Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #86

From healthy group chats to sustainable shit, the importance of doing nothing, extraordinary news, the mediocrity trap, and onboarding nature

THIS WEEK ↓
🕳️ Rabbit Holes: Group Chats // Sustainable Shit // Doing Nothing
🤯 Reframings: Extraordinary News // Reading The World // Unproductive Love // Mediocrity Trap
🎨 Creations: Onboarding Nature // Oreo Kintsugi // I Came By Train

Rabbit Holes 🕳️

As always, 3 perspective-shifting rabbit holes to rewild your mind:

#1 💬 Group Chats Are The Healthy Social Network We Were Promised

We wanted the internet to connect us more, but instead, we got social networks that are flooded with entertainment, sell us ads, make us addicted, overwhelm us, and polarize us. However, group chats might be the hidden oasis of the social internet and a model for using digital technologies to enhance human connection rather than degrade it.

“All this [group chat] communication is, at the most basic level, just a matter of distributing data to differently curated selections of recipients, yet the precise curation has an immense psychological effect on what it is we feel we’re doing; it is not unlike the difference between nervously cracking jokes at a table of five new friends and pouring our hearts out to people we’ve known for a decade. Those dynamics translate, slightly distorted and muted, through the screen. […]

The group chat can sustain indefinitely this thin wire of connectedness. Some might argue that this feeling is a deception, another screen-based way to stave off loneliness; I would say instead that it glows with potential. Because there is no practical end to the group chat, it can be a means of keeping the lights on, constellating a set of people who would otherwise be entirely separate. […]

And so this is something else technology has added to our human experience. I cannot claim that it is entirely good, but I can say that it feels — to me, on balance — additive, constructive rather than isolating. In the landscape of group chats, your social world tingles with life, in all directions, at all times, at your literal and proverbial fingertips. “Conversation” expands into something else altogether, something bigger and more chaotic and less clearly defined, but which is humming along beside me and with me even as I am supposed to be writing this right now.”

» The New York Times Magazine | How Group Chats Rule The World by Sophia Hagney

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#2 💩 The Shitty Part Of Sustainability

We take from the soil but don’t give anything back. That’s basically the gist of this article, which explores the actual value of human excrement— which was cutely called “night soil” back in the day—and how we broke nature’s circularity by literally flushing it away, damaging nature even more in the process. Holy crap!

“As our bananas, apples, lettuce, corn and rice grow, they extract nutrients from the land. That food is then trucked, shipped and flown to where we live – and where we eat it and excrete it. Yet, we don’t return that organic matter back to where we got it from […]. We don’t drive, sail or fly to return this organic bounty to the land. We flush it down the drain. […]

So, because we don’t ship our shit back to where the food comes from, we keep perpetuating the redistribution of nutrients on the planet. Soils grow barren, so we use synthetic fertiliser, which isn’t anywhere near as good as the real shit, and also is very polluting to produce. In our quest to rid ourselves from our dangerous dark matter, we’ve broken the essential rules and laws of Mother Nature. By taking our poo out of the equation, we altered not only our agriculture, but the entire planet’s ecology. […]

We spend our efforts and money to remove the dangerous filth rather than to acquire and use a superb product of our metabolic bodies. And that’s the leap of thinking we must achieve, as a 21st-century society, to fix the problem fully.

We have to de-stigmatise our own dark matter. […] When business people and entrepreneurs are once again bickering about who gets to lay their hands on humanity’s oldest gross domestic product, we’ll know for sure that we have closed our metabolic rift.”

» Aeon | The power of shit by Lina Zeldovich

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#3 🦥 Doing Nothing Is More Important Than Ever

We’ve already explored the importance of different views on work and productivity and the role of slowing down or disengagement. This article takes it another mind-bending step further by investigating how our distorted obsession with productivity influences our (mis)understanding of the non-human world. It ultimately asks the question: “When human productivity is the cause of so much damage, why is it so often presented as a solution for salvaging the planet?”

“If idle time is needed to awaken our political selves, as Slouka suggests, it must be crucial to considering what citizenship might mean in a broader sense, beyond just a human context. The undirected attention that idleness allows can leave space for other relations, for other politics, for other ways of being. […]

Mostly, the work of non-human entities—animal, plant, fungus, mineral, element—remains illegible to us. This is not for lack of effort: ecologists and physiologists and statisticians map territories and count offspring and track mates, overlay mealtimes and prey densities, measure brain activity and body fat and stomach enzymes. The result is ordered groups and categories of activity, confidently enumerated and named and labelled in terms of productivity. Least flycatchers engaged in aerial acrobatics to snag insects on the wing is sustenance, from this perspective, not entertainment. Wilson’s warblers hopping in the shrub birch branches, munching on little green inchworms, are engaged in functional foraging and not gustatory pleasure. The spruce grouse my black lab flushes from the woods is fleeing for survival, not searching for solitude and hermetic peace.

But are we really seeing these lives in their entirety? The porcupine trundling along the trail; the lynx with its unhurried paces along the road; the moose, when not browsing willow, not surveying for wolves, just standing in the brush looking out at the mountains?

When we think we understand the imperatives of the world, we constrain the possibilities for deeper understanding. Our interpretations of the actions of others reflect our own judgments; we observe what aligns with our expectations. When we hold this confidence, we act as though we can rule and organize the lives of those around us. What is lost in that certainty is both the autonomy of the lives of others and space for their self-determination—for their anarchy, in both idle and productive forms.”

» The Walrus | Doing Nothing Has Never Been More Important by Kate Neville

🤯 Reframings

A few short reframings that I’ve recently stumbled across:

“The information in your news feeds is curated for interest or surprise. As such, the news is not a record of the ordinary but the extraordinary—a reflection not of reality but of precisely that which is uncharacteristic of reality.” – Gurwinder

“Walking lets you read the world — and much like the slow, contemplative mental processes involved in reading a book, the pace with which one moves through the world while walking allows for a different, deliberative kind of seeing. You notice more. You think more.” – Audrey Watters

“Rather than focusing on increasing productivity, it may be worth asking, ‘What would I be delighted to spend time on, even if it went slowly?’ Direct your energy toward figuring out how to start what you want to do rather than thinking about how to shorten what you don't want to do.” – James Clear

“About half of my friends kind of hate their jobs, so they're moderately unhappy most of the time, but never unhappy enough to leave. This is the mediocrity trap: situations that are bad-but-not-too-bad keep you forever in their orbit because they never inspire the frustration it takes to achieve escape velocity. […] Terrible situations, once exited, often become funny stories or proud memories. Mediocre situations, long languished in, simply become Lost Years—boring to both live through and talk about […].” – Adam Mastroianni

🎨 Creations

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking innovations:

A Toolkit For Onboarding Nature // Oreo Kintsugi // A Council For Redistributing A Fortune // 'I Came By Train' Climate Heroes // A Fashion Collection Than Can Only Be Make With One’s Pre-Loved Clothes By Local Tailors // One Less Car

That’s it for this week’s Rabbit Holes issue!

Did you enjoy this week’s issue, with its slightly updated format and new section? If so, please give it a ❤️ (yes, you can like this e-mail) and share it on social media!

Thanks for supporting my work! 😊

Thomas