Tangible Life
We were never supposed to see our own faces this much
I’ve been saying this ever since the company I work for moved to remote work during the pandemic. Thankfully, for me, it decided to stay that way when many other companies shifted back to the office.
Imagine you walk up to someone to have a conversation and you hand them a small rectangular mirror and say, “Would you mind holding this so I can study my every facial expression as we talk?” That’s pretty much what the standard settings on most team collaboration or video chat services are creating. I wish the default setting could be set to “hide self-view”, but in the platforms I’ve used, it is something you have to toggle on a per call/meeting basis. Microsoft Teams gives you the ability to do a quick “self check” before joining a call, which has value, but hiding the self-view once you are in the meeting would be a welcome default.
I turn the self view off not because I’m overly self-conscious about my appearance (though I recognize this is something that makes it even more stressful for many people), but because I can’t help but get distracted by my dog in the background or looking to see what item I may have left on the table behind me. Sometimes, I become focused on my facial expressions. No matter the distraction, these are all things that can be avoided by disabling the self-view and focusing the attention on the other people, as you would in an in-person conversation.
One point I’d never considered:
Before mirrors were invented, the earliest type of “mirror” used was nature — reflections in ponds, lakes and rivers when waters were calm enough to reveal a flat surface.
Isn’t it ironic that we seek out these same locations for their serene peacefulness, likely never using them as a selfie-eval tool in modern times.
Vitsœ: A Purpose
Paynter Jacket Co. did an interesting feature on Vitsœ for their site. While they’re a jacket maker, they have insightful blog posts under the Stories section.
I’m familiar with Vitsœ from the documentary film Rams. I knew that Dieter Rams had worked with Vitsœ for many years and his fingerprints can be seen on the company’s website and products to this day. I learned a lot more about the company from this article and the current managing director, Mark Adams, has a few insightful quotes throughout it.
Focus on better, not on newer. Why are we obsessed with the new? We should be obsessed with better. That is what drives us at Vitsœ. After all, it is the way that the natural world operates: constantly improving, not launching new species.
This seems so logical, yet almost none of the companies making the products we all hold in high regard foster this ideal.
The other quote I highlighted was about his wardrobe:
My wardrobe is a ruthless kit of parts. Everything goes with everything. Much of it lasts 20+ years. It is repaired. Shoes from Northampton. Socks from Leicester. Shirts from the US. Polo-necks from Derbyshire. Better, not newer.
I look forward to the day that I can say this about my own wardrobe.
Audiobooks Are Books and They’re Also Practice
Simon Harris, writing about his love for audiobooks and the reasons he believes they can hone a skill vs. merely informing or entertaining.
Listening is a skill. One you should take seriously and one that might have atrophied in recent times. I can’t prove this change, though I think we can infer it a little from changes in media — for instance movie scenes, cuts, and dialogue have all been shortened over the decades. Generally the pacing of nearly all media has quickened. Possibly the delivery of “more, faster” is the result of a too-great respect for novelty as an artistic flourish. I think these changes, and maybe others I can’t see, affect how people choose to make conversation in their daily lives, and make it shorter and faster too.
I agree with these points. I’m often saddened by the short duration of great songs today. Efficiency has infected conversation. Many folks would rather have several short burst message threads vs. one long-form meaningful conversation either verbally or in written form with a single person.
And you can practice this lengthening by listening to audiobooks.
I never thought of it as the practice of listening.
Keeping the thread of an uninterrupted narrative, holding your concentration and attention for it against all the other forces, this is a muscle worth stretching. You might find that over time you get better at it, you absorb much more, and it will make you a better listener elsewhere, too.
Having recently written about wanting to become a better listener, this resonates.
If you try to listen to them on 1.5x speed you are absolutely going the wrong way.
Guilty as charged… I may try 1x speed, unless the narrator is unusually slow paced.
Steve Jobs Archive Logo
I was looking over the Make Something Wonderful book from the Steve Jobs Archive. I don’t yet (and may never) have a copy of the physcial edition, but they did such a great job on the website version. I’d heard about it on several podcasts when the book was first released.
What struck me while on the site was what a great logo the Steve Jobs Archive has.
Steve Jobs Archive Logo
It’s simple, yet it has complexity that the Apple logo lacks. It’s perfect for the use and I wish there was more about it’s creation. I would venture a guess that Jony Ive had a hand in its creation, but I can’t find any reference to it online.
If anyone knows more about this logo’s creation, reach out with a link or to share, please.
Workspaces 394 - Sean Woolsey
The awesome Workspaces newsletter featured craftsman Sean Woolsey’s workspace. I have been subscribed to Workspaces for a long time, but this workspace floored me in the best way. I was studying the images, wishing I could be standing in this space. I like seeing that someone is making their tech investments as long lasting as Sean. He’s using an Apple Cinema display and the Apple Magic Keyboard with the AA battery tube (both products I’ve owned).
There are so many lovely touches, but my favorite has to be this.
Figured maple bowl
I also noticed that Sean’s pen looks like an adaptation on a brass nail setter. The etched grip on a nail setting makes for the perfect texture for a pen grip. The irony that my last linkpost was on the topic of driving the nail to the perfect depth in our life endeavors.
That inspiration wall is amazing. What an amazing space.
Hammered
Cole Schafer, writing in his newsletter, The Process:
We should create art in much the same way that a master handyman drives home a nail. Once we’ve hammered in the nail, we should stop hammering as not to bruise the wood. Once we’ve created whatever it is we originally sought out to create, we should lift the pen from the paper, the brush from the canvas or the fingers from the strings and and have the courage to say, “I’m done”.
This is good advice with a great analogy.
Dumb Home
Compared to many, I likely live in a dumb home vs. a smart home. That’s not to say that we don’t have modern tech prodcuts in our home. We have an Amazon Echo in the kitchen and in the kids’ rooms. We have a couple of HomePods in various rooms for music and interaction with Siri. We have Apple TV devices and a home security system. We have a smart thermostat that will sense when people are home and adjust things to help save energy. Our garage door opener is connected to HomeKit. We have a doorbell camera and a couple of outdoor cameras that are as well. We have a WiFi mesh network.
The reason I say that we live in a dumb home is that I’ve purposely avoided smart home equipment related to things like lights, light swtiches, home applicances, door locks and window shades/blinds. It isn’t that I don’t see the convenience or geeky angle of how lights turning on and off when you enter or leave spaces or saying a command and things magically happening all around the house at once. I’ve avoided them because they strike me as the type of home tech we’ve been falsely conditioned to think will reduce friction in our lives. I want a purely mechanical door lock that I don’t have to consider if it needs new batteries. I want an oven, refridgerator, washer and dryer that don’t need firmware updates and just consistently do the thing they were made to do.
When I hear people discussing their smart home equipment, it is mostly frustrations with inconsistent performance or incompatibility that is driving more cost, more time and more tweaking. Smart home tech creates more maintenance and tinkering for things that aren’t really that much of an inconvenience to begin with. I don’t find it inconvenient to flip a light swtich when I enter or leave a room. I don’t regret that my coffee kettle can’t alert my phone when it reaches the optimal temperature for brewing a cup. I don’t think that a door not unlocking as I reach for the knob as friction to my entry.
This opinion is mine and I don’t fault others for having a different view or feeling on these things. I just realized that my intentional aversion to many products in the smart home category is ironic given that I don’t avoid modern technology, generally speaking. I think it is an interesting connection point between concepts like “slow” apps or single-threaded thinking.
Podcast Apps and the Podcasts App
I’ve used a variety of podcast apps over the years, each for a long stretch of time. Pocket Casts was my app of choice on Android and that carried over when I moved to iOS. I tried Overcast, and while I know most folks in the circle of indie app developers and podcasters alike love it, it just wasn’t for me. I moved from Pocket Casts to Castro and used it for several years. Now I’m using Apple Podcasts, which surprises me a bit.
Late last year I decided I’d try to eliminate some yearly app subscription costs by simply trying the default or Apple native option. So many of Apple’s apps have matured and evolved, so I didn’t want to assume that Podcasts (the app) was underpowered for a pretty serious podcasts consumer like myself. I knew I’d be leaving some “pro” features on the table. Two of those were trimming silence and voice boosting. Another was Castro’s sideload ability. Yet another was the ability to create a shareable clip of a moment from the podcast. Castro did all these things very well, but other than trim silence and voice boost (which I had on as defaults for all podcasts), I didn’t find myself actually using the other cool features very often at all. Castro also had a cool feature that I did use semi-frequently that allowed you to share a YouTube video to it and it would sideload the audio of that podcast with metadata preserved. I do actually miss this feature a bit, but there’s workarounds using my read-later app of choice, Matter.
I hadn’t realized at almost the same time I started experimenting with Apple Podcasts, Castro began having stability issues and there were rumors that the app was going away completely. In late January, we learned that where there was smoke, there was fire and Castro was sold. I think it is great that the app will live on, but I would prefer to not be on the possible rollercoaster of what the new buyer may decide to do with it.
So, while it may not have every bell and whistle, I can say that Apple Podcasts is pretty solid. I’ve been using it for over 3 months now and it’s been fine. The UI is eerily consistent with Apple Music. The playback speed controls are fine. The missing trim silence is not a big deal. The Apple Watch app and integration is more solid than any other app I’ve used. The syncing with other devices is great. Being able to listen on my television through Apple TV is nice. The Homepod playback works really well. I’ve read that transcriptions of podcasts is coming soon in the app, which is nice. I hope it has the ability to share a specific section of a podcast like the Music app does with the lyrics highlighting and sharing.
My gripes with the app are few. I don’t like that if I listen to a single episode of a podcast, the app begins suggesting new episodes of that podcast to me for listening as they come out. If I wanted to listen to more than the episode I selected, I would have downloaded more episodes or subscribed/followed the show itself. I wish that was something I could toggle off. The only other annoyance I can think of is that if I’m listening to an episode and then start listening to another, the one I left doesn’t automatically fall to next in my queue (or anywhere in my queue at all) to resume afterwards. From what I can tell, those just fall into the ether and I have to go back hunting for them to add them back to my queue manually.
So that’s it. I’m what I would consider a podcast superuser and yet I’m totally content to use the app that ships with the OS across the Apple ecosystem. If you would have asked me much further back than late last year, I would never have imagined that I’d be content consuming content this way, but experiments are often illuminating.
Oh What To Do
I’ve expressed before how alluring a new app or beta testing experience can be. I’ve gotten better at this, but there’s just something about kicking the tires on a new app that tickles some part of my brain.
I saw that the new Superlist app is out and there was a nice write up over at The Verge about it. I had completely forgotten that the team behind Wunderlist was making a new to-do app. I used to use Wunderlist many years ago before it was acquired by Microsoft and it was one of my favorite to-do apps. Superlist looks pretty great, but I uninstalled it about 10 minutes after downloading it.
I realized I was about to repeat the same mistake I’ve made over and over again. I was about to evaluate another to-do app. I was about to dream about how much more productive it would make some aspect of my life. I envisioned how much more writing I would do by having things organized in a new system. I thought about how I’d structure the lists and how Superlist would boost my productivity. I did all that within 10 minutes, and then I remembered all the time I was going to invest in learning Superlist and integrating my tasks into it could be spent writing. So… I long-pressed the beautiful app icon and tapped Uninstall.
I think it’s a beautiful app and because it’s made by some of the same team behind Wunderlist, I’m confident it will make some people more productive. I’m just not one of those people, because I’m one of those people. Recognizing that you have a problem is the first step. This time, I caught it early and wrote this post instead of going down the dark alley of productivity porn.
Slow design
Orbyt Studio also features this on their own site, but the minimalist version at the linked URL keeps the message even more pure.
In our fast-paced world today, we often forget the importance of patience and taking time to think things through. We want to remind people of the value of creativity and clever thinking, supporting a movement that embraces focus, skill, and understanding over fast production and short-lived trends. This doesn’t mean we’re against technology, but we’re asking for a balance between using technology and the traditional principles of design as a craft.
The entire page (which isn’t long) is a great list of ideals and guidance for the world we live in today, beyond just design. It’s why I moved to Blot and iA Writer for my writing. It’s why I’m cautious about the injection of AI into everything at bleeding edge pace. Slow thinking and slow design have been on my mind for quite some time now.
A rant on ARC Search
I agree with some of the points that Manu makes with regard to AI, generally speaking. Seeing it injected with force into every app, experience and product is an uneasy feeling and I am personally taking a slower approach with it in many instances.
I am, however, using Arc by The Browser Company on macOS and trying out Arc Search on iOS. The nuance I’ll add to Manu’s points is that I’m using Arc Search, but rarely using the “Browse for me” feature that’s the selling feature of the mobile browser. I use it only when I want to intentionally allow the AI to gather the 6 pages and bring me back the summation. My default is still to allow the standard search results to render and I make my way through the entirety of the web if so desired.
Arc on the desktop has a suite of features that I enjoy that are not yet part of the Arc Search app. My hunch is that Arc Search will eventually just become Arc and many of the desktop features will come to the mobile variant and vice versa. I think I even heard Josh say as much on the launch video for Arc Search.
In order to not become jaded by the portions of the feature I am cautiously skeptical about, I’m trying to focus on Arc Search as Arc and the “Browse for me” feature as a separate optional function. Hopefully The Browser Company continues to allow users of its product to maintain that boundary.
Open in Safari [Shortcuts]
[Shortcuts] posts are to share shortcuts and tips for those that use Apple’s Shortcuts app on iOS|iPadOS|macOS. You can view all posts tagged shortcuts and I maintain a page focused on writing workflow shortcuts. These posts do not appear in the RSS feed for the site.
My default brower on macOS has been Arc for many months now. With the recent release of Arc Search on iOS, I now find myself using a non-Safari default browser, but needing to sometimes open a page in Safari. This is normally to take advantage of being able to run other shortcuts that depend on Safari integrations or shortcut actions that don’t exist in Arc.
After hacking around for a bit, I managed to merge bits of two shortcuts I found in Reddit comments to make a single shortcut that works on both macOS and iOS to take the current page and open it in Safari. On iOS, just invoke the Share Sheet and choose this shortcut (I’ve pinned it to the top of my Shortcut actions in the Share Sheet for ease of use). On macOS, just use the Share function in Arc (or Chrome) and choose Shortcuts and then select it.
I wish this wasn’t necessary and Arc would build in the menu option to open the link in Safari like Firefox Focus does, but until then, this works.
Open in Safari | Shortcut Download
LoveFrom is doubling down on craft in typeface
Mark Wilson, writing at Fast Company:
Apple products—much like the bodies of cars—feature continuous curves. Their forms have smooth transitions, as micron-level differences can distort reflection or even be felt by your hand. Technically speaking, continuous curvature requires both using the right mathematical functions to draw curves and also examining the sculpt of an object on the whole rather than considering a single corner or plane as distinct elements.
The ampersand is quite nice.
Listening
I was listening to a podcast where an interviewee stated,
Listening is just another word for being really genuinely available.
Throughout my life, I’ve always believed that the world, a higher being or a mix of the two send you messages if you’re a) willing to hear them and b) listening and paying enough attention to hear them. That’s really an expanded form of the above quote that distills both into a single statement.
The point I’ve shamefully missed, also throughout my life, is that people are part of that scope. We always tell our children they should “seek to understand” or “listen to understand”, but I’m woefully poor at the skill myself. I should be as willing to listen to someone, and be genuinely available in doing so, as I am intentional in hearing what the world has to say to me through its own wavelengths and signs.
I’m going to try to be a better listener. Not so that I can process and respond thoughtfully or intelligently, but so that I’m genuinely available to the person speaking; for their benefit and my own in equal measure.
The Life-Changing Power of Shutting Up
I found this great post by Nate Dickson while reading the great Issue 274 of the Dense Discovery newsletter.
The post reminded me that last year I’d read about and wanted to try an extended period of “no complaining”. I’d even considered making it one of my monthly “doing without” experiments. This paragraph is perfectly distilled:
So instead of expressing my anger, or bottling it up, I’m trying to let it evaporate. I imagine that anger is a substance, move it away from my heart, let it evaporate off my skin, sublimate away. It doesn’t matter, it doesn’t have to be a part of me.
There was a great mind trick I’d read about where you place a bracelet on one wrist and anytime you catch yourself complaining, you move it to the other wrist. You move it back at the start of the next day. The goal is to get to 21 days of not moving it over. This is from the book and movement created by Will Bowen. His website is a little to “aggressive sell” for my tastes, and while the purple “no complaining” bracelets he’ll ship you are a statement, I just got a couple of plain white silicone wristbands from Amazon that play to my minimalist design tendencies. While I’ve set out to have year long “without” themes in 2024, I think I’ll dig out the white bands and give it a go one month.
Digital Relationships
This post is my entry for February’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by Manu.
I’m part of a unique generation exposed to the early days of the web communities, but well after what I would consider my formative years as a child. I was in my mid-teens when I became exposed to “the Internet”. I grew up making things with my hands, playing outside and battling my brother for endless hours on the Nintendo Entertainment System (NES). I had a penpal who lived in a far away place. We only had relationships and digital was mostly an adjective used for displays that were no longer only analog.
The first bits of my online existence began with Yahoo! chatrooms and online forums. I’ve been a geek my whole life, so it shouldn’t surprise anyone to know that evolved to IRC channels, ICQ and AIM chats, Myspace and so on. Zoom to now and various aspects of relationships are being overrun or overruled by digital tools and platforms. I’m still a geek, but one with a much firmer grasp on the mechanics of what healthy digital reltionships mean for me and my relationship with digital platforms that support them.
All that serving as background, in the rawest sense, if the digital term is merely framing for how you initiate and sustain relationships with other humans, it could be explained simply as evolution of medium. We no longer write the majority of our communication on paper to send by mail the same as previous generations ceased stretching animal skins or looking for a flat slab of stone to draft a message. Evolving to email felt novel in the same way that typewriters felt novel to those writing everything by hand. I think in that regard, digital communication medium relationships have much the same pitfalls that other more analog mediums had. My penpal could have included a picture of someone else and said that it was them, though I don’t think it happened as often as deception or misrepresentation does in digital mediums.
This brings me to my current feeling on where things can evolve beyond the boundaries of ease or efficiency. Typing was faster than writing. Drafting an email is faster again. Having a generative AI platform write a letter feels like a fascade. Sending a message to someone that may actually be generative AI is the moment that the coyote looks back and sees the roadrunner standing on the edge of the cliff and it dawns on him that there’s nothing beneath his feet but air. If digital is merely medium and methods, but relationship is still the term that gets the emphasis in the phrase, it’s my opinion that time marches on and I’m the beneficiary of many relationships that spawned and are fostered by a digital component. I have several digital friendships that have never crossed the boundary of in-person interaction. I have some that have never even crossed the boundary of email, which is perfectly fine for me. None of these relationships are ones that I think define much for me beyond community, career and camaraderie. My relationship with my wife is one rooted in in-person conversations and moments of physical connectedness. The digital aspects of our communication are supplemental, which feels like good balance with the scale tipped in the direction that makes us happy.
Again, these are my opinions and like most things, they may not be sound for anyone other than me. How a family sits around a table in public all staring at their phones carrying on reltionships digitally with everyone other than those sitting in close physical proximity is a tip of the societal scale that disturbs me. How others begin, navigate and end romantic relationships exclusively with digital mechanics confuses me. The fact that our world seems to be trending toward more technology that replaces the relationship with more digital depresses me. Evolution is going to happen in spite of any attempts to thwart it, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t the opportunity more carfeully define the trajectory of that evolution.
More relationships with people, supported by healthy relationships with digital means is my own goal. What does that look like in practice? Meals with family where we look each other in the eyes and communicate verbally about our feelings. Physical interactions with other humans when the lives of said humans support it. Lots of emails. Lots of messages and group chats in Messages/Telegram. No “social media” as it has been defined by platforms like Instagram, Facebook, etc. No AI pals. No chatbot chums. Just more people like yourself that read a post like this and decide you’d like another digital relationship in your life and click here.
Migration Complete
Back in December, I started down the path of combining multiple blogs into one.
I thought it would take much longer, but with the combination of some python scripts to reformat other content management exports and a fair amount of copy/pasting and checking for broken links, internal references, etc. it is done.
The redirects have been set for Tech & Coffee and mnmlist·me to route visitors to Tangible Life. The posts from both of those have been migrated here and are all available in the archive section. I changed my mind about not moving my now page and my newsletter here. Honestly, Blot is really nice to use, so pulling those in was worth the extra time. It meant I got to redesign the ▲ of the Mind header/logo. The old one was awesome, but it didn’t fit this site’s theme, so I fired up Figma and created a v2 that I think feels perfect. This renewed attention on the newsletter even motivated me to finish the back issues for the archive. Those had been locked away in an old Revue export and I’d struggled to finish the effort. The first new issue will go out next week and I’m pretty excited about getting back to it.
Nav links at the top of the site route to the site archive/index (which includes tags/search), an about page, ▲ of the Mind and an RSS link. I may bring a photo gallery in the future. I may offer a dark/light theme toggle (conflicted about if this is really worth the effort with decent auto-darkmode extensions these days).
Now that the under-the-hood work is done, all that’s left is to write. So, write I will.
Year of Living Without 2024
As mentioned in an earlier post, I wanted to take time in January to give thought to what I would do without in 2024. I thought that another round of monthly themes would come out of it; however, I’m taking a more basic approach for 2024. Rather than doing without something for a month to train my mind or body to lean into discomfort, I’m going to cut out 3 things for the entirety of the year. Those 3 things are:
- No soda.
- No phone usage in bed.
- No device usage in the bathroom.
I don’t drink soda often as it is; however, I’m going to go without it completely for the remainder of 2024.
I slowed my fiction reading toward the end of last year, and the phone slipped its way back into my end-of-night routine. I’m cutting the phone out of my wind-down routine to resume fiction reading during that time. Starting tonight, the phone will go on the MagSafe charger that’s mounted on the back of the headboard. If there’s a legitimate need to grab the phone to do something (like check the outdoor cameras, etc.), it’s there. It will still serve as my alarm clock (should I sleep through my vibrating alarm on the Apple Watch). I’ll continue wearing my Apple Watch for the silent alarm that allows me to wake up without disturbing my wife. The watch will also allow me to listen to music, podcasts, or audiobooks with an AirPod as I fall asleep. There are a few shows that I’m excited to watch soon, so just before sleep is the only time I have; I’ll use the iPad from the bed or the couch in our bedroom vs. making an exception for the phone. Almost any exception to use the phone from bed leads to using it for anything and everything, so I’m avoiding that risk.
After doing without devices in the bathroom last year for a month, it was a habit that stuck with me for most of the months after that. Sometime during the last two months of the year, I got less aggressive about maintaining it. For the rest of the year, I’m back to no phone, watch, or any other device usage in the bathroom.
There are lots of themes and new habits I want to build during 2024 that have to do with doing MORE of something vs. doing without something, so I think by simplifying the Year Without criteria to 3 year-long eliminations, it will make it easier to also focus on doing more of some things. I’ll write more about that soon.
McCartney: A Life in Lyrics | Season 2 Trailer
I’m excited for this podcast to kick off its second season:
Season 1 was a lovely listen. Having consumed a large amount of Beatles documentary content, hearing Paul describe these behind the scenes perspectives is special. The episodes are short enough to leave you wanting more, but long enough to provide deeper insight. Each one focuses on a song that Paul had a hand in writing. Though I prefer the Beatles-focused episodes, even the songs from his solo and Wings catalog are excellent listens.
In the trailer above for season 2, you hear Paul mention that the seed of the idea for the Sgt. Pepper came from their road manager, Mal Evans, asking him to “pass the salt and pepper”. Paul misheard it as “Sgt. Pepper” and the rest, is history.
Positive Internalization
This post is my entry for January’s IndieWeb Carnival being hosted by foreverliketh.is.
At the end of December, we took a trip to the mountains in Blairsville, GA. My parents spend a portion of the year there, and we’re fortunate enough to have access to their cabin. Since they’d already migrated down to Florida for the winter, it was just us there for some time away from work and typical life obligations back home.
During that trip, the kids and I went over to my dad’s “building” that’s a few miles away from the mountain. I put that in quotes because that’s what everyone calls it. It’s a large metal shed of sorts, but it is large enough to qualify as a building. Not a barn. Not a warehouse. A building. His building. I’ve been there before, but not often enough to really take in what it has become. It has become the museum of a lifelong curation of various tools and materials. Everything (mostly) is sorted and organized into shelves, toolboxes, and containers. All labeled meticulously. When I told him I was headed there with the kids to look for an axe, he responded, “Feel free to look around. I have a few things there.”
All that brings me to how I spent two hours, plus many long moments since, experiencing the positive impact of not just thinking of the memories tied to tools, pictures, and other various artifacts but feeling them both literally and figuratively. Some of the most positive memories I have in my life go back to projects that my dad and I have done together. Holding some of the tools that were used many years ago and seeing, unlike our human form that withers with time, these items were just as they were then—a tool, waiting for the next project to perform. Some of those tools span multiple generations of craftsmen. Each one undoubtedly has countless stories to tell about the things they’ve created, destroyed, and every act in between. More than the project outputs, those tools in his building helped me tell myself the stories all over again, and they meant even more to my sense of positive internalization than I could have realized before I needed an axe.
If a Human Does It
Manu makes some great points in this post.
The example he didn’t include (that royally bugs me) is if a human makes an error, the human is wrong and has made a mistake. When AI does it, it’s a hallucination.
Let me see if that shit flies next time I really screw something up at work.
Another Year of Living Without
Last year, I did a series of experiments where I’d do without something for a month. I skipped a couple of months at the end of the year, but overall I enjoyed what I learned in the process. In the end, only a few things stuck as long-lasting habits. The goal was never to take a monthly theme and apply it forever, but it does have me taking inventory of what lasted longer than a month and why the majority subsided before year end.
I’m going to take January to decide what the monthly “without themes” will be for this year. Some months may be repeats from last year and some will be new things to trial going without. This year I’ll try to be more intentional regarding how doing without something opens the time or space for something else. For example, no phone in bed to open more time for reading before sleep.
I’ll write more about it before the end of the month.
Things I Learned This Year
Carl’s excellent post inspired me to write my own.
- Reduction is hard. Refinement is harder.
- Listen to those you love more than you do anything else for them.
- Rather than thinking about writing, write about the thoughts that have nothing to do with writing.
- Simplifying workflows nets more and better results than trying to solve for edge cases with complexity.
- Reading books is more fulfilling than any form of social media.
- Designing the life you feel good about living is more important than any other design decision you make in life.
- Slow feeds of self-curated information to consume make algorithms feel even more gross.
- Personal communication by email is a lost art that needs more widespread revival.
- AI does not need to be a new feature added to every app or service. AI should reduce our need for apps and services as a feature.
- Being bored is a restorative time for the brain just as sleep is a restorative time for the body.
- Anything that has been engineered to be short/quick/bite-sized so I can consume more of it, is probably not good for me.
- If every time I wanted to tell my parents something I would have needed to wait until they finish “doing something” on their phone, I’d be a shell of the person I am today.
- Feeling like there’s not enough time for something important in your own life is a great reason to slow down responses and limit immediate access to your attention.
- Tangible always beats virtual.
- Invest in the people that inspire you to be the best you and pay them dividends with your actions and words.
Off-Grid Floating Studio
Amazing space featured on Dwell. This image alone makes me want to work from the space:
A workspace with a view
Robert Swatt of Swatt Miers Architects designed this off-grid studio in Healdsburg with glass walls that provide the feeling of working in nature.
The cabin in Blairsville could give me these vibes, but currently I don’t work there by design.
Blairsville Horse
Horse; seven years between photos
I don’t know this horse’s name. It lives on property at the bottom of a mountain in Blairsville, GA. My parents live at the top of that mountain.
Seven years ago, I took the picture on the left and today I took the picture on the right. The horse gave me the same look as I pulled up alongside the fence and snapped the photo. I have no idea what the last seven years have been like for the horse, but just looking at the two pictures it forced me to take inventory of all the changes and evolutions that have taken place in my own over that span.
Being in the mountains of Blairsville is always reflective for me. There’s something about being away from home and yet feeling at home with nature and familiar people and places to lay my head that just open my mind like the right combination on a lock.
I hope both the horse and I are alive for another random afternoon photo in December 2030. I wonder what life stories we’ll exchange with our momentary lock of the eyes then.