The Fear of Missing Old

The Practical Polymath #22

Hi Friends, 

Greetings from Lille in France where I’ve been eating an unreasonable amount of cheese for the past week. I took advantage of being in the North of France to visit Villa Cavrois, a masterpiece of Modernist architecture built in 1932.

Every week, I’m featuring a newsletter by a fellow writer whose writing I admire. This week, it’s Leo Mascaro’s Shuffle Sundays. If you’re looking for a colorful mix of carefully curated recommendations and reviews about movies, shows and music, Leo is your man.

If you enjoy this newsletter, hit reply and tell me what you think!

Until next week,

Florian 

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The Fear of Missing Old

I reach for the bottle opener in my parents’ kitchen and notice the slightly worn off metal on the outer edges. This simple tool has been popping bottle caps for sixty years. And yet it is just as reliable today as it was back then. 

It is however an oddity. How many objects do we possess that are more than a decade old? 

Our consumption habits are based on the idea that new is better, more adapted to the current context.  

Our shiny new object syndrome manifests itself beyond the material realm. It seems to be very much at play when we decide which ideas to consume. 

Back when I was doing research in college, I would systematically skip the older journal articles and books. Anything older than two years felt like I was going to miss out on the latest piece of academic wisdom. For a long time, the “latest releases” section would be my first stop when I stepped into my favorite bookshop. I’d think, surely the most contemporary piece of thinking is the sharpest lens to make sense of the world. 

But is there really a correlation between a book or an idea’s recency and its ability to illuminate us on the present? 

I came across a theory that I found particularly helpful to answer this question. It’s called the Lindy effect. It says that the future life-expectancy of anything that’s non-perishable like ideas or technology depends on their current age. In other words something that resisted the test of time is likely to be around for another while. 

In his book “Antifragile” Nicholas Nassim Taleb uses the Lindy effect to assess the worthiness of a book:

So I follow the Lindy effect as a guide in selecting what to read: books that have been around for ten years will be around for ten more; books that have been around for two millennia should be around for quite a bit of time, and so forth.  

From that perspective, reading anything that just came out makes no sense at all. You’ll have to let time be the judge of anything that gets published. 

Here’s a fun experiment you can do to test out how “Lindy” your reading habits are. Go to your Goodreads page and click on “My books” > “Stats” > “Publication Year”. I was quite surprised to see how biased I was towards reading things that have been published within the last 50 years. 

A snapshot of what I read by publication date.

And if you’re a huge Goodreads nerd like me, perhaps you’ll enjoy the fact that they’ve curated a list of the best books by century from the 4th to the 21st.

You might think twice about picking your next read from the New York Times’ “best books of the year” list when you realize you’ve got about 1,600 years of tried-and-tested thinking to catch up on. Perhaps that when it comes to books, FOMO should really stand for Fear of Missing Old. 

Just like my parents' bottle opener, books and ideas from the past might seem a little rusty at first but it turns out that if they’re still around, it’s probably because they’re doing something right. 

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Weekly Wisdom

🧨 Deconstruction: There are moments in your life when you encounter an idea so powerful that it opens up an entire new dimension of understanding. Deconstruction was one of them for me. Introduced by French philosopher Jacques Derrida, deconstruction is a process that reveals assumptions hidden within our language. In particular, it highlights the underlying hierarchies between opposite concepts. Take for example “national/international”, “high/low”, “inside/outside” or “reason/passion”. They might seem like neutral opposites at first but in practice one concept is given primacy over the other. Understanding those hierarchies in language in turn helps us see the political and cultural structures of power they help maintain and justify. The video below is a good crash course in Derrida’s philosophy.

🥦 Tatsuya Tanaka: I’m obsessed with this Japanese photographer and miniature artist. He turns everyday objects and figurines into sheer visual poetry. See for yourself!

Tatsuya Tanaka - Gas Station 

👻 Ghost Knowledge: I’m super excited about Sari Azout’s latest experiment: Ghost Knowledge. The idea is to get people with a particular expertise to write about what they know. The way it works is that you publicly ask someone to write about a specific topic. Other people can then pledge money to support the article coming to life. I pledged $20 for Andrea Hernandez to write an article about “The rise of Curation as a Service (CaaS) as a result of information abundance”. She accepted to write it and I can’t wait to read it!

Lateral Thought

“Nobody thinks they’ll get old, but everybody does. The Western World’s fixation on work leads us to evaluate ourselves on achievement rather than on how meaningfully we spend our time.”

David Perell