Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
Welcome to 12 new joiners this week.
This is the 80th edition of this newsletter. I’ve been reflecting about the things you do over an extended period of time in your life. I can count those things on the fingers of my left hand because I have the attention span of a Cocker Spaniel. But the satisfaction of sticking with writing is real, not necessarily because you become better at it. But because, week after week, you know you’ve bottled up time that would otherwise flow through your fingers like water.
See you in two weeks,
Florian
Weekly wisdom
📚 Book of the week: I am reading “The Years” by French author and Nobel prize winner Annie Ernaux and I feel an urge to bring it up in every conversation. The best way to describe this book would be to say it is a collective memoir of French society from the 1940s to the 2000s. It reads like a memoir but the main protagonist is not the author, it is the whole of French society. Decade after decade, Annie Ernaux reveals the evolution of people’s collective desires, fears, moral stance and relationship to past events. In doing so, she pays tribute to what historians won’t bother writing down: fragments of mundane life, turns of phrases and people’s inner dialogues who despite their triviality end up defining our memories of times past. I still can’t quite grasp how a single person could see, feel and think as if they were an entire society. But there you have it, Annie Ernaux somehow pulled it off and wrote it all down.
📚 Motivation versus Discipline: “Can’t Hurt Me” is the epitome of motivational books. It’s the story of David Goggins, a former Navy Seal who overcame an abusive household, racial discrimination and severe health issues to become an elite soldier and endurance athlete. The man is remarkable. His advice is pretty classic self-help material: embrace discomfort, confront your weaknesses, don’t settle for mediocrity etc. It’s easy to get past the book's biggest piece of wisdom delivered in perfect Goggins style: “motivation is crap”. What he means by that is that motivation is fleeting. It is your coach telling you to do one more push-up or it is, ironically, David Goggins’ book inspiring you to run an ultra race until you put it down and it’s time for Netflix and Ben and Jerry’s. It’s Sunday night after all. It’s not motivation we should seek but discipline we should practice. And discipline is notoriously tedious because it involves showing up again and again for whatever you’ve set out to do or become, no matter the weather, the mood or circumstances.
🌍 Hot Stuff: Climate change is a source of anxiety for many of my friends. But at some point, anxiety becomes counterproductive or worse, part of the problem. Climate change is a complex and nuanced challenge that requires taking a few dozen steps back. This is what my colleague Zeke Hausfather is helping us do in his piece analyzing global temperatures in the past twenty years and the different scenarios we’re facing in the next decades. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us but we’ve already avoided the worst case scenario and there are reasons to be cautiously optimistic.
Lateral Thought
“In his writings, Proust suggests that our memory is separate from us, residing in the ocean breeze or the smells of early autumn—things linked to the earth that recur periodically, confirming the permanence of mankind. For me and no doubt many of my contemporaries, memories are associated with ephemeral things such as a fashionable belt or a summer hit and therefore the act of remembering can do nothing to reaffirm my sense of identity or continuity. It can only confirm the fragmented nature of my life and the belief that I belong to history.”
Annie Ernaux
The beautiful turns of phrase in the opening paragraph made me smile! And must buy that book...