We are busy raising a newborn, and I don’t get to open my laptop or – to be honest -use my brain that much. However, overall, I am surprised how quickly we got our bearings in caring for our little boy: parenting is much easier the second time around. Your first child is a living, screaming, running, throwing, jumping, and dancing, proof that you can go through this. You can let go of the fear, embrace the chaos, and enjoy your beautiful family. Plus, it turns out that parenting not-during-covid-lockdowns is much easier. Go figure.
The best things in life are cringe.
I have to admit I’ve grown to enjoy some things I previously deemed cringe: Weddings, reunions, photos of my kids, Italodisco.
I am not sure if it was a quirk of the 2010s or my specific age at that time, but it seemed the ultimate goal in life was to be cool: Detached, unbothered, slick, and never cringy.
I get the appeal of cool: It signals to the world you are stable, with enough life experience to remain unfazed, and it’s hard to impress you because you have somewhat refined taste.
But it’s easy to fake cool: Be blase about everything, never get excited, never give anything a chance. By avoiding cringe, you avoid something you might actually enjoy. By being protective of your cool persona, you rob yourself of cool experiences.
Really cool people dictate what is cringe and what is cool, and don’t give a damn what others think. Go enjoy what you like.
Technology feels like a crushing force
Last month, Apple released the iPad Pro, their “thinnest yet”. They also decided to release this ad in which they crushed a series of objects to “squeeze them” into a thin iPad.
It made people uncomfortable, and Apple even issued an “apology.”
Apple’s Ad unwillingly captured the tradeoffs technology presents and how we pay for the advances by losing the world we know.
| Yes | But |
| You can do so much on a single device | Netflix is also there |
| It’s thin, comfortable and light | The colorful, tangible, and beautiful spectrum of tools is lost |
| It’s slick, modern, and minimalistic | Everything looks the same, and we lost all other forms |
| You can paint, create music or write | AI can, too |
| Technology brings opportunity | It feels like a crushing force |
| The future is here | The past is destroyed |
Deliberate Technology is an ongoing topic on this blog and now it has a perfect illustration. I’m still working through my relationship with Tech.
- I love reading on my kindle, but my children never see me with an actual book
- I advocate for Remote Work, not to Work from Home, but to Work from Nature
- Our company mission is to “Democratize Publishing and Commerce,” but it leads to spammers, scammers, and the extreme incentives of the Internet. Should everybody create?
Interesting things from around the web
In the 52nd issue of Deliberate Internet, I shared Simon Sarris’s “The most precious resource is Agency”. Cate Hall published a fantastic complement about how to be more Agentic.
Agency is the skill that built the world around you, an all-purpose life intensifier that lets you make your corner of it more like what you want it to be, whether that’s professional, relational, aesthetic, whatever. Build a better mousetrap. Have an enviable marriage. Start a country. No one is born with it, everyone can learn it, and it’s never too late.
You can just assume world is a malleable place. Just try to make things happen and you actually may succeed. You can just ask for things, and you can just learn complicated things.
Most subject matter is learnable, even stuff that seems really hard
But beyond that, many (most?) traits that people treat as fixed are actually quite malleable if you (1) believe they are and (2) put the same kind of work into learning them as you would anything else.
Ask for things. Ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate (of course, try not to be a jerk in the process)
One trick is to embrace the low status: do the things you do not know yet how to do well and will fail at in the beginning:
making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.
I’m pretty sure Agency and Taste are going to be increasingly important to differentiate Human work from AI work.
The post [Deliberate 112] Cringe, and the crushing force of Technology appeared first on Artur Piszek.