weekly Go Flip Yourself

In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire bemoaned what we might now call doomscrolling:

Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity.

And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … I do not understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.

which is exactly my own experience; and why/ how I came to work on Objet:

Early on, I used to be pretty dumb about stuff shocks. I hate moving, and each time I moved, I’d swear that I’d never collect so much crap again. But each time, as I unpacked my life and settled into a new place, stuff would creep back in.  Somewhere along the way — perhaps it was the 5th or 6th move — I got more sophisticated in thinking about my stuff, and started managing the isolation/interdependence tradeoff more carefully.

can’t agree more with that solution:

Instead, I believe you have to think about individual lifestyle elements down to things like knives and shoes. You have to put more thinking into every act of ownership. This thinking doesn’t just add value inside your head. It adds value outside your head, to the stuff itself. Your stuff gets smarter. More information — the output of thinking — gets embodied by it.

nailed down:

It isn’t the quantity of stuff in your life that matters. What matters is how smart the stuff is and whether it is smart in service of your needs.