See ya NYC, I’ve moved to CDMX

I loved this thread on shared spaces in NYC though, will look to check it out when I revist:

Not officially of course - still working for the Man, but that might change soon too…

Thoughts during these times of change

Social Media

There’s a rejection among some users of social media against the feeling to be perfect on media - with a defined niche of apps like BeReal, (others?). People are rebelling against the mass transformation of social media into another platform for advertisement, into another commodification of yet another at first beloved way for people to connect and get together.

What can be done? Reduce the friction of spontaneous posting of photos. Google Photos automatically creates stories and collages of media using AI, why not create the highlights and send it off into the world (and possibly bring life to Google+ again? I never got into it but can see how it might be filled with content this go around).

And with the growth of sentiment against the perfect, what’s cool may be becoming less “influencer-y”, and more unfiltered. There’s certainly a ton of hate for people who live with a fake online persona, but hate doesn’t really cause action, just a feeling of elitism.

muerte

Death is when there are no connections left. Like garbage collection in a programming language, when all references to a person are gone, can that person truly be alive or within the world? Death is first a mental death, especially for the rich, who are the ones who start to prefer death over the seeming eternity of a monotonous life. I refer to this passage on suicide:

“The so-called ‘psychotically depressed’ person who tries to kill herself doesn’t do so out of quote ‘hopelessness’ or any abstract conviction that life’s assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire’s flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It’s not desiring the fall; it’s terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling ‘Don’t!’ and ‘Hang on!’, can understand the jump. Not really. You’d have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling.”

― David Foster Wallace

The question then is, how do buildings start to burn? How do people work themselves into a mental death within their lifetimes - do we see behaviors of suicide in other animals, of martyrdom or heroics, or of sacrifice for the greater good? Suppose it’s truly unique in that only humans commit suicide when the world is no longer available for them to believe in. Is that what sentience is? How did hope evolve, or what was the reason for it? For all the pagan rituals, blood sacrifices, any superstition, all involve some measure of hope. Culture and tradition then form around it, but that idea is built on the foundations of cause and effect. If I act in this certain way, then rewards will happen. Even basic animals understand that, so do they hope as well? Looking into any puppy’s eyes while sitting for a treat can confirm that yes, dogs hope, but why, and how can someone help the people who’ve forgotten what it’s like to look forward again?

slice of life

On a night plane ride from CDMX to sayulita with mo and vera. Just thinking about Fred again, and what an inspiration he’s been to me and people so close to me. There’s a overwhelming amount of shared love for what’s he’s been able to find and create during this time of strangeness in our lives. Also thinking about how going through a flight is much more transformative. Trains may be top as far as calm and peaceful and top for seeing a country for what it really is, but planes feel like rebirth sometimes. Is my body getting ionized by the radiation in the sky, and simultaneously being rebuilt, molecule by molecule? It’’s hard to say, but a plane feels like to me, a digital nomad’s confessor - the lifting of the window flap, the feeling of just myself noise canceling away in illuminated tunnels atop the clouds, close to heaven.