Thoughts + Things, July 2023
Uniqueness, writer's block, magic eyes, taste, an app, and slippers?
Listen 🎧🎼
Kevin Kelly -- Be Generous & Unique | Invest Like the Best
Kevin Kelly is a writer, founder of Wired Magazine, and once-editor of Stewart Brand's The Whole Earth Catalogue, among many other things. He's a favorite thinker of mine, and he's inspired many in the technology world and beyond. One of his most iconic ideas is the now-popularized 1,000 True Fans: the premise that you only need a small group of die-hards that love what you make in order to earn a living as a creator on the internet.
He's also compiled lists of advice throughout the years, which are great. You can now find them in his new book, Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wish I'd Known Earlier. I recently ordered it and am excited to dig in. But in the meantime, he's been on a number of podcasts including one of my favorite interview shows, Patrick OShaughnessy's Invest Like The Best. This episode is full of wisdom.
They have a long conversation, but my favorite theme is originality and authenticity: the premise that a goal of life should be, when on your death bed, to have fully become yourself. I've written about related ideas in the past: how to find our life's work, inch closer to Ikigai, and approach uniqueness in our journey of becoming. Hunter Thompson and Kevin would have had a lot in common here -- you must find a ninth or nine-hundredth path that is truly yours.
Some highlights:
being not the best, but the only -- literally inventing a new version of success
not relying on other people to interpret what you're about, but instead accelerating yourself by making yourself legible to the world. If people don't "get" you, it's on you! I found myself asking, what is the core "meme" I want people to think of when they think of Jackson?
finding work that you would almost pay to do, and rather than wanting to minimize the amount of time working on, actually want to spend all of your time working on
forgetting the expected answer as a path to imagination: an exercise in subtraction
our loss of rites of passage and rituals, especially in raising children, and how those things provide stability in a rapidly changing world
the "rule of three" for listening: asking "is there more?" when someone's seemingly done talking, and then doing it again so they get three chances. he argues that we need each other's help to say all we have to say
before you say something, is it: (1) true, (2) necessary, (3) kind?
he urges listeners to attend funerals and listen to what they say about the dead: it's usually a lot more about stuff like kindness than accomplishments
abundance in the universe: "the most selfish thing you can do is to be generous"
AI and LLMs as just one kind of synthesized cognition
technology enabling the improbable in the universe: "the more improbable you are the more likely you are to be authentic... we are aiming for improbable lives"
Kevin closes with:
Be generous and unique. Almost everyone does the opposite.
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Adaptation. (2002)
I recently rewatched this after seeing it for the first time late last year. Six months is short order for revisiting a movie, but it speaks to the impression this one left on me. And the second viewing did not disappoint.
I was prompted to watch again by this Letterboxd list of top films about writers and writing, where it ranked #2 after The Shining (1980). I'm excited to check more of those out, as it includes several films I love including one of my all-time favorites at #8: Before Sunset (2004).
And it would be hard to find a movie that more deeply explores the neuroticism, process, struggle, and discovery that writers of various mediums experience. Directed by Spike Jonze, this one is of course really about the screenwriter, Charlie Kaufman. Charlie is a masterful writer and occasional director, whose personal, honest, and cutting stories range from the pure masterpiece that is Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) to the unraveling kaleidoscope of creativity and ambition experienced in Synecdoche, New York (2008).
The premise of Adaptation is this: Charlie Kaufman (played by Nicolas Cage), the screenwriter of Being John Malkovich (1999), has begun work on his next screenplay: an adaptation of The Orchid Thief, a 1998 investigative book written by Susan Orlean (played in this film by Meryl Streep). But Charlie struggles with writer's block.
It is ridiculously self-reflexive, and takes us down a winding road of Charlie's own neuroticism as a writer, beginning with a voiceover monologue from the top of an opening black screen. These types of meta-ideas are often tried by students in screenwriting classes and certainly aren't supposed to actually work in practice. But Charlie is one of a kind. It's a wonderful film with incredible performances from both Meryl and Nic (who plays both Charlie Kaufman and his fictional brother Donald). Incredibly, the star of the show is actually Chris Cooper, who plays the central figure of The Orchid Thief, John Laroche (who is also a character in the film -- it makes more sense when you see it).
I've no doubt lost many of you, but if you're open-minded enough, I think this film might move you. For a final bit of convincing: I've often found myself referencing this scene that comes toward the end of the film. Despite its profundity and depth (if you can get past the fact that it's Nic Cage acting opposite himself), it doesn't really spoil any of the plot of the movie. So if you aren't sure, feel free to watch the clip. It's a glimpse of Charlie's writing at its best: simple, honest, profound, human.
We are what we love.
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Everything is Fertile by Nick Cammarata
I’ve been thinking about novelty a lot lately. I’m always chasing interesting, special, unique. Or at least fresh. Nick begins this essay by describing an approach to life that maximizes this: the kind of conversations that main characters have; the kind of dates that manic pixie dream girls take lost protagonists on; the adventures of Anthony Bourdain. And make no mistake! Being inspired to seek those things is a good thing.
But the essay is really about something else. He writes about a couple of his heroes -- Hayao Miyazaki (Studio Ghibli) and Alexander Shulgin (biochemist, MDMA researcher, etc) -- and how they use their creations as lenses to enable altered perception. And critically, as a path to developing eyes that can see fertility where sterility seems to be. A pair of highlights:
I was originally attracted to Miyazaki and Shulgin because they spent their lives exploring enchanted places. But in truth, I was an escapist missing their most potent lesson: exploration changes our perspective and forces us to pay attention, but this perspective can be brought back. By spending a lifetime dreaming of magical lands or flying with transforming elves one crafts the eyes to finally appreciate home.
I still believe in exploration, whether that means diving into new fields of knowledge, flooding your brain with neurotransmitters, or having first dates that require passports. These experiences give you magic eyes and allow you to see things in new ways. Jiro’s eyes allow him to appreciate the mechanical beauty of the Ghibli engine, a falcon’s eyes let it glide using the vortexes of the wind, and Shulgin’s eyes allow him to notice the beauty of a woodpile.
I’m eager to spend more time both seeing and reflecting. I think new perspectives, and alongside them, the novelty Nick first talks about and that I seek, are essential. But I also think much of our ability to really see can come from stillness, persistence, and patience. A wise person once told me, “only in the corridor of boredom will you find richness of experience.”
I’m reminded of this essay from Simon Sarris that I've recommended in the past, and of this wonderful tweet by David Holz:
I'm 14, at the beach in my hometown, feeling like "whatever" it so boring, who cares really? And then this woman ran out onto the sand and exclaimed "It's the ocean!" I ask "what?" "I grew up in Colorado. I've never seen the ocean. My God! There's so much water" tears began to stream down her face and I thought "we're on the same beach, but mine is boring and hers is beautiful and if I have to choose ... id rather be in on her beach" as she walked away continuing to exclaim about palm trees and coconuts I thought about how easily time makes us numb to beauty and how I didn't want to live that way anymore. for the rest of my childhood, the beach was very different.
To chasing new adventures and settling into what's right in front of us, all in pursuit of magic eyes.
What I Do When I Can’t Sleep by Dan Shipper
I've always been interested in taste, what makes for the good kind, and how to foster it. I've had many conversations about it lately, and asked the internet for its take on a few taste-related topics. It's funny that I rarely think about it explicitly in the context of food.
Dan's essay is one of my favorites on the general idea and it prompted me to think about taste in entirely new ways. Using smelling spices as a starting point, he articulates what it's like to discover and ultimately articulate your taste:
Smelling things blind, and then labeling them helps your brain to connect smells to words. Naming smells, in turn, helps you understand, refine, and communicate what you like and why. In short, naming is crucial to the development of taste.
[A friend] told me the secret was to blindly smell things and try to label them. You see, the part of your brain that’s responsible for smells is naturally mute. It’s called the olfactory bulb and it’s an ancient fist of neurons just behind your eyes. It has only indirect backroad connections to the areas of the brain that control language like Broca’s area. So, even though you might have an easy time knowing whether or not you like a scent, it’s not easy to label that scent with a word. It’ll feel like groping through a dark closet for something you know is there, but can’t quite find...
I think there’s a deep lesson here. It’s about how to develop taste, not just in food or wine, but in any creative endeavor that’s important to you: building products, writing essays, building marketing campaigns, or making YouTube videos.
He goes on to discuss his 'Ineffable List,' a collection of excerpts in a perpetual iPhone note that "have that thing." Put another way, they're samples of his taste: he thinks about this process as collecting ingredients to be named and used later. I love this and recently started one of my own.
Fascinatingly, Dan recently pasted the entire list into Anthropic's Claude, an LLM like GPT that allows a longer context window (the list was too big for ChatGPT). He asked it to highlight the core themes, ideas, and styles in the list, and got back a summary that's pretty amazing. This is a beautiful frame for how we might use AI: not just as a resource for knowledge, but as a mirror for ourselves.
I had lunch with a friend recently and we discussed how beautiful it is to feel seen by those who know us. This is most profound when others see us in ways that aren't even obvious to us. This is what Dan describes with Claude: it helped him to put his taste into words.
I can't help but wonder: how will our relationship with technology change when it can help us understand ourselves more deeply, or more truly? To Kevin Kelly's idea above: will AI help us become?
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Stops App
A new category! Stops is my favorite new app in a while. It's a new kind of iPhone camera, with shades of the earlier days of photography on the iPhone: Instagram filters, VSCO, and all of those editing tools. The difference lies with constraints: Stops gives you very few choices. It's really made to download and shoot with.
There's a default setting that takes great photos with zero fiddling, which is mainly what I use. The app's creator Rehat spent a lot of time perfecting a filter that just seems to work great in lots of environments and the photos shine. Another important note: there's no zoom on Stops, so it's like shooting with a traditional fixed-lens camera. Constraints underlie most creativity, so choosing one of Stops' crop settings (4:3, 1:1, etc) and working within it can be really fun. You might be a little annoyed at first, especially if you're a perpetual camera zoom-er (sorry, Mom).
There are a few other fun tricks, like the option to add grain, a couple of light settings, and some fun filters that produce really funky monochromatic photos.
Some of my favorite shots are above.
Glerups Wool Slippers
While we're at it: another thing you can get. This one isn't free, but I still think you'll love them. I can't claim originality here: these are one of The Wirecutter's go-to house slippers/shoes. But I bought a pair last month and they rock. I've never been a huge slipper guy, but in trying to wear shoes inside less I gave them a try. Now I have a cleaner apartment and very cozy (but not too hot -- wool is pretty magical!) feet.
Thanks for reading.