Changing Your Personality, Content and Storms
Why you should drink seven thousand glasses of water
Don’t tell anyone, but I was disappointed by how little damage storm Eunice did.
I didn’t want anyone to die or be hurt. I didn’t want anyone to be out of pocket or to lose something important. It was a very particular type of carnage I craved. I wanted dramatic (but harmless) destruction. I wanted great branches to be shaken from trees. I wanted things to be ripped from the earth; uprooted and hurled around. I wanted to bask in the majesty of nature.
Instead, I saw a wheelie bin blown over and the neighbours’ patio furniture nudged to the side. Standing at the window, I was disappointed by the few small branches that fluttered from the trees. Quite a big log fell in my neighbours’ garden, and I felt jealous.
I think this is why, last year, I saw so many people chucking rocks at the ice in the park. We like things breaking. We want to marvel at nature. We want to be in awe of how strong it is. We want spectacle.
It’s a funny old emotion, this desire to see stupendous, but harmless chaos. I wonder if this is part of the reason we were so interested in the Ever Given when it became stuck in the Suez Canal. As disruptive as that was, it was a distant, abstract sort of awfulness. The real losers were insurance companies, and none of us mind them losing out.
We could be shocked at the size of the boat and just how stuck it was. We could marvel at the backlog of other boats building up on either side. It was a problem we could understand. Climate change is vague and nebulous. Systemic injustice is sort of fiddly with no easy solution. Neither of those problems is like watching a big tree fall over and block a road. That’s refreshingly easy to understand: the wind blew a tree over. It’s blocking the road. The council is going to have to move it (maybe with a big crane. Even better news!)
But I greeted the news of Russia invading Ukraine rather differently. There’s an old joke from The Day Today about the news welcoming war with studio graphics prepped in excitement. Given the build-up and with all the news sites turning on their live reporting features, this is more true than ever. But there’s no excitement about war in the way there is about a big storm. War is messy and complex and nasty and scary and horrible. And it’s all too depressing that after years of not having to worry about nuclear weapons, we suddenly have to think about them again.
Perhaps more depressing is that everything carries on as normal. Plane routes are changed to avoid danger. While people die, the Financial Times reports that GBP has slid 0.5% against USD. We turn and look in the other direction while carrying on with our lives.
I realise I’ve rather written myself into a corner here, because now I too am demonstrating this abrupt, crass, tonal shift from considering war to continuing with our lives - a tonal shift demonstrated best, perhaps, by this ad break on CNN. Life continues. There may be a war, but people still need to make money from ads.
1. Anil Dash, That broken tech/content culture cycle: a biting and spot-on summary of how the social-media-dominated tech landscape exploits and twists and misdirects to drive profits at the expense of society.
He expresses this as a set of “rules” - ones that no one has ever consciously set out to follow, but which have become the de facto unspoken operating model for big tech:
Build a platform which relies on cultural creation as its core value, but which only sees itself as a technology platform. Stick to this insistence on being solely a “neutral” tech company in every aspect of decision-making, policy, hiring and operations, except for your public advertising, where the message is entirely about creativity and expression.
[…]
Double down on funding the worst voices on your platform. Call it “free speech”, and make sure that nobody internally points out that truly defending free speech would have entailed protecting those early marginalized creators who made your platform credible in the first place.
2. In the Atlantic, I Gave Myself Three Months to Change My Personality by Olga Khazan.
I’ve never really liked my personality, and other people don’t like it either. In grad school, a partner and I were assigned to write fake obituaries for each other by interviewing our families and friends. The nicest thing my partner could shake out of my loved ones was that I “really enjoy grocery shopping.”
I’m always interested in the idea of personality change, partly because I don’t like the idea of believing too much in a fixed “personality”. “I can’t change,” we say, when someone criticizes us, “that’s my personality.” I think it’s always best to be suspicious of ideas that let us off the hook from trying something difficult. This article is a fun romp that effortlessly manages to cram in quite a bit of research and thought into what seems like an amusing anecdote.
3. In Vice, Inside the Super Positive Community of Competitive YouTube Water Drinkers by Mack Lamoureux.
"I'm dating a girl now and it came up in the first 10 minutes we were talking—like, it's pretty important to me,” Harchick told VICE. “It's something I think about a lot. We went on a trip, we went to a hotel and one of the things I was most excited about is there was a brand of water in the hotel room that I had never tasted before.
Believe me when I say, it’s a whole thing with the Drinkers. At the time of writing, these channels have combined for 30,791 videos. That number is constantly increasing, and they even have a coded Google Doc to keep a running tally of total waters drank.
Sounding a bit like the obligatory “happy story” at the end of the email, I enjoyed this article about people who upload videos of themselves drinking water to YouTube, which manages to be funny without mocking the people involved. I particularly like that they call the glasses of water they drink “waters”.
Until next time,
Simon