Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #83

From attention fetish to emotional divestment, losing the dining room, over 600 ideas from ministry of imagination, and why people in large cities have large egos

Hi there!

Another week, another curation of thought-provoking rabbit holes! BUT before that, please help me improve this newsletter by completing a brief reader survey:

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And now, enjoy this week’s rabbit holes:

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THIS WEEK → 👀 Attention Fetish 🚶‍♂️ Emotional Divestment 🍽️ Losing The Dining Room ➕ Ministry of Imagination 🚿 Why People In Large Cities Have Large Egos

Rabbit Holes 🕳️

As always, here are three perspective-shifting ideas to rewild your mind and help you create a better world, plus some extras below. Enjoy!

#1 👀 Attention Fetish

This is a super interesting framing that relates to my article about Away Land and how we continue to hide externalities in more and more areas of our lives. Tara McMullin argues below that this is also happening in media, specifically when it comes to storytelling, which has become less about the people, personal or political, and almost entirely about the shock, the anger, the wow, etc. – “our stories cease to be our stories and become instruments for attracting attention.”

“Attention becomes a fetish. […]

Marx uses the notion of commodity fetishism to describe how we imbue commodities with inherent value rather than perceiving the value of a commodity as derived from the human labor used to produce it.

A commodity could be a symbol for the people who made it, the time they labored, and the craft they practiced. But what happens when we see the people behind a commodity? Well, we start to get pretty concerned about their welfare. The focus on commodities—especially consumer goods—allows us to ignore the plight of workers and the impact on the planet.

In fact, I remember a DoorDash commercial from a few years back that featured groceries delivering themselves to someone's front door. That's commodity fetishism in a nutshell—pun intended. Delivery person? What delivery person?!

If commodity fetishism entails locating the value of a good in that good rather than in the labor used to create it, I want to propose that attention fetishism locates the value of story or insight in the attention it creates rather than what that story or insight actually illuminates.

Stories do have incredible value. But when a story is shaped and molded in such a way as to maximize attention, it tends to erase the people and personal, social, and political stakes at its center. We see the person on screen or in our feed, but what we're really focused on is the shock, the heartbreak, the transformation.

As story subjects and story producers, we should consider the impact of attention fetishism on our own identities and the potential for alienation from our own stories.”

» Unpacking The Attention Fetish by Tara McMullin

#2 🚶‍♂️ Emotional Divestment

If you’ve been baffled by Sunday’s European Union elections' outcome, the piece below will give you a thought-provoking puzzle piece that provides a deeper explanation for why people are increasingly voting far right-wing. I am reminded of Hannah Arendt’s famous words: “The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never made up their minds to be or do either good or evil.” By the way, all of this also links to my piece Why We Should Embrace Our Collective Depression.

“Our around-the-clock overexposure to global human suffering, our daily feed of what we once considered catastrophic events — political, ecological, cultural — when combined with diminished attention spans, smaller and smaller chunks of content, and baked-in cross-platform imperatives to remain emotionally removed from any given person, place, or event, adds up to a kind of merciless sterility and an impatience with meatspace that we’ve never known before.

Instead of slow, steady, face-to-face interactions with other humans, most of us are interrupted by phone alarms and alerts and besieged by rapid video-based media feeds, shorter blocks of text, shorter songs, movies that feel like a frenetic action-based montages, news analyses focused on headlines alone, TikTok summaries of current events (and celebrity beefs and skin products) replacing newspapers, Instagram posts replacing love letters, podcasts replacing books, mood boards replacing hobbies, zooms replacing meet ups, texts replacing phone calls, articles about ten signs of a narcissist replacing therapy, life hacks replacing feelings, ghosting replacing break ups.

These phenomena aren’t matters of indifference or bad taste. This is what arises from our increasingly unnatural experience of community, of culture, of public life, of identity, of bodies in space. […]

And when each new calamity unfolds — disaster strikes, tempers boil over, frustration explodes into violence — instead of hearing steady, principled adults greet those strong emotions fearlessly in public with direct talk of communicating openly, committing to clear ideals, and supporting differences of opinion as a means of steering through conflict and crisis and dark times, we are treated instead to the personal calculus of divestment: public figures resigning, backing away, announcing that, essentially, engagement isn’t worth it. […]

Saying anything is saying too much now.”

» The Rise of Emotional Divestment by Heather Havrilesky

#3 🍽️ Losing The Dining Room

You might be familiar with the loss of third places (e.g., cafes, parks, bars, libraries, playgrounds, etc.) and its connection to rising loneliness rates. This trend seems to be now spilling over to our homes with the loss of the dining room due to new family and gender norms, the housing crises, and what I’d call a binary world that’s either fixated on productivity (eating lunch at the home office desk) or on entertainment (eating dinner on the couch while watching Netflix).

“The classic, walled-off dining room is getting harder to find in new single-family houses. It won’t be missed by many. Americans now tend to eat in spaces that double as kitchens or living rooms—a small price to pay for making the most of their square footage.

But in many new apartments, even a space to put a table and chairs is absent. Eating is relegated to couches and bedrooms, and hosting a meal has become virtually impossible. This isn’t simply a response to consumer preferences. The housing crisis—and the arbitrary regulations that fuel it—is killing off places to eat whether we like it or not, designing loneliness into American floor plans. […]

If dining space is merging with other rooms in single-family homes, it’s vanishing altogether from newly constructed apartments. Americans might not mind what’s happening to their houses, but the evolution of apartments is a more complicated story.

“For the most part, apartments are built for Netflix and chill,” Bobby Fijan, a real-estate developer and floor-plan expert, told me. “The reason the dining room is disappearing is that we are allocating [our] limited space to bedrooms and walk-in closets.” Even though we’re dining at home more and more—going to restaurants peaked in 2000—many new apartments offer only a kitchen island as an obvious place to eat. […]

As households and dining spaces have contracted, the number of people eating alone has grown. According to a 2015 report by the Food Marketing Institute, nearly half the time we spend eating is spent in isolation, a central factor in America’s loneliness epidemic and a correlate to a range of physical- and mental-health problems. […]

In an age when Americans are spending less and less time with one another, a table and some chairs could be just what we need.”

» America’s Loneliness Has a Concrete Explanation by M. Nolan Gray

➕ Extras

Rob Hopkins hosted the From What If to What Next podcast from May 2020 until March 2024, as well as a side podcast called the Ministry of Imagination, in which his super interesting guests were invited to choose 3 policies that would rapidly accelerate our transition to a better world. The result was over 600 deeply thoughtful, considered, audacious, and ambitious policies, which Rob now put together into a huge manifesto. Check out this amazing piece and get inspired:

Ministry of Imagination: An imagination-based manifesto for times that need one

🚿 Shower Thoughts

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Thomas

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