Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“In the 20th century, Hans-Georg Gadamer was one of the theorists who helped to popularize the idea of ‘historical consciousness.’ He argued that we can only ever interpret the past through our own prejudices and traditions, and that meaning emerges through a fusion of past and present ‘horizons.’ Appreciation for the subjectivity of our historical consciousness was, he suggested, a relatively new phenomenon. He believed it was ‘the privilege of modern man to have a full awareness of the historicity of everything present and the relativity of all opinions.’”

“‘We are constantly contending with algorithms of all kinds,’ writes Kyle Chayka in his book Filterworld, ‘each one attempting to guess what we are thinking of, seeking and desiring.’”

“‘Compassion draws on mental resources and given that our mental resources are finite, we have a finite capacity for it,’ explains Adam Waytz, a psychologist and professor at Northwestern University. And because our tendency is to direct our empathy toward those we feel closer to, ‘we might fail to properly acknowledge the suffering of others’—to be unfair to groups we consider different from ourselves, say, or unethically biased toward those we favor.”

“Is it any wonder that so many of us, after a busy week of work, opt for a change of scene, as often as we can, rather than stay put and build the kind of community that we find so appealing elsewhere? The 17th-century French thinker Blaise Pascal suggested that this was down to humankind’s ‘secret instinct which impels them to seek amusement and occupation abroad.’ Alongside this urge, Pascal wrote, stood a contradictory pillar of self-knowledge: ‘That happiness in reality consists only of rest, and not in stir.’ In the case of the village mentality the contradiction is evident: We want the deep peace of belonging, but our itchy feet undermine our ability to put in the hours.”

“What would it mean to practice negative capability in one’s own life? Perhaps it’s simply having a certain comfort with the messiness of existence—a determination to not be crippled by the thought that one either is, or isn’t, ever doing the ‘right’ thing. And an ability to celebrate, to wonder and not attempt to explain; to look at your child and think, ‘If I had decided to do something different in my life, even if it was ‘better,’ then this person might not exist.’ It is a way to realize that despite everything, there is really something very beautiful about the chaos of existence. Rather than try to find reason in it, we perhaps just need to embrace it.”

“Today there are increasingly fewer mysteries in our scientific, overdocumented world. So—with even shimmering monoliths now humdrum—where can we turn to find the mystery in our lives? Perhaps the best place to start is the landscape in which they appear. Touch the earth, observe the clouds, consider the extraordinary statistical unlikeliness of evolution and chance which has led you to this exact moment, on a planet spinning at 1,000 miles an hour in a mostly uncharted universe. It makes you wonder, at least.”

“An encouragement to subtract can be seen in various forms of the so-called slow movement, which include calls to reduce the length of the standard workweek from five days to four. The idea is a good one, but as Cal Newport argues in Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout, many employees aren’t burdened by how many hours they work, but by how much work they’re expected to do during them. What we need, Newport says, is to rethink how we measure productivity—as well as to reduce the volume of work employees have to do in the first place.”

“This is how to remember a moment: You write it down as soon as it is over. Spare no detail—the weather, the color of the walls, every single thing that’s said (you will not accurately recall every single thing that’s spoken: Record all conversations you have). It would be quicker to photograph the moment, of course. It would be easier, less emotionally taxing. But writing it all down, as much as you can bear, reminds you, in the way a photograph can’t, that you were there inside the experience, trying to make some meaning out of it.”

“Growth is often associated with moving on. It’s a commonly posed question, for example, whether one should ever vacation in the same place twice. If travel broadens the mind, the argument goes, then a travel itinerary should be as broad as the horizon. There’s such a lot of the world to see: Why go back again?”

“Without ugliness, without imperfection, beauty spins frictionless; it gains no purchase on the world. Real, unabashed ugliness should be celebrated. One aspires to be beautiful, and one desires lovely things. But ugliness is the stuff of life.”

“Tackiness may require unabashed love, but it also rewards those who get the references—and the current mood. As Karl Lagerfeld once proclaimed, ‘Trendy is the last stage before tacky.’ The tack-o-meter is constantly adjusting. It moves with the times, chewing up the past to recalibrate our present tastes.”

“I made it a point to greet it every morning, to be sure it was still doing its thing. For as long as it is waving, it gives me a sense of assurance that all is well. An unexpected, yet very real relationship had been unwittingly established, and it taught me that value of things is not determined by price, but through time and meaning.”

“For the less zealous, a silent city may come with trade-offs. Enforced quiet—imposed, say, through city-wide regulations—is far from a cure-all. Not only would it limit activity and deflate the vitality of urban life, but it would inevitably shrink that third space between home and work. The street—the liminal zone of travel, meetups and play—would be reduced to quiet desolation.”

“The lonely have often found comfort outdoors. In The Living Mountain, an unfussy meditation on Scotland’s Cairngorm mountains, Nan Shepherd writes: ‘Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.’”

“Paper straws are still carbon- and energy-intensive to produce, and several types are not even recyclable, unlike their plastic counterparts. This is ecological gesture politics, in which a tiny concession (straws make up 0.025% of ocean plastics) precludes more meaningful sacrifices, such as giving up driving, flying or eating meat.”

“Cohen’s argument is not a pep talk that promises losers that ‘the only way is up.’ That way of thinking plays into the same unhelpful binary: By optimistically imagining a win on the horizon, we are still acting out our fear of loss. Instead, salvation lies in humility, which Cohen describes as ‘the consequence of an awareness that truth doesn’t belong to us.’ Like loss, humility is characterized by an absence: of pride, self-regard, entitlement. This absence humbles us when we lose, and when we win—as Cohen writes, ‘Humility reminds us of the large portion of arbitrariness that determines any personal success or failure.’”

“Selling out is an accusation that is only leveled at certain artists. One Direction, Cher and Stephen King are immune from such critique. The notion of a sellout relies on the belief that particular artists owe something to their audiences or wider community; something that is incompatible with certain forms of commercial success. A change in style could be considered selling out, by switching your self-penned confessional folksy ballads for a synth-heavy pop sound, for instance, or by eschewing the art house cinema that built your reputation to direct a superhero movie.”

“The promise of improved access and low-cost democratization sits uncomfortably alongside the fact that digital mental health has become a multibillion-dollar industry, according to an estimate by the American Psychiatric Association. Many of these apps are free, on the face of it, but at what cost?”

“Filling personal spaces with purely decorative, cheaply made trinkets—or tchotchkes, knickknacks, bric-a-brac, junk—is as American as apple pie. ‘Over time, Americans have decided—as individuals, as members of groups, and as a society—to embrace not just materialism itself but materials with a certain shoddy complexion,’ writes author Wendy A. Woloson in her book Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America.”

“Dance is associated with the emotional pinnacles of the human experience—love, joy, lust, art, insanity. Watching someone dance, or doing it ourselves, inspires emotions we struggle to access otherwise. This complicated relationship between movement and feeling is part of what makes us human. It makes sense, then, that artists and researchers working with robotics view the creation of a dancing robot as a meaningful tech frontier: How better to prove the skillful yet fundamentally unthreatening potential of humanoids than getting them to do the Mashed Potato?”