Some lines from this brilliant Substack post.
…I did not take photos of myself, was not filtered, and had no idea what I looked like as a bunny rabbit, puppy, or unicorn.
…I had no idea how many steps I’d walked or stairs I’d climbed…
…I read cereal boxes while eating breakfast and shampoo bottles while sitting on the toilet…
…Quizzes were just for students and I did not know which ice cream flavor matched my personality, who should play my BFF in a movie of my life…
These hydropanels use the power of the sun to extract an endless volume of clean drinking water from the air.
Growing Underground uses hydroponic systems and LEDs to grow crops pesticide-free using 100% renewable energy. They grow salads 33 metres below the pavements of Clapham, London, drastically reducing transportation emissions.
Everyone agreed on the goal: develop a global computer network. They didn’t agree on how. By the early 1980s, several different protocols competed.
OSI (Open Systems Interconnect), backed by European telephone monopolies and most governments, was favoured. Other strong competitors included two corporate networks, IBM’s SNA and DEC’s DECNET. The dark horse contender was the internet, defined only by a self-governing community dependent on volunteers.
The internet community was nimble – able to develop in months what took the OSI committee-based process years – but it scared off some potential adopters because nobody seemed “in charge”.
I don’t know about you guys, but, um, you know, I’ve been thinking recently that… that you know, maybe, um, allowing giant digital media corporations to exploit the neurochemical drama of our children for profit…
You know, maybe that was, uh… a bad call by us.
Maybe… maybe the… the flattening of the entire subjective human experience into a… lifeless exchange of value that benefits nobody, except for, um, you know, a handful of bug-eyed salamanders in Silicon Valley…
Maybe that as a… as a way of life forever… maybe that’s, um, not good.
– Inside, Bo Burnham
It definitely seems that when change is more threatening than promising, everyone collectively hits the brakes. I’m not sure if that’s a lack of imagination, or perhaps even a correct risk-adjusted calculation. People just have less faith in the promise of change.
Every step of the way, to everyone around us, we should be asking the question, what are you building? What are you building directly, or helping other people to build, or teaching other people to build, or taking care of people who are building? If the work you’re doing isn’t either leading to something being built or taking care of people directly, we’ve failed you, and we need to get you into a position, an occupation, a career where you can contribute to building. There are always outstanding people in even the most broken systems — we need to get all the talent we can on the biggest problems we have, and on building the answers to those problems.
– Marc Andreessen in his essay, Time to Build
Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At the bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction – so easy to lapse into – that the world has been made for humans by humans.
Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia.
By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us.
– Robert MacFarlane
We experience life in terms of changes, we feel diminishing sensitivity to both gains and losses, but losses sting more than equivalently sized gains feel good.
This particular sentence in the book struck me. It says,
We talked about luck, the hold it had over a child’s life – what he is born into, whether he is loved, and how intelligently. After a pause Miranda said “and when it’s all against him, whether someone can rescue him”.
Some years ago, my eyes locked onto a bus stop advertisement. It was a clear inoffensive statement.
As someone who forgets their own birthday, there was no chance I’d remember the ad for later. I ended up spending ages googling what I thought I read, without much luck.
Years later, I stumbled across it again 🙂
In a society that profits from your self doubt, liking yourself is a rebellious act.
Caroline Caldwell