slow consumption

To warm up your conversation and small talk skills, you just need to do something we’ve done almost every day in our lives: read out loud.

Patrick King • Better Small Talk

Next time you wonder about something - a word, a face, a feeling, an unrecognized song - don’t look it up right away. Let it sit in your mind like a riddle. Think about it when you walk, cook, or do your cardio. Let it itch you a little, you’ll be surprised by what else rises to the surface.

how to become gently interesting

This is one of the many reasons why I find the current conversation about so-called generative AI so immensely frustrating: there’s all this hype about making everything easier and faster, about how we can eliminate all the work involved in the making of words and images. But no one arguing for this seems to have asked what’s left when the work is... See more

Mandy Brown • Coming Home

Adults spend their free time with escapist distractions (anything that will fill your mind with something that's not your real life); ‘should-ing’ themselves into productive hobbies; or taking care of all the many “to dos” that never seem to add up or count for anything. Where is the play? Where is the time for our minds to wander? Our curiosities

Choosing to walk

substack.com

notes from article:

“is writing a product, or an art?”

“when you choose to walk, you choose not to pursue immediate gratification or even comfort but simply to expand the number of things that might happen to you”

ai attempts to seperate the mythology of writing from the work of writing, as though the quotidian labour of expression is something that keeps you from your ideas rather than the exact process by which you discover them.

my thoughts:

what do we separate ourselves from when we use AI to write for us? we eliminate the process, which is how we uncover our voice, perfect our practice, and develop ourselves. ai promises to take care of the “boring” or “tedious” parts, but those parts are integral to our development. this ties into a video i watched by anna howard on how convenince culture is stealing our creativity. when we fail to “walk” and instead take the quickest/easiest method to traveling, we often miss out on all the things that could’ve happened to us.

i like how this author uses walking as a catalyst to get this message across. walking is boring, often mind numbing, and is hardly the quickest way to get somewhere- but by walking we increase the number of things that could happen to us. its the same with writing- by reworking a paragraph a dozen times i learn, i become.

Notes from video:

an addiction to convenience is killing our creativity. if we opened a page and expected the answer on the first page, would we buy/open a book again? the process of creating art is often coming up against things that don’t resonate, and how do we respond to it?

going through the hard/boring parts make us stronger, creative, etc

you