Memory Lane

The Practical Polymath #39

Hi Friends,

Greeting from Brooklyn.

Welcome to the latest edition of the Practical Polymath. If you’re new here, every Friday I send a fragment of thought along with a few links that I think are worth your time.

It is four minutes to midnight and sending this newsletter is the last thing I’ll do today.

Until next week,

Florian

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Memory Lane

Ten years ago, I moved to Paris to start a new job. My brother lived there already and I was excited to join him.  

We had two weeks to do whatever we wanted. We biked our way through every cobbled street, stayed out late in the rowdy hours of the night and cured our hangovers with coffee and croissants.Today, I still think of these two weeks as a defining moment of our brotherhood.  

The Pareto principle is used in business to describe how a minority of efforts are responsible for driving a majority of results. It is equally useful to understand how we assign meaning to time. A relative few moments in our lives disproportionately influence our experience and relationships. These two weeks spent with my brother brought us closer together than many years sharing the same roof. 

There’s something a little disheartening about the realization that most of our time is mere B-roll we might never again recall. The weekday morning routines, the recurrent meetings in our calendars, the weekend trips to the playground. They will be thrown in the pit of oblivion by the picky gatekeepers of our memory.  

But the Pareto principle offers an optimistic reframe. It doesn’t matter so much that most of our life won’t make it to the Pantheon of memory. We can count on those few meaningful moments to satiate us. And instead of seeking more time, we should seek ways to infuse meaning into it no matter how little we’re holding in our hands.   

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Weekly Wisdom

👽 The Fermi Paradox: So far, we found no evidence of extraterrestrial life. And yet, many theories point to the high probability of their existence. This contradiction is called the Fermi Paradox. Tim Urban brings it to life in this mind-bending piece. He lays out the different plausible and less plausible scenarios that answer this question I now cannot get out of my head: if there is such a high probability of intelligent life, where is it and why haven’t we encountered it yet? 

🧘 Practicing Self-awareness: One of the things I struggle with most as a writer is to tune into my observations and thoughts. The inner voice pulling you towards an idea can sometimes be so faint as to be easily drowned in the noise of everyday life. Salman Ansari offers some practical advice on how to practice listening to your inner whispers.

Lateral Thought

“One of the functions of art is to give people the words to know their own experience. There are always areas of vast silence in any culture, and part of an artist’s job is to go into those areas and come back from the silence with something to say. It’s one reason why we read poetry, because poets can give us the words we need. When we read good poetry, we often say, ‘Yeah, that’s it. That’s how I feel.’”

Ursula K. Le Guin