Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #89

From transcending the rat race to utilitarian arts, willing to be seen, all-escape keyboards, content slop and pasta grannies

If you share my newsletter on LinkedIn and tag me, you’ll get a quick spotlight in an upcoming issue.

This is exactly what Karen Rosenkranz did! Karen is a trend forecaster and author of both the book City Quitters: Creative Pioneers Pursuing Post-Urban Life and the Substack City Quitters in which she explores cultural shifts and post-urban life, particularly the potential of creative rural regeneration. Her Substack is perfect for those considering escaping the urban rat race and moving to and reviving the countryside. Because I’m one of these people, I’ve actually been subscribed to Karen’s Substack for a few weeks now, so I can highly recommend checking it out – my favorite article is “The home as a place of production”.

Again, if you enjoy reading Creative Destruction and want to be featured here as well, simply share my newsletter on LinkedIn and tag me. 😉

Now on to this week’s issue:

THIS WEEK ↓
🕳️ Rabbit Holes: From Escaping To Transcending The Rat Race
🤯 Reframings: Utilitarian Arts // Willing To Be Seen // UBI As A Catalyst // Good At Optimizing 
🎨 Creations: All-ESC Keyboard // Pasta Grannies // Removed

“Everything Everywhere All at Once
might make for a catchy movie title,
but it’s no way to run our lives.”

Michael Gentle in How the iPhone stole our free time

Rabbit Holes 🕳️

As always, 3 thought-provok…..

No, actually I wanna test something new here! A while back, I read about the power of subtraction versus adding stuff + some of you told me that my newsletter can, at times, be a bit overwhelming. So, as I’m anyway going into a bit of a summer slowdown, here are not three slightly overwhelming rabbit holes but just one super impactful and crispy one:

🐀 From Escaping To Transcending The Rat Race

When we talk about leaving the rat race, we often dream of the freedom that follows—the freedom to do whatever we want. But as this article points out, chasing freedom is just another trap and what we might actually want isn’t freedom to do whatever we want, but freedom from the game of competition – from wanting what everyone else wants.

“Our culture likes escapism: First, we quit our jobs to escape from offices. Then, we make our own jobs to escape from freedom. We leave one cage only to find ourselves in another, some completely made by our own hands. Under the compulsion of performance and production, freedom is impossible. The solopreneur who quits his job to work for himself becomes the controller of his productivity, tyrannizing himself through optimization. […]

Job quitters tend to have a Moses complex: they feel the need to free their people from corporate pharaohs by convincing them to ‘leave the matrix’ and that the pathless desert path is better than the nine-to-five because there is nothing better than having the freedom to do whatever one wants. Create content. Start a podcast. Build an email list. The land flowing with milk and honey is found somewhere on the Internet. I was once a job-quitting Moses. Now, one year later, I can confidently tell you that I was terribly wrong about many things.

Truth is, there is no job (or lack thereof) that solves your impending sense of doom; satisfaction doesn’t depend on one particular employer or work-life balance. Instead, it’s the attitude we have towards work that needs to change—it’s the only thing we can change. The only question more important than “How do I get the prize” is “Do I even want the prize.” […]

At the core of the great resignation, what people truly want is not freedom to do whatever they want, but freedom from competition.

The ultimate escape—transcendence—is vertical, not horizontal.

You do not escape your competition by moving further away from them, you can only escape them by moving above them. […] What the job quitter is truly looking for, whether or not they’re aware of it, is a reference point where all other things can derive meaning from. […]

It’s incredibly difficult to know what to want and transcend competition. Erich Fromm says, “Modern man lives under the illusion that he knows ‘what he wants,’ while he actually wants what he is supposed to want.” […] We should be more aware of what it is that we are willing to roll up our sleeves and pull late nights for. Don’t just accept any ready-made goal as your own. […]

So, stop looking around and look up.”

» Pluripotent | Transcending the Rat Race by Sherry Ning

🤯 Reframings

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

“Creative expression is often used as a gateway to something more practical, and is rarely accepted as something practical in itself. This is why parents will rush to place their kids on long waitlists for art and music programs, but won’t encourage them to become artists or musicians as they age. […] With this view, the arts are utilitarian at best, burdensome at worst.” Lawrence Yeo

“Looking at a person is different from looking at a thing because a person is looking back at you. I’m getting to know you at the same time you’re getting to know me. To truly see someone else, you have to be willing to be seen.” David Brooks in A Humanist Manifesto

“UBI should not be just about survival or consumer spending. Instead, it should be seen as a catalyst for driving technological change. […] People are more likely to participate in the technological transition positively if they feel secure and supported, including reskilling, upskilling, or even becoming entrepreneurs, thereby creating complementary services and products. In this view, UBI is a requirement for, not a consequence of, technological transition.” Azeem Azhar in 💸 Turning UBI on its head

“Content slop has three important characteristics. The first being that, to the user, the viewer, the customer, it feels worthless. This might be because it was clearly generated in bulk by a machine or because of how much of that particular content is being created. The next important feature of slop is that it feels forced upon us, whether by a corporation or an algorithm. […] But the last feature is the most crucial. It not only feels worthless and ubiquitous, it also feels optimized to be so.” Ryan Broderick

🎨 Creations

Some hand-picked, particularly thought-provoking innovations and creations:

Growing Shoes // All-Escape Keyboard // The Tiny Pod // Removed by Erik Pickersgill // Project Color Corps // Pasta Grannies // Urchin Futures

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

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Thank you so much for supporting my work! 😊

Thomas