hmm
I didn’t want to lose anything. That was the main problem,” Sarah Manguso writes on the opening page of Ongoingness, her short book about learning to let herself forget things. She long fears being “lost in time,” until finally she realizes (as I’ve quoted once before), “the forgotten moments are the price of continued participation in life.” In... See more
“forgetting as a form of hedonic adaptation”
American society’s extreme individualism, electronic financial system, and thoroughly impersonal consumer retail setup mean that most adults can obtain 99% of their essential needs without real social networking of any kind. The system we live in is established mostly on impersonal trust. Every ordinary product or service in America is available... See more
The Decay of Adult Friendship in America.
re: our incessant need to capture everything
A friend asked a Busy Guy to lead a project, and instead of saying yes or rejecting it, the Busy Guy said: “I can’t commit to that, but I can commit to thinking about it, and if I come up with something I’m excited about, I’ll do it.”
Such tact in that answer.
-DP
I’d recommend assuming there’s some area of your life where you are, without realizing it, frozen in time, and that locating it matters quite a bit. Look across the three theaters of your life: work, relationships, and self-relationship, and take note of the biggest issues you face. Know that you might be looking for something that doesn’t feel... See more
Cate Hall • Maybe You’re Not Actually Trying
He described modernity’s obsession with Machen —do/make—as the belief that only what we can build, manipulate, or produce is real. This becomes the default metaphysics of acceleration: faster iteration, more output, more control. But Ratzinger contrasts this with another mode of being: Verstehen and Stehen —to understand and to stand. That is, to... See more
Luke Burgis • Everything Is Fast
Is authenticity the goal or itself a performance?
Messy desks and the myth of the perfect workspace
Productivity software is a gigantic industry (lots to unpack there). And within the category, there seem to be two schools of thought: breadth of function of range of integration. i.e. "software that can do everything you need” or “software that can connect to all your other software” —— These two approaches are fueled by the same thing: “how can... See more
