or smarter yes, better no. That's so shitty because it's what art is supposed to do.

So I guess the question is, what sites are flying under the radar that are working towards that higher level? Those are the sites I want to read, or better yet, the writers I could sign.

Wilshire Boulevard runs the entirety of Los Angeles, from the city to the ocean. When it curves into downtown, it's more than six lanes wide, bordered by the tallest skyscrapers in California. At night, they're backlit against the sky so that when you run, like I do, down the completely empty sidewalks, above the packed 110 freeway and down into the glass canyon, it feels like the city parts at your presence.

At first, I thought this was an example of the soundtrack delusion. A way to use glamour or juxtaposition or association for a false sense of self-importance. Then I realized that it is the opposite. It's the same feeling that you'd get rising in the morning in a penthouse apartment overlooking the city, or the one you can understand if you've ever pulled into the driveway of someone's mansion, yes, but it's there for anyone.

A student or a two-million a year bank executive have equal access to the same feeling - the one that we seem to be subconsciously pulled to, like it is fulfilling or innately purposeful though we know, deep down, that's just an illusion. So maybe the flutter you feel when the street cleaves through the heart of the city isn't something to scorn, maybe it's something to embrace.

Getting your fix cheaply, quickly and naturally, in a weird way, might be a kind of freedom.

I don't get "liberal arts 2.0" or Zen Habits or productivity blogs or the rest of these self-improvement sites.

It's completely detached from reality. Look at these awesome subway maps. Or check out some study about how the brain thinks about difference kinds of cereal. Scientists have discovered a secret way to reduce traffic congestion.

Excuse me if I don't cum in my pants. In fact, my eyes glaze over. It's all so pointless.

Am I really supposed to believe that they do anything with this information? I don't even think they really read it. Does the headline make me seem smart? Are the words "psychology" "rationality" "DNA" "happiness" or "The New Yorker" anywhere in the article? Well then goddamn, I better summarize it and tell other people.

Who gets smarter from this? Where is the discussion? Where is the reality?

Ok, so now my email inbox is 20% more efficient. I've examined a sweet tagcloud of words from all the items in Google Reader. I'm firmly convinced that I need to believe in myself. I memorized a list of cognitive biases. Now the fuck what?

We're not dandies. You don't get anything for fine-tuning your body and mind like it's a car modification kit. The question to ask is: What are you working towards? And I think you'd see that you could spend every second of every day reading that crap and it wouldn't get you anything closer to being there. Unless, of course, your goal is to be one of those writers yourself and pass the buck of actually deriving value from the work to some other hypothetical reader.

You probably didn't know that most of the "experts" quoted in news stories are connected to the reporter through a PR firm which they pay thousands of dollars to every month. The PR firms subscribe to services where reporters basically troll for perfectly tailored quotes in exchange for a few generous superlatives after the person's name. It's where a lot of book blurbs come from, or the part in someone's bio where it says "James has been quoted in the New York Times, Wall St. Journal and the Washington Post."

You probably forget that someone with even mediocre credit could lease a Jaguar for $349 dollars a month and a couple hundred down at signing.

You probably never stopped to consider that the average Digg user looks like this.

Remember: Women in porn take Xanax between scenes to numb the pain. Celebrities rent the cars the day before the taping of an episode of Cribs. A commentator barely skims the material he's debating on television and thousands of people write and yell and simmer over remarks he pulled out of his ass. Or somebody has five-figures of credit card debt and a soul-crushing job, but people hear his big title or where he went to college and they feel jealous, inadequate and awful.

Think about the things people are sincerely outraged over - how regularly, if you truly examined the root of the issue, would you see that it was only shadows? Shadows of half-truths, lies, exaggerations, flippant responses or rationalizations.

You want to be respected, be in the papers, have a nice car, have an avalanche of traffic, wonder why your life isn't like a porno or a tv show. Well, the funny thing is that "reality" seems to require the suspension of disbelief as much as fiction does.

I'm just saying that when you really look at it - and I mean really look at it, as in the facts and figures and averages - the things we think are important are comical. Intellectually, it's time you admit to yourself that it's all a big fucking farce. Only after you've done that you can start to understand that spiritually.

When Richard Feynman was a boy, his dad would take him on nature walks through the woods near his home. His father would point out a bird and say "there's a Spencer's Warbler" and explain to him how at that very second it was eating the lice that ate the proteins off its feathers because everything is a source of food for something else.

It turns out that only half of what he told him was true. The important half. The part about why the bird acted the way that it did, what it was doing, or what it meant. The name was mostly just jibberish.

To Richard Feynman, this was an important theme for the rest of his life. When he taught in Brazil, he realized that although the students often studied physics, they rarely understood it. To him, this was like reading Socrates in Greek but missing the philosophy. What people forget, he felt, was that the words themselves are relatively worthless. Their meaning is what has value.

I saw that Fred Wilson gave a speech a few weeks ago on what he called "earned media." It's very likely that this will be one of the next big internet phrases. And as usual, people will miss the operative word: earn. They'll miss that the concept is both bigger and smaller than the sum of its parts. That "earned media" communicates both a literal definition (hard work) as well as an idea (genuine vs paid media). They'll be too busy "using" the word to really understand it. I'm sure only few of them will stop to think about how strange it is that the concept is also known as "free media."

What made Feynman so special, at least to me, was that he only cared about what things meant. His father taught him that there was an enormous difference in knowing about a bird and knowing what other people call birds. One is harder to test, it doesn't fit as well into textbooks, and like earned media takes time to accumulate.

Deciding to live that way is difficult but admirable decision. People who are self-taught know how embarrassing it is to try to use a word you've seen but never actually heard before - how quickly someone will jump in to correct you. But which side of the table do you want to be on? The side doing the correcting or the doing? Correct in detail or in principle?

I've never really written about my girlfriend here. It's strange because she is such a big part of my life.

Our relationship isn't always the best which is unfortunate because she is a very sweet girl. It's my fault mostly. I am a 21 one year old guy and I work all the time. My position forces me to make some really shitty decisions, ones with no real winner and enough of them added a bit of an edge to an otherwise wonderful relationship.

I don't always agree with the things that upset her. There are times when I think she's totally wrong. But looking back there are quite a few decisions I made that I am not proud of. Priorities and internal logic that were embarrassing at best and disturbing at worst.

I guess you need to think when you're making a choice: is this an something I respect or is the logic just tenuous enough to settle your conscience?

There is a good line in Meditations where he says something like never do anything that you will worry about remaining 'behind closed doors'. I think the same goes for how you treat the important people in your life. And when I look back on things, there's a lot I could never justify to a third party. I regret that and it's something I'd like to put an end to doing.

And so ends the chapter of my life where I constantly scour the internet for funny dog pictures and carry a camera to catch Hanno failing a site-record 5 times.

If you haven't seen it, FailDogs.com now aggregates all the fails from I Has Hotdog and Failblog onto one site. Ben Huh, the CEO offered me a certificate commemorating the sale as a joke but I of course made him give me one. The site couldn't be in a better or smarter hands.

I like watching those shows on HGTV where people shop for their first home. I always lose it when I see some 25 year old engaged couple rejecting a house because it only has "two bathrooms" or "not enough space for a formal dining room." It's banal and insidious and makes me shudder.

When I think about it, that's a lot like how we judge and make complaints about other people. Deep down there's no other explanation but entitlement. I mean, have you ever once thought that you'd be willing to trade something you do appreciate in someone in exchange for the thing you're complaining about?

Our grievances against other people are mostly rooted in this tendency to take what we do get for granted and whatever else we want as justly deserved. It's a petty kind of narcissism shined over with rationalizations about social cues or the 'future of customer service' or reciprocity. And when I look at it that way, I realize there isn't much honor in criticism, just greed.