I was at Apple during the Jobs era and you could really see the Zen influence in how he ran things and his approach. I was slightly interested in Buddhism at the time but the Apple experience pushed me to dig a bit deeper. After I quit, I went and studied at a Zen monastery afterwards to try to and sort out and make sense of all that I had seen when I was there.
Steve was deep into a specific lineage that went from Kodo Sawaki (the 'Homeless Kodo') to Kobun Chino Otogawa, who was Steve’s long-time mentor and even did his wedding. Sawaki was famous for being a total rebel; he had a column in the Asahi Shimbun in the late '60s filled with these blunt aphorisms that basically told people to stop being so full of themselves. You can definitely see that 'no-BS' attitude in Steve's approach. He also used meditation as a way to work through problems.
“If you can meet with Triumph and Disaster And treat those two impostors just the same” - R. Kipling
Media riles up those who have been limited or deprived by circumstances. It waves flags and triggers emotions and creates envy and conjures social ladders to political influence, or financial gains, or popularity and public attention, or peaks of history. The reality though is that those apply to the people who don’t know better - the new grads, the hungry and ambitious, the midlife-crisis sufferers, the naive who haven’t encountered bad people or circumstances. If you’ve seen a lot or you know evil, you don’t need a public life where you may attract it. When you know what you have and value it, a quiet life is the best way to protect it. People value privacy when they have something to lose. If you know what you want to do and can do it without attention, you are much better off doing than dealing with collateral damage from unpredictable attention.
The media today is becoming incredibly propaganda filled and charged. This is a highly combustible environment. Big geopolitical risks are coming and publicity risks making you a target.
When low interest rates paid for VC-subsidized press the world was filled with startup success stories and drums up for startups and their potential gains. That meant many promising entrepreneurs took money at unsustainable expected ROI and lost years of their life working for a promise. Another word for that is lottery. When the dust settled having a quiet business and chugging along profitably proved to be like the little mice who survived underground after the asteroid hit.
If you are a cat who just caught a mouse, would you go to a hill to advertise to all local predators that you are about to enjoy fresh meat?
A few years ago I made a "string art" portrait for my girlfriend at the time. It's made from a continuous† 2 km long black thread, woven around a loom made from a bicycle wheel rim. I'm still very proud of how it turned out.
†OK fine, it broke at a few points and I had to knot the ends together, but it's the principle that counts.
I really wanted to make something creative for her, but I'm pretty terrible as an artist, so I instead applied a talent I do have: making 200 line Python scripts. Apparently the first to do this was an artist named Petros Vrellis, though I did come up with it independently.
Sadly, we've broken up since then, and we didn't remain friends. I do wonder what happened to it, I can't imagine she'd've thrown it out, but on the other hand it would be odd to have a physically quite large memento to a previous relationship hanging from your wall.
Well, I'll give you a quick summary for why a conservative might be upset. You do not have to agree with these issues at all or their interpretation, but a short list:
1. Anything Trump; because Hunter Biden. You might argue about "whataboutism," but "whataboutism" is what protects us from flagrantly biased institutions. This is also going on today with IRS "whistleblowers" claiming the IRS recommended felonies on Hunter, but the DOJ offered way too sweet a deal.
2. Catholics. Specifically, the memo which targeted "Radical-Traditional Catholic Extremists." It also attempted to define the term by theological distinctions (do they like Vatican II? Do they have disdain for modern Popes?), cited sources that are otherwise banned for bias in the FBI (the SPLC), and advocated "the exploration of new avenues for tripwire and source development." The memo also did not list any potential crimes that they were concerned such a group would commit. Christopher Wray retracted the memo immediately saying it was "appalling" but has been extremely cagey on answering questions as to how such a memo was even written.
3. The FBI, according to The Washington Post reporting (not even conservative media) admitted that they misused a Section 702 database, illegally, 278,000 times that they know of in just over a year. Did it against all sorts of people - protestors, BLM, Jan 6 suspects, basically managed to piss off everyone.
4. "Pro-Life" Pregnancy Centers were violently attacked over 100 times as of October 2022 since Roe v. Wade was overturned, with firebombings and similar. No arrests were made for any of them. When asked about the FBI's seemingly blind eye at the time in a Congressional hearing, Merrick Garland claimed the attackers were too "clever" by "doing this at night, in the dark." This explanation was not thrilling.
5. Mark Houck was a pro-lifer, and father of seven, who was recently acquitted unanimously after being accused of violating the FACE Act (basically, obstructing access to an abortion clinic). Now, that's a potential crime that does involve the FBI, but the FBI arrested him by raiding his house with a SWAT team for no apparent reason other than to terrorize his family. And that's not my assessment - 22 members of Congress demanded a plausible basis for sending a SWAT team over this alleged crime, and they claim to still not have had an answer. Republicans put him in the audience for the last State of the Union in protest against Biden.
There was also a unit of currency that some Esperantists proposed called the "Spesmilo." A few banks used it prior to WWI (one of which was a bank called Ĉekbanko Esperantista that conducted its business in Esperanto).
Its legacy lives on in the modern age in a Unicode character for the currency: ₷
Steve was deep into a specific lineage that went from Kodo Sawaki (the 'Homeless Kodo') to Kobun Chino Otogawa, who was Steve’s long-time mentor and even did his wedding. Sawaki was famous for being a total rebel; he had a column in the Asahi Shimbun in the late '60s filled with these blunt aphorisms that basically told people to stop being so full of themselves. You can definitely see that 'no-BS' attitude in Steve's approach. He also used meditation as a way to work through problems.
I would recommend this book, 'The Zen Teaching of Homeless Kodo,' which features Kodo's aphorisms and various levels of commentary:https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Zen-Teaching-of-Homel...