Welcome back: The Shape of Hard Work to Come
Is sounding like your newsletter has not been written by a machine.
(This newsletter goes out to 348 subscribers.)
Dear reader,
It has been a while.
I know that I want to start writing again on a more regular basis. My first inclination was to just start all over again. It seems almost unfair to import email addresses from a different service, but here we are. You have given me your consent once, and I knowingly exploit the opportunity to commit myself. To commit myself to writing regularly again. Even as I type this, I strongly feel the urge to delete the sentence and ask myself: why are you doing this to yourself? Don't you have enough other things to do? Has your toddler been letting you sleep too much (too much is now four uninterrupted hours) and this makes you feel like you have superhuman abilities?
Let's start with the obvious: I do not have superhuman abilities, but I have committed myself to hard work.
Some of you may have seen the quote by Martin Shaw on my social media channels. I started using Readwise as intended and now I rediscover daily what amazing things I have already read.
I commented, in my usual snappy self, that this captures quite well the Age of Artificial Intelligence. I wrote on LinkedIn:
As we resurface present history at an ever-accelerating pace, we find fewer moments dedicated to genuine self-expression. Despite this, the allure of technology remains undeniable. The dopamine rush we experience from watching machines efficiently handle the mundanities of everyday life is too compelling to resist.
I received a total of seven likes out of 704 impressions.
The thing about Readwise is: it works with spaced repetition. It reminds me of the things that I have highlighted before. I get a daily notification asking me to look through seven different highlights. In there, I can decide to keep a highlight – which I do in most cases as reassurance about my own past ability to highlight essential passages in an article, essay, book, or even a podcast – or dismiss one. Not only that, I can signal, by the power invested in me by the design team of Readwise, to actually love a highlight as a way to signal my undying commitment to the specific passage glowing at me on the screen.
Do not consider this passage a mockery of the service. I really do enjoy this. Today's services are all designed to jolt us with newness. Progress has become not a trajectory but the pull request of an API. Despite the myriad services out there designed to help us make better notes, the world doesn't seem to want us to read them somehow. Why consume something that you wrote yesterday if you can spend time reading something that someone else published today? Readwise is different. It helps me maintain a relationship with things that I have invested both time and an emotional response to before. Through returning to those highlights, I can reflect on my relationship to what has been said and chart a new perspective for today. In Foresight, the point is not to predict a future but to bring different futures to life to explore our relationship to a possible outcome. Revisiting past ideas works pretty much the same way.
But the interesting thing happened when I opened up the article itself, the one by Martin Shaw. It was published last year in Emergence Magazine and, if it wasn't obvious so far, I do recommend reading it.
Anyway.
The point is… a section right at the beginning of the essay caught my eye that I didn't highlight before, and it is this one:
As we walk our questions into a troubled future, storyteller and mythologist Martin Shaw invites us to subvert today's voices of certainty and do the hard work of opening to mystery.
Do the hard work. And I decided that I should. That's why you are reading this.
Now, I understand that you might have changed your mind about receiving a newsletter or even this newsletter. I understand. Feel free to unsubscribe. There will no repercussions other than me writing down your name and … I’m joking.
Quite a few things have happened since the last time you received a piece of my writing in your inbox. In the next few weeks, I will attempt to sketch those out and contextualize them. The point is not to feel like you are reading my journal but to create a narrative that might help you navigate yours. I will attempt this, knowing that writing will help me navigate mine.