Everything is minimal. Everything is spare. Even landscaping. Everything built is "midcentury" and "modern". There is no fat left to trim.
Whatever begins a new aesthetic movement will not make economic sense, because it will involve us valuing things beyond the economic, again.
I find it weird that the well-intentioned war on stuff, instead of casting out bad stuff, turned to things like the tiny house movement. Minimalism: your-life-this-time edition.
I want busier, greener, more vital things. There's no vitality in all this new art. It lacks scent and taste.
One of the reasons minimalism and anti-stuff ism seems insane is that a studio full of materials feels quite blissful to me.
People living in pods/etc forgo crafting in their own homes. That seems wrong.
People should try to make more of the things they use.
Everyone used to make their own dresses, spoons, tables, pillowcases, half the things they touched daily.
Great strides in economic efficiency = now we make them for 99 cents out of glue.
But things you touch should be sacred. Imagine eating every day out of a bowl your friend made. Boko's bowl. Imagine your wife embroidered your winter blanket. Imagine the little fort you make for your child, like the one that was made for you.
So I don't like minimalism. I love objects. We care too little for them.
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I truly have no idea how other people spend their time and money, sometimes it seems baffling to me when I get glimpses, so it's hard to know just how differently I (we) live. I do not think I'm particularly prolific.
The answer is we just try stuff. If it doesn't work you can always try something else.
Simi wanted to learn to dye, so she reads about it, puts down the guide and tries it. (you guys have been saving your acorns and onion skins to boil, right?)
There's no substitute for doing.
We got some chickens and I built a coop after learning the basics of building from videos and just fooling around with materials. I had no idea what I was doing. This doesn't always go well, 8 of our chickens died in a coyote attack due to poor pen design
Consuming news online is spiritually unwholesome. If you absolutely must read the news you should go down the street and pay with coins for a paper. Then keep walking and read it in a cafe. When a friend comes in you'll remember how little the news matters and put it down.
even better just buy one newspaper, ever, and read it over and over for a few years every time you feel compelled for news. This may cure you.
the guy wandering alleys downtown picking up used cigarettes to find the good ones left has keener powers of observation than a person who is compelled to be 'informed' by the news
There's a similar problem with newspapers. People read them thinking they will go from being uninformed to informed, instead of simply becoming misinformed.
Most newspapers do not trade in information, but in specific worldview confirmations. A couple examples follow.
What do you think about the general views of economists on school vouchers? The narration wants you to think that economist are, on-net, against vouchers, so they couch it as "only a third agree" But...
It turns out 36% agree, 37% uncertain, and 18% disagree. The honest framing is not at all "only a third agree", its really that *twice as many economists agree with vouchers than disagree, plus a wide amount of uncertainty.*
I wonder how much crazy guerilla marketing goes completely unnoticed. Imagine e.g. trying to drive the adoption of something like Cash App: you have ppl reply to *every single* FB marketplace and craigslist ad with "I want this, do you use Cash App?" and then never message again.
Would it increase adoption? Some percent of them would download the app! Would anyone be able to tell you were doing it? Potentially never, unless people talk.
So my question is how many campaigns do crazy footwork like this, where we might never know unless people talked?
Reddit (famously) faked users early on, which is probably common and the only adjacent real life example I can think of.
What's wrong: Early on one must cultivate sense, experience, and money, this advice attempts to gain the third at the expense of the first two. It's 💯% defensive advice and assumes no upside to risk, so following it means you forgo all asymmetric upsides
Maxing out 401Ks and IRAs supposes you have no idea what else to do with the money (which may be true) but step 1 is to look for what else your money could be doing.