Decouplement
Current location:
Milwaukee, WI, USA
Reading:
Termination Shock
by Neal Stephenson
Listening:
Merry Go Round
by Jenny Owen Youngs
(if you have a moment, reply with your own 3-item status)
Decouplement
I initially feel an unnerving isolation when I'm disconnected from the wider world.
Such moments are often forced upon me by circumstance: when mid-flight over a vast expanse of ocean or tucked betwixt bags and chickens and goats while rambling through mountainous South American landscapes in a run-down but resilient autobús.
I ultimately enjoy and even look forward to these periods of decouplement, but they don't materialize as organically and consistently as they once did—and I think this is true for many of us.
We live at a moment in which tapping into the collective human unconsciousness via our omnipresent, always-on devices is effortless; it's sometimes more difficult to disconnect than connect.
This is amazing and wonderful for many reasons, but it's also discombobulating for brains that weren't built for such protracted cognitive conjoining.
I personally do some of my best thinking and creating during my off-grid moments, but it can be a struggle to remind (and maybe even convince) myself this is the case.
When my connection with the enmeshed mob of e-linked humanity is severed, I slip in and out of fidgety focus before eventually descending deeply and satisfyingly into the cozy embrace of near-meditative contemplation.
Without external factors to forcibly amputate me from the globe-straddling body of our species, though, achieving this relative stillness is more of a task; it's an effort—an ambition—rather than a circumstance emerging, weather-like, from a swirl of variables over which I lack any influence.
After a period of implacable integration I begin to feel deficient of deep-thinking and I'm strained by the slow accumulation of psychological baggage. My thoughts become more superficial and simplistic, and concerns I would normally address before they become issues accrete like plaque on a tooth.
I enjoy learning—celebrate it!—and consider exposure to works of art, bodies of knowledge, and differing perspectives to be fundamental to a well-rounded, cognitively nutritious diet.
But I also understand these things are (valuable, important) qualia gleaned from other people, and while such inputs are worthy of consumption and consideration and possible integration into our own thoughts and perspectives, without periods of absorbed introspection and single-brain digression we may lose ourselves in the collective and curb our capacity to contribute to our species' shared accumulation of cultural riches.
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Projects
Select, recent works from across my project portfolio.
Aspiring Generalist: Depth and Breadth
Brain Lenses: Proximity Bias
I Will Read To You: The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
Let’s Know Things: Pandemic Travel
Curiosity Weekly: Dec 7, 2021
One Sentence News: Dec 8, 2021 (podcast version)
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Interesting & Useful
Some things to click (I curate & share similar links weekly via Curiosity Weekly and daily on Twitter):
I absolutely love these sorts of ultra-specific tools/resources.
Lightning & Thunderstorms Maps
Real-time global map of lightning strikes and storms.
Amazing use of Google Street Maps-style 360-degree exploration tools.
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Outro
I've been thinking a lot about how much of me and my processing takes place and exists beyond my body, of late.
I think this is partially the consequence of being so immersed in poetry right now (a solitary activity, if heavily influenced by existing work), but I've also been playing around with a few services that allow you to stream video games without needing a console or other significant hardware: all the processing is done remotely and your button-pushes are sent through the internet to big racks of computers somewhere, which then send the real-time results (in graphic form) back to your screen, all in an eye-blink.
It's an approach to gaming (and processing more broadly) that's been around for several years, but I finally have a speedy-enough connection to try it out—and it's not bad! Pretty neat. Not sure if I'll use it beyond the fiddling-around period, but the concept works well, all things considered.
That said, this is also one more previously local thing that's being shifted elsewhere: geographically removed from my physical context but accessible when needed. And there are a lot of pros and cons to that sort of cloud-enabled abstraction.
What's going on in your world at the moment? Fiddling around with anything you'd be interested in sharing with a stranger from the internet?
Consider sending me a quick hello and telling me something about yourself. I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)
You can reach me by replying directly to this newsletter, or at colin@exilelifestyle.com.
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