Hi Friends,
Greetings from Brooklyn!
Yesterday we went out for drinks and my friend took out a Kodak disposable camera to take a selfie of our group. I asked him why he didn’t simply use his phone. He told me he enjoyed the pleasure of rediscovering memories weeks or even months later. A gift to his future self. I like it. What gift will you make to future you?
Until next week,
Florian
Wandering Above the Sea of Fog
I stopped reading the news.
For a long time, I’d feed on every bit of news alert, political podcast and daily commentary I could get my hands on. That was my way of being a good citizen. And frankly, I also found it entertaining.
Since I’ve stopped, I noticed feeling more connected to the world.
How can it be?
You read the headlines to understand the world better. But here’s the paradox:
1) Despite its intensity, the relevance of news content is extremely ephemeral. Twenty-four hours at most. And in an environment of constant breaking news the window of relevance is shrinking.
2) Because of its short shelf-life, you constantly have to refuel. It’s like a Netflix show with an ending that keeps you coming back for more. The only difference is this show never ends.
3) Because it is based on novelty, news content attributes disproportionate importance to single events. It offers low explanatory power, highlighting short-term symptoms and ignoring long-term systems.
So to sum up, you go in wanting to learn more about the world. But you get sucked into spending most of the time consuming information that expires in a blink of an eye and gives you a surface-level interpretation of reality.
What to do instead?
In order to understand the present you need to remove yourself from it.
This painting by Caspar David Friedrich couldn’t provide with a better metaphor. It’s very conveniently named “The Wanderer Above the Sea Fog”. I’m guessing you know where I’m going with this.
The wanderer was lost in the forest, trying to find his way back in a thick fog. He could barely see his own feet. But then he found a path that was leading up a mountain and started to climb. The more he climbed the longer the horizon stretched. And when he reached the top, he was finally able to regain his sense of direction. So much so that he stopped there for a while, admiring how mountains, valleys and forests blended into each other into a coherent whole.
Just like the wanderer, we must find mountains to climb out of the fog of news. Those mountains are made of every bit of wisdom that resisted the test of time.
Weekly Wisdom
😯 Fertile Ground of Bewilderment: I discovered the work of Charles Eisenstein this week and I’m very intrigued by his ideas. He argues that the conventional way that humanity has dealt with problems is by going to war against them ignoring the underlying system that generates them in the first place. In his view, the origin of our most pressing challenges is based on what he calls “the myth of separation”. The idea that we are separate from each other and from nature is the foundation of our economic system. This transcript of a talk he gave back in 2016 is probably one of the most mind-shattering things you’ll read this week.
🎥 Inside: Bo Burnham’s new Netflix special is a masterpiece of insight and dark humor on the times we live in. My favorite segment was his song “Welcome to the Internet”. I don’t know that the Internet was captured better than by this line: “Could I interest you in everything, all of the time”.
Lateral Thought
“The real problem of humanity is the following: We have Paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions and godlike technology. And it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall.”
Edward O. Wilson