Category: Ideas

Erin got a record player for Christmas, so I also have access to one. We each picked out albums from our parents to bring back to Connecticut and stopped into a local record shop last month. Her dad’s copy of Elton John’s Honky Cat was hilariously warped—it sounded like the left and right speakers were playing a quarter-beat different from each other. At the shop, she found a copy of an original press of Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours that the shop proprietor had forgotten about. It had a slight scratch, so he priced it at five dollars.

Vinyl is terrible, except for all the ways that it’s great. Most of those ways amount to coming full circle in an attention-starved economy where billionaires who thought Snow Crash had some pretty good ideas for the future are fighting for each second of our lives, fully aware that we’re near to bursting yet desperate for the next second to be the best second we’ve experienced that day. Beyond that, it’s about the vibe and process.

All this to say, putting a vinyl record on a turntable is an intentional act. Those records contain albums that are entire pieces of art, comprising individual songs that are each a bit of art but none of which capture the complete work. Experiencing art as a whole, accepting it as it’s provided, is powerful and often requires patience and an open mind. That becomes more important as the temporality of the art increases.

Scuttlebutt is objectively an excellent word. It’s fun to say, has a playful connotation that lands better than “gossip,” and is a great example of a multisyllabic word that is even more amusing when you switch up the consonants that begin each half. Buttlescutt.

I wanted to understand where this word came from.

Merlin Mann’s Wisdom Project is an excellent collection of pithy and useful observations about the world. They range from the purely practical, to the advisory, to the somewhat absurd. It’s worth a read.

I follow a Mastodon Bot that posts something from the document every six hours, and save any that catch my eye. This one resonated with me:

Try to save some parts of your life to be just for you. Including some special things that you’re happy about or are even a little proud of. If your only private things are shameful things, you will become very sad and will eventually despise your own company.

Merlin Mann

This message is increasingly acute in a world where it’s easy to externalize experiences, activities, and values. We’re encouraged to create horcruxes across social media which changes our self-perception and ability to fully understand who we are beyond what we share. This is accelerated among those whose livelihood requires them to be online, particularly if their mainly compromises their daily lives.

But the situation doesn’t need to be nearly this extreme to be impactful. If we define our worth in this world solely by factors that others nominally control, we have no sway over how we view ourselves. While we can hope to surround ourselves by well-meaning friends and lovely individuals, it’s still unhealthy to lose that sense of self by spreading it around. We each need ways to focus on ourselves and gain a better understanding of who we are independent of those around us. We can often define much of our lives by how we relate to others, but the way those relationships pan out are a product of who we intrinsically are.

In college, I started seeing low-effort headlines claiming yet another corporate industry death at the hands of millennial. A typical example is the casual sit-down restaurant, and you can see a compilation of such claims (along with subsequent refutations) in this CB Insights post. I’d rather focus on the broader phenomenon and the various fallacies of thinking that lead to these poor and useless critiques of an entire generation.