If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.
~ Haruki Murakami
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Everyone else →
Benevolence →
Benevolence and self-direction (described below) are usually near the top of the values we all share. Each of us also has an internal hierarchy of values, where we rank our values based on those we find extremely important to those that don’t really motivate us at all.
~ Chris Bailey, from There are just 10 basic values
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Benevolence—in my opinion—only pops up on our radar once we have enough time, energy and resources. Whether or not it’s clear in that moment, that’s because we, for the first time, manage an honest look back and actually realize all the places where we’ve received help from others. So that’s nice for ourselves, but also for the entire human race.
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Decide →
Decide! There is nothing in the world so pitiable as an undecided man, who wavers between two feelings, hoping to reconcile them, and does not understand that nothing can unite them.
~ Goethe
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Victims of our own technology →
Just a couple of days ago, Apple CEO Tim Cook tweeted out a video promoting, “the new iPad Pro: the thinnest product we’ve ever created.” The response has been overwhelming, and overwhelmingly negative: for many viewers, the ad’s imagery of a hydraulic press crushing a heap of musical instruments, art supplies, and vintage entertainment into a single tablet inadvertently articulated a discomfort they’ve long felt with technology’s direction in the past couple of decades. As the novelist Hari Kunzru put it, “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized branded slab is pretty much where the tech industry is at in 2024.”
~ Colin Marshall, from Aldous Huxley Explains How Man Became “the Victim of His Own Technology” (1961)
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Setting aside the marketing brouhaha, I was gobsmacked by the phrase, “Crushing the symbols of human creativity to produce a homogenized brand-slab […]” Yes, “homogenized brand-slab” is brilliant and feels like a line of dialog from THX-1138. But I was really fish-hooked by the “symbols of human creativity” part. I talk a lot and often these days about creativity, but I’d never really considered the question: What are symbols—images, place holders, iconography—of creativity?
Because it doesn’t seem to make sense to me why a paint brush, or a trumpet (for example) represent creativity. It’s the mind of the person that does the creativity part… and so: What are symbols of creativity?
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Knowing →
This is the game we play: The only thing you really know is what you can put into words.
~ Alan Watts
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I wish →
I wish when I was younger I knew what I know today, what I feel like today, a kind of ease with myself. Because when you’re younger you are much more intense and everything’s much more important and you look back and you think, “Oh what was that all about?” Nothing is that important, just live your life because we’re here so briefly.
~ Anthony Hopkins, from Anthony Hopkins
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Oh good, it’s not just me who thinks this. Because, if I could take that knowledge with me, I’d really like to again be the age I was, when I thought I’d surely have my shit together by the time I was the age I am now.
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Listening →
Sit at your desk and listen.
~ Franz Kafka
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Tic-toc? →
When a person relies heavily on the clock to determine what to do and when to stop, research suggests they might also have a looser relationship with their own sense of control. This is because they look towards an external cue to guide their actions, according to Sellier, and that external cue, rather than something within them, is what seems to control the world around them. Event-time people appear to believe, more than clock-time people do, that their actions make a meaningful difference in determining what happens to them.
~ Shayla Love, from Is it better to live in ‘clock time’ or ‘event time’?
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This feels closely related to my point above about shifting my focus to longer time frames. I definitely use clock-time a lot. How would I go about being intentional about choosing one style over the other? I suppose simply asking myself: Is this thing better done in clock-time or event time? Because my default is clock-time.
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Meaning →
Those who can’t find anything to live for, always invent something to die for. Then they want the rest of us to die for it too.
~ Lew Welch
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Writing →
I juggle many things (recent days have been a lot of dirt moving related to garden beds). But I love sitting with a pen and paper. Working on an issue for Open + Curious.
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