you turn on the vacuum. the child is scared of the vacuum. they run to you. but you are using the vacuum. their source of comfort is directly enmeshed with that which they are seeking refuge from. in fact, in this moment, they are the same phenomenon. perhaps life is like this.
machiavelli gets a lot of heat, but he was basically correct about a lot of things. i don’t care about e-drama but this thread below is a perfect illustration. this guy got known on here just a few weeks ago for getting a 10k bonus payout for a viral post. X staff personally sent him 10k publicly. now he’s on here saying the app is terrible, the leadership ruined it, and so on. that 10k bonus conferred zero loyalty and just gave him a platform to “bite the hand” of the person that gave it to him. a machiavellian principle is: that which is done swiftly is forgotten swiftly. if you have to do something people won’t like, let’s say, take a large amount of money from each citizen: just do it all in one blow. they’ll be mad, but they’ll forget. it will dissipate. meanwhile, if you have something to do that people will like, like give every citizen $10,000, never do it all at once. give everyone $500 a month for many many months instead. this will cement it in their minds - it won’t dissipate, you’ll get way more loyalty and “points” out of it. in fact, this exact example may be in ‘the prince’. certain books are cast as trite, cliche, perhaps even slightly evil, but if you actually read them yourself, you see their principles in action hundreds, or in other cases even thousands, of years later - every day.
it’s really such a deep pleasure to do something - a craft, a skill, an activity, and your kid sees you do it, and they get excited, and they want to do it themselves. and when they do, they’re just not as good as you
my wife had our daughter in my house. unrelated, later, my cat had kittens in our house. this has lead me to wonder what non-hospital building on earth has seen the most births. must have some aura surrounding it. probably on the angel’s map of earth as an auspicious spawn point.