Natalie Tyler

“We live in a world where we see ourselves as independent individuals. If you’re an independent individual, you don’t really think in terms of power. You think only in terms of your own influence on the world.

What you don’t see is what people in the past were more able to see: when you are in groups, you can be very powerful. You can change

The second side to quality is subjective, the intangible aspects of an object's character. Less easy to pin down, but of real importance, particularly in a world longing for connections to humanity and nature. How do I feel about this object? What do I know of its character and its provenance? Where were the materials from which it has been made,

“You are afraid of surrender because you don’t want to lose control. But you never had control; all you had was anxiety.” - Elizabeth Gilbert

In collecting all those articles and bookmarks, I’d been engaging in what the Substacker Harjas Sandhu, in an insightful post, calls “hoarding-type scrolling”. The hallmark of this behaviour, he writes, is “saving good posts for later instead of reading them now… I feel like a squirrel looking for fat nuts to stash in my little tree hole. The

There is no time to study an art form, to submerge yourself in an archive; the search engine has eroded our skills at scavenging for information, through discographies, galleries, or libraries.

Thus the part of the journey usually dedicated to development, intentional consumption and tangible engagement has been erased to make space and time for

To adapt an analogy from the Austrian philosopher Otto Neurath, we’re like sailors on a ship that long ago left port and now urgently needs repair. We’d love to return to dock and get it kitted out perfectly – setting up our lives so they’re just as we’d like them – then start the journey again. Instead we have to patch things up mid-voyage as best