Musings
My weekly list of interesting things…
Here’s what I’ve been musing on this week…
Life has gotten more convenient. Too convenient, even, especially because it frees us of the inconvenience of actually having to think, to learn deeply, to figure stuff out for ourselves. The brilliant Tim Wu has an excellent article about the problems of too much convenience that is worth reading.
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/02/16/opinion/sunday/tyranny-convenience.html
Our society might be coming up with many innovations, but we’re seeing a dearth of big ideas. This author makes a disturbingly compelling case that there are far too few big ideas being pursued right now. His focus is on the tech industry, but I think it applies to most of the others, too.
https://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/issue3-negroponte
Nat Eliason has fairly consistently delivered some good articles, and his latest one doesn’t disappoint. In it, he talks about how we’re consistently asked to commit to something, but that isn’t usually a very helpful way of thinking about it. Instead, he suggests that we should look at decisions in terms of investing in something, rather than committing to something. If you invested in a relationship, instead of committing to it, how would that change things? If you invested in an exercise program, or a course of schooling, or a meditation practice, instead of committing to it, how would that change things? I found that idea very thought provoking.
https://www.nateliason.com/invest-in-something/
Your first thought is not your best thought, so if you don’t deliberately spend time thinking, you’ll go with your first thought and never get to the brilliance you’re truly capable of. This article expands on that idea; I would have put more emphasis on how you’re subverting your own potential by not spending the time to move past your first thoughts, but interesting nevertheless.
https://www.fs.blog/2018/02/first-thought-not-best-thought/
When I was working at a home improvement store a while ago, I had an ongoing argument with a co-worker over whether a particular snow shovel was blue or purple. Apparently there is now a similar, much more widespread controversy over whether tennis balls are green or yellow. The thing I find fascinating about all of this is that differences in color perception are one of the easiest places to see clearly that different people looking at the same things can perceive them very differently. There is also a theory (explained in the article) that it also has to do with whether you’re a morning person or an evening person. Even more fascinating.
https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2018/02/what-color-tennis-ball-green-yellow/523521/
What I’m reading
Fiction:
A Wrinkle in Time by Madeline L’Engle
I loved this book when I was a teenager (and beyond) and it’s one of the ones that definitely holds up. Which is also why I’m very excited about the movie adaptation that’s coming out later this year — it looks fantastic. If you haven’t read this one for a while, read it again. If you’ve never read it, definitely read it. It’s a lovely story about growing up, family, friendship, and the many different types of love.
Non-fiction:
The Wizard and the Prophet by Charles Mann
Humans are going to be faced by quite a number of big problems over the next century; as the world’s population heads towards 8 billion, we need to address issues like food for all of us, drinking water, and the energy needed to run all the necessary infrastructure. Plus climate change. The Wizard and the Prophet is a tour through the history of thinking about these problems by some very, very remarkable people, who were intelligent, thoughtful, usually educated, and often with significant blind spots. The author outlines the two major schools of thought — the environmentalists who’s mantra is the three R’s; reduce, reuse, recycle, and the technoptimists, who believe that we simply need more technology and innovation to move past the problems we’ve created. Neither of these is likely to result in a truly workable solution, but there has been so much fighting and polarization between the two groups, there isn’t likely to be any cooperation any time soon. An illuminating, if slightly disturbing book.
Thanks for reading, and have a great week!
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