Tag: Aesthetics

Categories
Emotional Work Politics Reading

Day 1371 and Against The Tides

I don’t swim very much as an adult but I grew up in an era with mandatory swimming tests (even at university).

I was lucky enough to not only learn to swim in the Pacific Ocean but in Colorado I spent a lot of time in our many creek, rivers and lakes. Freshwater has its own appeal and I’ve seen the tides work on the Great Lakes. But little is as magical as the buoyancy of seawater.

I’ve struggled with not having swimming and the joys of warm weather and cool water with some of my autoimmune challenges. A bathing suit I’d never worn came to represent some of that loss.

But today I was able to take a swim. I put on a bathing suit and was able to casually swim with just enough force applied to steady myself in a comfortable place against the increasingly forceful tide coming in. I felt like I’d won even if it was just for thirty minutes. I enjoyed a nice healthful thing in between the chaos of a very busy moment.

I’m not much of a Fitzgerald fan and but the joy of finding the limitations in one’s life as you mature is the relatability of feeling the weight of a one’s years as you push against the tides.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past

So many decisions cannot be undone and yet we steady ourselves against forces much bigger than we are. Pushing against some of the vastness of a sea while relaxing into its much bigger whole is quietly humbling

I feel good about pushing against the vastness but also not being so sure about my own place in much larger forces. It’s no wonder man yearns for the horizon.

I took a shower and immediately went back to work. But it was nice to be a human doing a human thing while all of this is going on around me. I held my own against the tides. And I intend to keep doing.

Categories
Emotional Work Politics

1370 and Ride or Die

Americans aren’t showing the loyalty we used to be known for these days. It’s embarrassing to see the big games we talk from politics to Wall Street. If it’s all big talk then of course the world laughs when we fail to be steadfast.

Maybe that’s why we have such a glorious oeuvre of “ride or die” art. From literature and cinema to Lana Del Ray we want people who commit even when the risks are unquestionably large and success isn’t assured.

That means a lot of hurt. And not caring who knows you’ve committed to a risky or even crazy caper. Lana waited for an alligator wrangler for fuck’s sake.

From her Blue Jeans lyrics it sure looks like she’s seen her share of bullshitters caught up in the game.

I stayed up waitin’, anticipatin’ and pacin’
But he was chasing paper
“Caught up in the game, ” that was the last I heard

And maybe that’s the point of America’s love of the ride or die. The risks are clear. But the reward for loyalty knows a deeper satisfaction than those who get caught up in the game. Don’t chase the paper and expect the game to care. Only people care. And we should all aspire to loyalty beyond reproach.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics Preparedness

Day 1362 and Hilux Drip

The right to repair movement is a worthy effort fighting the banal evil of planned obsolescence.

If you aren’t familiar with the term, it’s an economic and industrial design strategy to deliberately make products with shorter functional lives to “shorten the replacement cycle” aka make you buy a new one.

If you are a user of Apple products (as I am) then you are probably familiar with its reputation for degrading service. They are paying out to the tune of 500m for the practice.

But right to repair issues and planned obsolescence doesn’t just happen in electronics. It’s a problem in auto repair and home appliances too. Repairing a broken part can be more expensive than buying a new item.

And it’s getting worse. Computer chips are now in everything from your refrigerators and dishwasher to your car. Consumers reasonably loathe the increased complexity and challenges of repairing major purchases when everything is “smart.”

At this point I’m willing to pay more money for appliances with zero smart features and physical controls for everything. @ Kelsey Hightower

And I fear most of our regulatory climate is dedicated to making this problem worse. When Japanese automakers first come to the United States their vehicles had longer lifespans so American carmakers were forced to respond by building more durable products. That was a positive thing.

But geopolitical tensions being what they are the, U.S. Commerce Department proposed a national security ban on certain Chinese and Russian-made car parts from U.S. roads The motive is to protect American consumers from digital surveillance and hijacking. But who knows what gets caught up in the effort as we could be allowing in parts that make it easier to repair our own cars.

If we learned anything from Japanese cars it’s that allowing competition was an unalloyed good. There are cars I wish we had in America like the iconic Toyota Hilux. Here is a synopsis from Perplexity on why the Toyota Hilux is considered to be so durable. It’s got a robust chassis, a simple design that is easy to repair, minimal electronics and high quality components.

But you can’t own a Hilux in America. Why? The “Chicken Tax,” a tariff on light trucks, was imposed by the United States in retaliation for tariffs placed by other countries on American chickens.

But maybe it’s good we Americans can’t have a light truck that is easy to repair and designed to last. The internet has a long lore of memes dedicated to the car’s use in revolutions. You certainly wouldn’t want Americans getting any ideas about that.

A viral parody meme about why the Hilux is the choice for insurgents

Categories
Emotional Work Reading

Day 1361 and Temporal Distortion

I dislike how illness messes with your sense of time. One of the themes of the pandemic was how it affected people’s perception of time. We measure time but our experience of it is harder to pin down.

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly distorted people’s perception of time. Many experienced a disconnection between objective time and subjective time, often feeling that days blurred together or that time moved unusually fast or slow.

Perplexity Recap

Temporal disorientation feels as disorienting as spatial disorientation to me. Getting lost in your own personal time fucks with the reality of consensus reality time passing.

Every time I have a couple of sick days in a row I am fearful. You can reorient if you are lost on a road but the world moves even if you don’t. How do you reorient yourself to time?

We humans live forward. If we somehow find other ways to experience the fourth dimension I’d question if we remain human through that. We understand time dilation but living with time as a concurrent dimension to space and having it be mutable warps the mind a bit.

It’s a rich space for science fiction for a reason. Edwin Abbot’s Flatland is a classic of geometry. As a child I was fascinated by the idea of a tesseract in A Wrinkle in Time. A hypercube is a heady concept for a tween.

All this is to say, I was outside some slipstreams of time and I am slipping back in and seeing if I can flow with the tides.

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1359 and Some Dirty Reading

It would appear I have pneumonia. Healthcare being what it is, doctors say there little point in doing clinical testing to find out if it’s bacterial, viral or fungal (unlikely given climate) as the treatment is basically the same. I did a round of antibiotics because why not. Nuke it from orbit.

I’m stuck in bed mostly, my voice comes in and out for the few calls I absolutely must take, and I’m bored and irritated as I would prefer to work though it as it’s exciting times. I’m sleeping like a champion as my Whoop records day after day of long nights of somewhat fractured sleeping are forced by cough medicine into submission.

Having had Covid at the end of May, I now fear being doomed to some degree of respiratory illness risk for the rest of my life though I rarely had so much as a cold in decades of living in a big dirty city. Global calamities leave uneven marks and I consider myself lucky.

The benefit of bed rest is the amount of reading one can get done. My favorite cultural publication Dirt did a Tech Canon overview to get must reads from the slightly more stylish emissaries of the Silicon Diaspora. No offense to Patrick Collison who initiated the discourse with his own list (which is quite good) but it’s good to think outside the empire’s core for the trendy extracurricular bits of the syllabus.

The Tech Syllabus via Dirt

As someone who self labels as a fashion bitch, I was pleased to contribute Neal Stephenson’s bitchy novella on abstraction and the graphical user interface called In The Beginning There Was The Command Line. It’s dated and old and free on GitHub so go read it.

There is quite a range on the list of core texts including a few books and essays that one could easily imagine being put onto banned reading lists. It’s nice that we have Heidegger Zoomers inside the pantheon now.

Schizophrenic philosophy posting is all the rage with the artificial intelligence kiddies. And to think I thought reading Deleuze and Guattari was a waste of time. Do your homework kids so you can discuss rhizomatic thought and large language models at your next conference. Perhaps you can dig into the war machine.

If I’m having a frail Victorian lady kind of week then there is nothing better than attending to the aesthetics of the moment and now you can too! Remember Alex Karp studied under Jürgen Habermas

Categories
Travel

Day 1353 and Remnants

I am sick. I am unsure how I got it or even what it is but I’ve got an intense dry cough, I lost my voice (I’ve been pitching so it may be strain as it doesn’t hurt) and the pain in my left intercostal muscles and rib cage is so bad it making it hard to rest comfortably. It’s been an overstimulated kind of year.

My hope is that I recover enough by Monday that being ill won’t affect my work but I am throwing a Z pack at it in case it turns out to be bacterial pneumonia. I won’t get into the details but I’ve got reason to suspect staphylococcus infections.

If it’s viral then oh well but if it’s bacterial better safe than sorry when it comes to autoimmune patients. I’ll never turn down a chance to nuke my gut biome. Doxycycline is my preferred antibiotic but a macrolide antibiotic has its place.

Being stuck in bed and too uncomfortable to even move has at least giving me time to pick through my reading list and look over the remnant trends of the month’s cultural detritus. The human body may have autophagy but I’m less sure the body politic does. It’s all history repeating.

This New York Times trend piece covering stylized flat lays of TSA security bins insists on it being a fun new trend gaining prominence in the last six months. I find this “new” framing comical as it’s anything but new. Instagram launched in 2010 my wee Zoomer friends.

One of the experts quoted in the trend piece, Hitha Palepu (who is fantastic) was regularly featured together with me as far back as 2015 when I was something of a travel aesthetics expert myself as the CEO of a travel cosmetics brand.

Everything old is new again. I myself can barely manage the nostalgia riffs of Blackbird Spyplane let alone the regurgitation of a ten year old trend. I’d like us to try something new every once in a while. But I suppose we can’t even get a new presidential candidate so why would I expect Thursday Styles to have anything fresh.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1345 and Class Consciousness

I have written about classism, class anxiety, and class status as part of my interest in how we form group identities. Searching just for the world “class” turns up 504 mentions on this blog.

That seems like a lot but I’d argue that no other identity marker (even race & gender) determines quite so much about your life and trajectory as your class. Yes, even in America. Perhaps especially so in America. If you aren’t read up on the topic I recommend Paul Fussel’s Class: A Guide Through America’s Status System.

Yesterday I happened to be sitting next to a trio of twenty somethings during transit. After glancing at their outfits and listening to their animated discussions, it seemed clear they were either upper class or professional management class. Being both curious and nosy (and having no way out of listening in) I rudely but playfully asked:

Ok I’ve got to ask, are you business school classmates or cosplaying as extras from Industry?

This intrusive question seemed to amuse them and we fell into a long conversation. It turns out they had in fact become friends while getting their MBA from a top European business school. I didn’t inquire into their private family lives obviously but I’d guess that means I was right about both class buckets.

We had a chat about hoe business school was the best decision they could have ever made for their social lives in particular. The class work was fine but it was the friendships that made it worthwhile. Business schools provide an entirely different sort of class experience if catch my drift.

I found it quite pleasant to be in a random IRL social situation where discussion ranged from Biden’s opposition to the US Steel acquisition to the implications of Paul Graham’s Founder Mode essay for the professional management class. Usually that requires Twitter or a Bloomberg podcast (they were fans of Odd Lots).

Naturally this begs the question as to how much I am aware of my own class consciousness and how much I do or don’t fit into my own class (having made the journey through multiple classes).

Do people prefer to socialize within their own classes? I found it relaxing to discuss some class coded topics without fear of looking like a privileged asshole.

Which isn’t to say I think of myself primarily in class terms. Last weekend I attended a gathering of friends & internet mutuals with significant class diversity including lower, working, middle and full on class-opt outs. It was there I realized I was the only person I knew who ever publicly discusses cross-class relationships. This despite cross-class relationships being a significant factor in upward mobility.

I assume it’s as normal as any other kind of cross-identity relationship but now I’m not so sure. Do you socialize outside your own class? Do you even think about it? And most amusingly, is it déclassé to discuss one’s class?

Categories
Startups Travel

Day 1342 and SKU Bloat ZIRP Era

I was doing some packaging preparation for fall travel and was pleased to discover that I’d finally appeared to have built out a basics wardrobe that actually mixed and matched well. A decent capsule wardrobe I bought I’d never achieve had come together after literally a decade of failed promises from startups.

There was an era of direct to consumer startups that promised quality and simplicity. A startup would launch with few basic but upscale stock keeping units (or SKUs) that promised they would be all you needed to own at a fair price point. This was alluring proposition for many early entrepreneurs including myself.

The premise was simple. Why would you want to add unnecessary complexity to tee-shirts, glasses, or toiletries when you could get something good without worrying if you were paying a markup for branding or retail margins?

The DTC boom has been largely looked at as failure as a movement for both consumers and businesses. With the benefit of hindsight, many of the businesses relied heavily on growth that couldn’t be achieved without either expanding your retail presence in stores or without giving up on providing simple basics.

As the zero percent interest rate era boomed, brands released constant new and novel SKUs to chase growth in every vertical from sneakers to lipstick. The goal of better prices and simpler products failed under the weight of driving growth at scale. Darlings became pariahs and founders sold to roll up private equity firms.

ZIRP ended as post pandemic era inflation demanded higher interest rates. We all complained bitterly about cost and quality of consumer goods in the aftermath.

And yet maybe we judged things too harshly. A chaotic decade of changing macroeconomic conditions were not easy to navigate. The growth required by venture and private equity were always going to conflict with a simple ethos of shopping.

But here I am with exactly what I wanted from my shopping choices at the start. I’ve got my quality basics merchandised in a simple way from brands I purchased from directly. In other news, the Everlane Barrel Pants are excellent.

Categories
Travel

Day 1340 and Elbow Room

Americans have one of life’s finest luxuries in our protected and ample open spaces. Our cities are bustling economic hubs of opportunity, but unlike in many other countries American has an incredible heritage of publicly owned wilderness.

We may take this access to ample elbow room for granted. Having spent the weekend with a diverse groups of people with interests in how we manage and care for our American ecosystems, it was an incredible reminder of our vast shared inherited wealth.

One friend pointed out that other nations may have become accustomed to the density of a megapolis but Americans come by their space loving “don’t crowd me” individualism honestly. Another friend pointed out that many of us would find ourselves over-socialized in other culture.

Peacefully watching the water go by in the sunlight of late summer

I felt this especially as I’d been socializing with people I enjoy and respect. And even though I had an amazing time I am exhausted from even the love and joy of fellowship.

We’d picked a spacious spot where we had plenty of privacy. It was an intimate group working through topics close to all of our hearts. And yet after a long weekend, I’d like to be quiet and quite alone for just a little. Fortunately I can do just that.

Categories
Culture

Day 1339 and Alienation

I don’t feel strongly alienated from the world. I am not confident I have the right to be at war with my reality. Certainly I’m frustrated with aspects of my reality and I’ve taken actions to feel more at peace with my lot in life.

Perhaps because of this bias towards action, I’m familiar with many flavors of alienation. Those seeking to remedy it are the people who bring change.

Being dissatisfied with the world is the first step in applying your will to solve your dissatisfaction. Some of us will build great things by doing so.

Through that lens, I have had the good fortune to meet many people alienated from and by the world. They don’t wallow in it because the point in the dissatisfaction is to take action to remedy it.

Problems naturally range from daily quotidian ones to full system wide issues. Even small actions are enough to remedy the feelings that arise from feeling separate or out of step with the world. Modernity isn’t a permanent state even in its own age.