The gravitational-wave background is huge news for the cosmos, yes, but it’s also huge news for you. The nature of reality has not changed—you will not suddenly be able to detect vibrations in your morning coffee that you couldn’t see before. And yet, moments like these can and should change how each of us sees our world. All of a sudden, we know that we are humming in tune with the entire universe, that each of us contains the signature of everything that has ever been. It’s all within us, around us, pushing us to and fro as we hurtle through the cosmos.
The culture-wars approach to museums seems to me to be related to the assumption that museums are, or should be, the caretakers of singular, true and timeless narratives. (but) Truth isn’t a matter of supporting a specific set of beliefs, and the stories we tell—even about ourselves—change the more we know.
- John McCoy, The Stream of Warm Impermanence
It’s even harder to take a week off from your shit job to go on a road trip to the airplane graveyard when your rent is $2000 a month, you’re sitting on a hundred grand in student debt, and your company is laying off 25% of the workforce because they believe they can replace you with a racist autocomplete script on meth and steroids, and chased by a glass of refreshing cooler from the Three Mile Island reactor.
- Mike Monteiro, How to Live Off The Rails
Aristotle claimed that excellence is not an act, but a habit. I used to think that meant discipline. Now I think it means alignment. When the form of your day supports the function of your mind, when what you do with your time supports the kind of thoughts you hope to have.
- Joan Westenberg, I Spent 90 Days Rebuilding My Brain. Here’s What I Learned.
The stories that affirm our shared humanity are born of self-knowledge, and I rarely gain a deeper understanding of my inner landscape just by scrolling through an endless feed of posts. We are allowed, perhaps even obligated, to prioritize what enriches us—so why don’t we?
- Lucy Bellwood, Terra Incognita
The next time you use something that works so well you barely notice it, remember that somewhere, a designer solved a problem so thoroughly that both the problem and its solution became invisible. That designer might not be famous, might not have thousands of followers, might not be invited to speak at conferences — but they’ve achieved something remarkable: greatness through invisibility.
- Christopher Butler, You Can Be a Great Designer and Be Completely Unknown
The strongest heart is the one that’s still beating. Even at your lowest point, the job of the heart is to make sure all your organs are getting blood so your body survives. You don’t have to be amazing all the time. Sometimes there are low points, and even if you’re just surviving, that’s a big deal.
- Saadia Faruqi, Author
When nations grow old,
the Arts grow cold,
And Commerce settles on every tree:
And the poor and the old
Can live upon gold,
For all are born poor.
Aged sixty-three.
The things that I have made over the years of my life have taught me so much, and in so many different ways. They have different lessons depending on the period of my life that I’m engaging with them and they change over time to me. There are many pieces in this building that have also changed over time so, to me, that is a bit of a kind of a life. There is a bit of something alive in that intersection.
- Adam Savage on remaining engaged with the art he made in his early 20’s, YouTube
Browsing one day in a library, I opened a book in the stacks and found a passage on 1830s France by Charles Fourier, the utopian French philosopher, in which he talks about the dishonesty of business transactions, the tedium and deceit of family life, the hardship of small farmers, the miseries of the poor and near-destitute in great cities, the evils of naked greed, the neglect of genius, the sufferings of children and old people, the stupidity of war, the coercive mechanisms of society disguised as law, morality and the benefits of civilization. Can you believe this? I thought to myself. Everything this man said one-hundred-and-eighty years ago is true about us today. I had no choice but to write it down, so I could prove to my friends that nothing ever changes.
- Charles Simic, Take Care of Your Little Notebook
Finally, consider how lucky you are to have someone who still occasionally lets you perform a nearly useless act of love that you always try really hard to do well.
- Merlin Mann, How to Make A Proper Bedtime Bottle of Water
The Value of Art
Speaking as both a (largely wildly ‘unsuccessful’) musician and a corporate strategic consultant type, the conclusion I’ve come to of late is that the music industry can only ethically exist if it de-emphasises product/content/output as a …
We contain multitudes, all of us, even the worst of us.
From those multitudes, we make things.
Sometimes the things we make come from the light in us. Sometimes they come from the shadows. Usually, making something requires a bit of both.
- Annie Mueller, When you love something made by a terrible person
We need to break the notion of “discovery” away from the myth that some system will find interesting stuff and hand it to us without us having to do any work.
- Pete Brown, We need to stop talking about discovery
As the Internet continues to increasingly mirror how things work in the real world, we have to abandon the idea that good things will come to us on an endless conveyer belt. Unlike spam calls, junk mail, and advertisements the things that we actually care about require us to find them and are not produced at a constant rate.
We are not uplifted by competing to achieve superior speed and efficiency. The sales pitch of GenAI is that the technology provides a shortcut to writing a song, making a movie, understanding a book, but these promises are illusions.
- John Warner, We’ve Been Consumed
A simulacra of human virtuosity is not what we need. We need each other. We need signs of life about us. We need to know that we are not alone. And this is something we must consider not just in relation to the singular artifact, but also in relation to our environment. In a time of acute loneliness, the proliferation of AI-generated content seems not unlike an act of pollution, compromising the integrity of the social ecosystem.
- L. M. Sacasas, The Cat in the Tree: Why AI Content Leaves Us Cold
I think, probably, the amount of delight we experience is directly related to the amount of control we’re willing to not have.
- Annie Mueller, I will trade you this muddy shitball for that shiny marble
I feel like this is particularly fantastic advice for being delighted by music, movies, tv, games, books, and other creative media. Delight can only surprise you when you’re chasing what interests you and not following the reviews of algorithms and strangers.
But we didn’t take any photos of that bullock. You rarely do, when something comes of nowhere and flabbergasts you with its simplistic beauty. Everything moves on, a different picture moves in to occupy the frame, as the rules of the universe dictate, and it’s often in those moments, directly after the flabbergasting, beautiful thing has been witnessed, when the bittersweet fact of that seems most apparent.