Minimalism, Hoarding and Dependencies
What is older than wisdom and truer than words?
People always ask what you would take if your house were on fire. But what about the opposite question? What would you leave? What would you be secretly relieved was burnt to ashes?
A friend of mine told me once that when moving house, he had this wish that the removal van would get lost. That it would just never arrive, and he would be left with a perfectly blank, empty house. A domestic Apple Store, all empty cupboards and clear surfaces, with perhaps the single MacBook that he had carried in his rucksack.
I flip-flop between a minimalism and hoarding.
There is something oppressive about possessions. Possessions require more possessions. My books need a bookcase. I need tools to assemble the bookcase. Then a toolbox to store the tools. Then a cupboard to store the toolbox. It’s the old lady who swallowed a fly all over again.
So, I think about the inverse of that old favourite question: if you were rushing out of your burning house, what would you be quietly relieved was going up in flames? What would sooth you as it crackled in the heat?
I wonder if it’s more interesting to ask than answer. If, in fact, the asking is all we need: to remind ourselves that there are other thought experiments that are less about acquisition and pride. If asking what you would keep makes you appreciate that item more, perhaps asking what you would leave to burn lets you admit what items are dragging you down. Maybe it lets you delight in scarcity rather than excess - a shift our climate changing world requires us to make, but which I see no movement towards.
I see the lure of an empty house. But then someone arrives with a bottle of wine, and you need a corkscrew. And a glass to put the wine in. And before you know it, you’ve repurchased everything that was in the removal van that disappeared.
Framed a different way, these are dependencies. They are things you depend on, even though you don’t really want them. Extra clutter you add to your life to be able to do the things you want to do.
When we build software, we have dependencies. We have to run code on something. So even if we write in the lowest level possible assembly code, we still depend on there being a computer, and power and probably the internet. And that’s before we get to browsers and libraries and frameworks. Code to generate charts and logins and buttons. All lovely, but all brittle.
Dependencies are killers. They break, they conflict, they need maintaining. We don’t fully understand them as we don’t want them in and of themselves, we have them only to do something else, so we pay as little attention to them as we can get away with. But each one drags us down, in the same way the toast rack and toolbox and screwdrivers do.
There is a quote I think of sometimes:
When they burned the library of Alexandria the crowd cheered in horrible joy. They understood that there was something older than wisdom, and it was fire, and something truer than words, and it was ashes.
This comes from Frog K, on Twitter in reply to a message about updating the Guitar Center logo. I struggle to see this as a spur of the moment quip, rather than an allusion to Philocles or something. There is, perhaps, a whole world of profundity in Twitter replies and Reddit posts and TikTok comments.
But it leaves me thinking about the horrible joy of destruction. And makes me wonder if perhaps it is a feeling worth pursuing sometimes. When I find I can delete some dependencies, when I find I can remove some old code, when I spot the toast rack at the bottom of the cupboard and pop it into the bag for the charity shop, I feel something truer than possessions. And I cheer in horrible joy.
Elsewhere
Where has all the productivity gone? by John Cook (2 minutes)
On the subject of questions that are more interesting than the answers, this short read (and Twitter thread it is based on) is another example:
We really should be in the middle of a golden age of productivity. Within living memory, computers did not exist. Photocopiers did not exist. *Backspace* did not exist. You had to type it all by hand.
If you're doing information work, relative to your ancestors who worked with papyrus, paper, or typewriter, you are a golden god surfing on a sea of electrons. You can make things happen in seconds that would have taken them weeks, if they could do them at all.
So given this… why do we get so little done? In answering this, Cook leans towards what Balaji Srinivasan calls “The great dissipation. The productivity has been dissipated on things like forms, compliance, process.”
But I’m also struck by his other point:
Maybe we’re seeing that technological bottlenecks were not as important as we thought. For example, it’s easier to write a novel using Microsoft Word than using a manual typewriter, but not that much easier. MS Word makes the physical work easier, but most of the effort is mental. […] Technology calls our bluff. Improvements in technology show us that technology wasn’t the obstacle that we thought it was.
This is perhaps similar to my feelings about where productivity has gone. Interactions between humans, figuring out what you want to do, getting everyone to agree - these remain whether you’re using papyrus or iPad. In fact, I sometimes wonder about the inefficiencies of scale (or technology). Could it be that being able to do things faster makes people value those things less or pay less attention to the real drivers of speed? Could it be that connecting everyone together results in a net decrease?
Also of note, this thread is from four years ago, yet the question is maybe even more prescient now than it was then.
I Spent 72 (Uncomfortable) Hours Without A Phone. This Is What It Taught Me by Daisy Jones in Vogue (4 minutes)
“In recent years, conversations around tech addiction have dampened somewhat,” Jones writes, which I somewhat disagree with. There was a programme on Radio 4 a few weeks ago about persuading teenagers to go for a month without a mobile phone, but, she adds, this is “not because it’s no longer concerning – it is – but because it’s too late.” That I do agree with.
I tried to relax and enjoy this new phone-free world. It was uncomfortable, obviously. Every time I was left alone, which is when I’d usually check my phone, I instead just stared numbly into space. If I saw something I liked, I couldn’t take a photo of it, so I had to remember it with my brain.
This she manages to get used to, however, the “admin” required to navigate life without a phone does not go away.
This is not a world that’s built for phone-free life. Without a phone, taxis have to be booked at actual ranks (which are few and far between). You have to check maps in order to get to a location. […] You might find yourself locked out of everything, meaning you have to transfer money physically via the bank. […] What I was left with was a strange taste about the wider world at large. The realisation that, even if I wanted to spend less time on my phone, I actually couldn’t.
To answer the previous question, is this, perhaps, where our productivity has gone?
Driving Too Fast in San Francisco in Popular Film by Kit Buckley from his newsletter The Unbearable Weight (8 minutes)
“I am going to watch every single Nicolas Cage film,” is the description of this newsletter, in a line that describes it exactly while not quite doing it justice. Each article is inspired by a Nicolas Cage film, I think it would be fair to say. Each one is named after one, and I believe the result of him watching one. But they’re not really about the films. Sometimes they are almost poems, playful and digressive. Sometimes they are philosophical. This one, takes a detour to ponder the nature of car chases in movies:
A car chase in the modern conception is not a struggle of car versus car (or driver versus driver) but instead one of car versus environment. Car chases work best in environments ill-suited for cars. We want to see the car squeak through an alley so narrow that it snaps both of the sideview mirrors off.
The car chase is pure choreography: the speedster ballet, the truck dressage, the handbrake pirouette, the pratfall through the fruit cart, the doffing of hubcaps and side mirrors, the storefront window grand jeté.
It’s fun not just for the insights, but for the oblique way they are linked or inspired by Nic Cage films. This conceit gives something so structureless a weird sort of structure, or at the very least a framing.
As ever, thanks for reading, and I’ll see you next time,
Simon