Let's talk about one more tweet, which I liked when I first saw it or I might have retweeted it.

I think people retweet things when they see something that they haven't figured out how to say yet,

but they knew in their head, but it's just implicit.

It hadn't been made explicit.

I think that's when people are like, I need to retweet this.

So this one was

January 17, blame yourself for everything and preserve your agency. From my end, it's like

take responsibility for everything and in the process of taking responsibility for something,

you create and preserve the agency

to go solve that problem. If you're not responsible for the problem, there's no way for you to

fix the problem. Just to address your point of how it was something you already knew, but phrased

in a way that you liked, Emerson did this all the time. He would phrase things in a beautiful

way and you would say, oh, that's exactly what I was thinking and feeling, but I didn't know how to articulate it. And the way he put it was he said, in every work of genius, we recognize our own rejected thoughts. They come back to us with a certain alienated majesty. And I just love that line. What I try to do with Twitter, which is I try to say something true, but in an interesting way. And not only just true and interesting way to say it, but also it has to be something that really has emotional heft behind it. It has to have struck me recently and been important to me. Otherwise, I'm just faking it. I don't sit around trying to think up tweets to write. It's more that something happens to me, something affects me emotionally, and then I synthesize it in a certain way. I test it. I'm like, is this true? And if I feel like it's true or mostly true or true in the context that I care about, and if I can say it in some way that'll help me stick in my mind, then I just send it out there. And it's nothing new for the people who get it. If it's not said in an interesting way, then it's a cliche, or if they've heard it too much, it's a cliche. But if it's said in an interesting way, then it may remind them of something that was important, or it might convert their specific knowledge, or might be a hook for converting their specific knowledge

into more general knowledge in their own minds. So I find that process useful for myself and

hopefully others do too. Now for the specific tweet, I just notice this tendency where people are

very cynical and they'll say all the wealth is stolen, for example, by banksters and the like

or crony capitalists

or what have you, or just outright thieves or oligarchs. You can't rise up in this world if you're ex. You can't rise up in this world if you're a poor kid. You can't rise up in this world if you are from this race or ethnicity, if you were born in that country, or if you're lame or crippled or blind or what have you.

And the problem with this is that, yes,

there are real hindruses in the world.

It is not a level playing field. And fair is something that only exists in a child's imagination and cannot be pinned down in any real way. But the world is not entirely luck. In fact, you know that because in your own life, there are things that you have done that have led to good outcomes.

And you know that if you had not done that thing, it would not have led to that good outcome.

...