Staggeringly Valuable

July 10, 2024

3-Item Status

Current location: Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA
Reading: The Strategic Foresight Book by the IFRC & Solferino Academy
Listening: Untitled by Kate Bollinger

Quick Notes

Buy Me a Coffee: If you’d like to support my work, you can make a one-off donation here (becoming a paid subscriber to this newsletter does the same thing, but monthly instead of just once).

Poll: Last week’s poll suggests a whole lot of us opt to just write notes down (no love for the audio note-takers), though a few people just use their brains (a nice method if you can make it work!). This week’s poll is about physical activity.

(If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status and/or Quick Notes about what’s happening in your life.)

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Staggeringly Valuable

I probably use my laptop, a 2021 MacBook Pro, more than any other tool I own. It enables and amplifies my efforts in countless ways, and as a consequence I consider the few thousands dollars I paid for it to be money well-spent.

I don’t drive my car very often—I only really use it for roadtrips. But it doesn’t require much upkeep, cost me a relative pittance to acquire (as cars go), and makes those overland jaunts to far-flung locales feasible, as otherwise I’d have to spend a fortune on rental cars to get where mass-transit options won’t take me; so I put my little 2007 Prius in the “money well-spent” category, as well.

I could probably count on two hands the things I’ve bought that I consider to be staggeringly valuable, in the sense that they empower me in important ways, or add something truly vital to my life.

Most of these items, because of how fundamental they’ve become to how I live and operate, are also nearly invisible: I only really think about my car when it needs an oil change or when I’m prepping it for a trip, and my computer is just the technological appendage I use to make and distribute things, requiring about as much focused consideration as my elbow or eyebrow.

In contrast, I’ve been fortunate to have experienced a large number of things I would consider to be valuable at this scale, and while some of these experiences are travel-related, many of them are less swashbuckling and Instagrammable in nature, and more subdued and internal.

Learning to cook, for instance, didn’t cost me much of anything, but the value I’ve derived from those initial “let’s figure this out” efforts (and the small investments I’ve made in cooking gear over the years) have paid out such spectacular dividends it would be difficult to estimate their value.

Similarly, learning how to read research papers, deciding to get better at interacting and communicating with people (back in my awkward middle school years), and figuring out how to keep my expenses low and how to remain debt-free are all undertakings from which I’ve benefitted far out of proportion to the investments I made in them, to the point where the interest I’ve gleaned has become a core background element of my life.

I own things that are flashier and super-useful-in-the-moment, and I’ve done things—like my many travels all over the place—that are likewise more impressive in some contexts, and which have also helped me garner all sorts of lessons and fresh (to me) perspectives.

But the priceless stuff, in my experience at least, also tends to be simple and humble; things, experiences, and learnings that are obvious in retrospect, become invisible day-to-day, and which are worth far more than their initial cost, over time.

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If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by buying me a coffee.

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Interesting Links

• How Do You Build Tunnels and Bridges Underwater?

  Because people generally can’t build underwater, there are two options: Do the building in the open and move it underwater, or temporarily transform the underwater site into a dry one.

  For the first option, crews typically build parts of the structure on dry land and then sink them into place. For instance, the Ted Williams Tunnel in Boston was constructed in sections in a shipyard. Workers dredged the tunnel’s future path in Boston Harbor, cleaning mud and other refuse out of the way. Then they placed the sealed segments along the prepared trench. Once the segments were connected, they opened the ends of the segments to create one long, continuous tube. Finally, the tunnel was covered with soil and rock. Very little of the construction process was actually done underwater.

• It’s Getting Harder to Die

  Legality aside, most people feel that it is ethical to withdraw or refuse life-sustaining treatments, especially when the burdens of such interventions outweigh the benefits. Imagine a scenario in which Jack’s lungs fail and are unlikely ever to recover. He requires a mechanical ventilator to do the work of the lungs and is able to go home with the machine ventilating through a tracheostomy hole in his neck. He lives this way for some years, but as complications accumulate and he grows frailer, he decides that he no longer wants to live on the machine. His medical specialists are certain that he will die relatively quickly without it, and together they plan to withdraw the ventilator while providing medication to mitigate Jack’s inevitable sensation of air hunger.

• Can AI Rethink Art? Should It?

  In a new work by the French artist Pierre Huyghe, robots powered by artificial intelligence film the unburied remains of a man, and periodically position objects next to it in a ceremony that only they seem to understand. The scene takes place in the Atacama Desert in Chile, one of the planet’s oldest and driest deserts.

(If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.)

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Poll

This week, I’d like you to tell me something about your workout habits. Exercise, in this context, means just about any physical activity you do to stay healthy: so sports, long walks, weight training, running, etc.

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VERY early iteration of my audio recording setup, back before I knew what I was doing (2015). I’m in the process of editing/producing recently re-recorded audiobooks of my early books (using my far superior current setup and much better understanding of how all this stuff works). Part of why I wanted to do these re-recordings is that some of those initial audiobooks just don’t sound very good, and this gave me the excuse to go back through them, make some corrections and edits (updating the ebooks and paperbacks to new editions), and release audio versions I can be happy to promote (folks who bought the old ones will have access to the new ones automatically, when they’re available).

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Outro

Following up from last week, I’m planning to attend my first CrossFit class tomorrow, and I’m looking into dance class options for later this month.

I’m also integrating some new leg/foot/ankle stretches into my routine, as it looks like I’ve got plantar fasciitis in my left foot—just a mild case right now, so I’m trying to nip that in the bud before it becomes a bigger deal. I’m planning to do a shorter run today, not wanting to upset my foot-fascia, and I’ll be taking things relatively easy in that regard until I’m sure I’ve got a framework in place for nudging that back in the right direction.

Thanks for all the CrossFit/lifting advice this past week! I’m generally happy with my existing exercise routine, but I’m looking forward to trying some new things, and hopefully learning how to do some of the current stuff better and more purposefully.

Got a favorite dance I should look into? A favorite stretch for my poor, strained left foot? Drop me a message about that (or whatever’s on your mind), and/or take a moment to introduce yourself—I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send me a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication at: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211

Or hit me up via the usual methods: Instagram/Threads, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or a clock in the forest.

How the square root of 2 became a number.