@gregmoore
Missives from the dark forest.
Ecology knows that shifting baselines dampen collective urgency and deepen generational divides. People who care about internet monoculture and control are often told they’re nostalgists harkening back to a pioneer era. It’s fiendishly hard to regenerate an open and competitive infrastructure for younger generations who’ve been raised to assume that two or three platforms, two app stores, two operating systems, two browsers, one cloud/mega-store and a single search engine for the world comprise the internet.
Twitter’s dead carcass could feed many new blooms.
I think a lot about how we as a culture have turned “forever” into the only acceptable definition of success. (…) Something can be good, and also end, and that thing was still good. And it’s okay to be sad that it ended, too. But the idea that anything that ends is automatically less than this hypothetical eternal state of success. I don’t think that’s doing us any good at all.
- brightwanderer, tumblr post
Defining success as “do it forever” is a very capitalistic view of the human creative process.
Most truths are like that, easy to hear or recite, hard to live in the sense that slowness is hard for most of us, requiring commitment, perseverance, and return after you stray. Because the job is not to know; it’s to become. A sociopath knows what kindness is and how to weaponize it; a saint becomes it.
- Rebecca Solnit, Slow Change Can Be Radical Change
Rebecca focuses this around political change but I feel like it applies to personal growth and development just as well. Want to loose weight? Write or draw more? Be a better friend? Take the slower, grace-filled path of becoming.
Currently Reading
Pattern Recognition
by William Gibson