Many a Thing She Ought to Understand, a delightful story highlighting the importance of context:
I watched The Sound of Music all the time as a kid. It was one of maybe six VHS tapes we had at home, along with Bambi and 101 Dalmatians. And a few years ago, I was talking with a friend about how much I loved the movie growing up. And he said, me too, though the Nazis scared me. And I said, what Nazis?
The brilliant piece by Haley Nahman, On feeling “like yourself”:
I ask because the idea that we sometimes feel like ourselves and sometimes don’t is both widely accepted as coherent and in conflict with reality, which says that we are always ourselves, by definition. Even when we are being inauthentic, we are expressing something true about ourselves: inauthenticity. Does that make you feel crazy? I’ve struggled to grasp this concept for basically my entire life: That my personality is not the rule, but every exception and rule combined into one chaotic knot. Fall or summer, sweet or cranky, generous or selfish, I remain (begrudgingly) myself. And yet I still think this all the time: I feel like myself / I don’t feel like myself. Perhaps what I really mean is: I understand myself / I don’t understand myself…
You know what makes me feel like myself? Writing around the same question for eight years, unfortunately. To that end: I disagree with my former diagnosis. I don’t think “not feeling like myself” has to do with being sad necessarily, I suspect it has more to do with comfort and control. I feel like myself when I recognize the terms of my existence and feel comfortable navigating myself within them…
It strikes me as important to stress-test our self-conception–to feel ourselves regress, occasionally, or digress, and to recognize our selfhood still…I feel “like myself” one week and don’t the next. I comprehend myself and then I don’t. Maybe we’re bound to this mercuriality forever, or maybe, through the very repetition of this process, we move slowly towards a more expansive sense of self.
Or her Hello from down here:
…my inclination to solve every problem through brute-force metacognition is exhausting…
Maybe because I’m not sure what’s specifically wrong, or in some cases I do know what’s wrong and it seems unwieldy and unfixable—a famously depressed view. I’m trying to let go of the idea that I have to figure everything out right now. By that I mean I’m telling myself to stop trying to figure everything out right now. I’ve been around long enough to clock when I’m going through something that will only make sense in hindsight, but I’m always surprised by how much grace it requires to not panic when I’m in the thick of it. To resist diagnosis. To experience the symptoms as part of an inevitable process…
There are so many traceable examples of this failure in modern society that are compelling to think about, but I’ve been mulling over where this fail pattern shows up for us as individuals who seek out order as a means to improve ourselves and our lives. Game plans, bullet journals, healthy habits, 10-step programs, pedometers, morning routines, diets, perfectly blocked-out calendars. It’s not that these tools never work; it’s that their primary role is to ease our discomfort with the unavoidable entropy of existence, rather than address the entropy itself.
It’s all going somewhere, although I’m not sure I’ll be able to put it into words I’m happy with…the above relates to the illegibility that Venkatesh Rao was referring to (I’m pleased to have that new word to describe this state of being). We’re looking for solutions to age-old problems and continue to hold out hope that someone will construct some tooling or system that solves for them.
Re-Organizing the World’s Information: Why we need more Boutique Search Engines
The problem, now so drastically different from a decade ago, is not what to read/buy/eat/watch/etc but what is the best thing to read/buy/eat/watch/etc with my limited attention.
Something about this statement’s claims about 2011 does not ring true. Maybe the author is young enough for a decade past to feel like a long time. Maybe I’m old enough for a decade past to feel like nothing. But these feel like the same issues we were dealing with in 2004, or 1998. We were excited about the potential of new technologies to solve for them then, too.
We are far from achieving the grand vision of the Internet. The project of human knowledge, as it stands today, is a vast ocean of ephemeral and fragmented information and ideas, with the best sources near-impossible to find. We need more interfaces with a point of view on what information is missing, how it needs to be organized, and at what point of the value chain the curation has to happen.
Indeed, we’ve never been close to achieving the grand vision of the Internet, the project of human knowledge has always been a vast ocean. It’s entertaining but delightful to see new people discover this fact and propose new solutions to this problem. I’ve been doing it repeatedly for my entire career. But novel approaches are, well, novel–full of potential to chip away at the problem a little bit more. It feels like we’re approaching a post-social-media era where new tools will emerge that are focused less on algorithmic context and more on authentic context, less on stirring up emotions for the sake of eyeballs-on-advertisements and more on helping to produce meaning in increasingly complex environments, less focused on the consumer as the product and more focused on the customer as a valued human to serve. I’m here for it. I’m slowing and methodically working in the background on some ideas in this area.