Hey there! If you’re new, this is a (wildly inconsistent) periodic newsletter in which I share some of my favorite things I’ve listened to, watched, or read as of late, all accompanied by some thoughts to go with them.
I hope you enjoy the things. They are definitely great. My thoughts are a work in progress, but I hope you enjoy them too.
Listen 🎧🎼
Punisher - Phoebe Bridgers
I’m not sure how I missed Phoebe until recently, especially given the number of friends whose response to my gushing about this new music discovery has simply been, “Oh yeah, she’s so great!” Needless to say, I am far from the first and will not be the last to hype up Phoebe Bridgers. Both of her albums are fantastic, but Punisher, which released a few months into COVID life last year, is the standout for me.
There’s so much I could write in this section, but I’ll spare you all the unending praise that I’ve showered most of my group chats with in the last month. I’ll keep it to this: the masterwork of Phoebe’s (and most of my favorite) songwriting is that she can simultaneously write with deeply personal specificity while unearthing universal observations and truths. It makes for music that cuts deeply and hits you rawly in the moment, all while leaving you pondering big questions long after.
Favorite tracks: Chinese Satellite, Garden Song, Kyoto, I Know The End
Bonus: a fun reaction video I just came across. He can speak far more intelligently about music than I, but reacted very similarly to Phoebe’s work.
Buy Phoebe Bridgers stonks, please.
Jerry Seinfeld on The Tim Ferriss Show
This interview is excellent for many reasons, but if I’m to catch your attention for any one topic in particular it is their conversation on writing.
Jerry talks in-depth about his systems for accomplishing anything hard, especially writing. Strikingly, he frames writing as the hardest thing there is (in contrast to what people tell you most of your life, as writing is framed as fairly trivial or easy). Despite this, he discusses how he and we can make progress with writing, exercise, or anything else:
The mind is infinite in wisdom and the brain is a stupid little dog that is easily trained… You just have to confine it through repetition and systemization.
Jerry shares a similar metaphor for how he approaches nurturing creativity. He says to treat yourself like a baby at first, one that needs care, acceptance, and love. Only after you’ve given yourself (or your writing) that care do you switch the other mode: intense personal criticism. He’s able to stay sane and motivated by balancing those two modes. I think I tend more toward the latter and often don’t write/make/create anything. To his point, it’s far better to just use today to create something, anything. You can be hard on yourself for it tomorrow.
There’s one other note from this interview that really resonated with me. I’m still working through its implications:
I feel like if you break the human struggle down to one word, it’s confront.
Watch 🎥 📺
Frances Ha (2012)
I’ve watched a handful of Noah Baumbach’s films in the last few months, inspired largely by how much I enjoyed this one. I just revisited it and can say with confidence that it’s a personal favorite. Greta Gerwig is utterly magnetic, carrying the film by herself with ease.
I watched this for the first time just prior to turning 27, which is Frances’ age in the film. I’d been thinking a lot about turning 27. At least in my naive mind, it meant having really grown up, being an adult with no asterisks. 27 says, “you should have grown up by now.” Frances literally references her age as not being that old when defending her lack of… togetherness. It’s silly to assign that sense of completion or finished maturity to any age, of course. But my notes after initially watching the film ring as true today as they did to the immature 26-year-old who wrote them:
We are all just on our way. 27 is old — to a younger me. And it will be so young to an older me. We may look farther ahead or behind to others based on the glimpse of us they get.
I think that’s what I love about this film. Frances, by intention, does not have her life together in the ways that seem to matter in our culture: her career prospects are iffy at best, she’s hopelessly single, she has no consistent place to live, she doesn’t even know how to handle herself at dinner parties. And while I am (according to this unreliable narrator, at least) farther along than Frances in some of those categories, that’s missing the point. There isn’t some checkpoint — birthday or otherwise — at which point you need to be grown, manicured, matured, evolved, or completed. And while it can be useful to take note of your own growth, comparing your progress to the small sliver of another person’s reality that you get to see just isn’t worth it.
Frances is on her way, and so am I.
Read 📖📄
Familiarity and Belonging by Simon Sarris
I came across this little essay via Gaby Goldberg as part of her post on modern (internet) friendships -- which is also great!
Simon's writing here is short enough and wonderful enough that you should read it in full. But if you're curious about what stood out to me, there are a few ideas I'd like to hit on.
In brief, he discusses the beauty that comes from familiarity. The re-reading, re-visiting — whatever it might be — is a necessary practice for realizing something’s value. Only participating in something once is depriving oneself of familiarity with that thing, and subsequently, the depth of its beauty.
This expands into our relationships:
What creates strong friendships are repeated, tiny, and unplanned interactions.
Simon supposes that one of the best ways to cultivate this familiarity with others and engineer that repetition is to do work together, preferably with a window for others to see in. He calls us to do this, specifically with meaningful work outside of our jobs, which is a thread I'm particularly fascinated by and could write a lot more on. The notion that anything worth doing can (and should) be turned into a "side hustle" is one that I continue to wrestle with.
TV is so pernicious because it asks for nothing from you, except all of the time you’ve got to spare. You might not even notice that you’ve lost something.
A bit detached from the message, but this one hung with me with respect to so much of the content and social media I consume.
Broadly, there's an idea that seems to hang over this entire piece: perhaps all of our intention and deliberateness has left us without the ability (time? bandwidth? necessary exposure?) to experience the serendipity of life. In the same way that always going or doing keeps us from ever being able to be bored, and thus never able to experience all of the wonderful symptoms of idleness.
on maintaining attention by Ava
Similar to the Simon Sarris essay above, I’d strongly recommend reading this in its entirety: it’s short and essential. But a few highlights:
I've never been good at maintenance. I let things slide until they're in a truly abysmal state. I'm spacey, scatterbrained: I forget to text people back, forget to schedule appointments. I've not just cracked but completely shattered the screen of every iPhone I've ever owned. My dorm room in college was a literal trash heap. My attention naturally works best in targeted bursts. It's like a tractor beam: intensely focused on one thing while leaving everything else in complete darkness.
This form of attention is both effective and flawed: it means that I can summon tremendous amounts of energy for a short duration and direct it towards whatever I'm obsessed with. When the obsession fades, however, it becomes significantly harder for me to remain interested in the task at hand. Of course, any long-term project requires sustained interest through weeks and months of boredom and hopelessness. As a result, I've become convinced in the past couple of years that I need to get better at maintenance: attending to the same thing over and over and over, even when I experience the work as rather less than thrilling.
A long excerpt I felt necessary to quote in full. This notion of maintenance is one of the best ways I’ve seen the monotonous aspects of life — the work — described. By nature, I’m generally uninterested in the maintenance-related items of life. I’m interested in the adventure, the fun, and the interesting. I do my best to allow the momentum from those things to carry me through maintenance.
Ava describes this feeling at an even deeper level:
Christ, how do people do this? How do people do anything?
I have this analogy I use: hard things (work, maintenance) are like riding a bike uphill. The first few pedals — and truly, even setting out to get on the bike — are the hardest part. Once you get past those, you have some momentum and riding becomes easier. The same is true for any real deep work, and certainly true about writing. Writing has become an object of much thought for me lately, and so much of the practice is just about forcing yourself into the initial effort. After that, the words eventually start to flow.
Still, I’m typically caught in Ava’s refrain — how do people do this consistently? How do people do anything? I don’t want to do anything. Unless, of course, it’s fun. There’s a separate discussion to be had about engineering your life and work so that most things are indeed fun, but if the self-help motivators were more honest, I think they’d admit that even the best-designed life and work arrangement still consists of a great deal of maintenance.
There’s no way around it: life is a fight against entropy. There's this line I like about how most of Western philosophy is about doing and most of Eastern philosophy is about being. In order to live a good life we have to learn how to reconcile the two. To believe we don't need anything from the material world to feel joy—to perceive the essential luminousness of everything around us, which continues with no effort on our part—and then still to choose to attend, to maintain, to force our way upstream.
This is a beautiful dichotomy. I find that much of my internal strife rests at this cross-section: to pursue a life of zenlike appreciation, to live in the moment, to appreciate the wabi-sabi of it all — OR — to chase greatness and success in however I seem to be defining it. Yet this idea of maintenance seems to somehow sit in the middle of those two, necessary to both of them in ways that aren’t always comfortable.
Ava finishes up with a poetic summary:
To know you have to keep showing up forever and still choose to put in your most earnest effort each time feels Sisyphean, but on certain days it also feels like pure relief.
I’ve always found The Myth of Sisyphus fascinating, challenging, and striking. Especially the conclusion that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy.”
I hope you are well. We made it to 2021. We’re already a month in, for that matter! Time rushes on.
2020 wore me out, to be honest. But also left me asking big questions, cherishing time with others more than ever, and with a hope of a return to life out in the world again. May that come soon enough.
Thanks for reading. It truly means a lot. If you have any thoughts to add to my thoughts + things, comment or tweet me @jacksondahl.