Dynamic Hypocrisy

My life is peppered with smart people. It’s a great thing.

But some of them are like me, just smart enough to be dumb.

Like a colleague who’s smart enough to know about emotional states and empathy. But too dumb to create meaningful action from it, so it just ends up being pity, and circular exercise in rationalizing someone else’s decisions. 

A little bit of knowledge is rather dangerous. It can lack enough context to know when it’s actually applicable or if something else is going on. Or give just enough confidence to make a decision that’s not correct at all.

And the worst is that being “well-meaning” can be a defensive shield around the whole thing. It was an innocent mistake. But it still fucked shit up. So if you’re smart enough to be dumb, do the smart thing and take ownership of your actions.

Said me to me.

The Rubik’s Cube is an old puzzle. A cube segmented into 3×3 squares on each face, you can freely rotate the little shapes to attain the goal of making each side a solid color. 

At least that’s the stated goal.

But is it the state it’s supposed to be in?

Think of this way: is there an ideal human?

Can we rotate and twist ourselves into the shape of an ideal human? What does that human even look like? 

Or is a few mis-matched colored squares okay? How many mismatches before we aren’t ideal anymore?

Or is fair to say that sometimes you need different shaped humans? A scientist shape for cancer research, an athlete shape for basketball, a wet shape for fishing.

Isn’t it far more interesting to see every possible shape of human, and see where it fits?

The solution of the cube isn’t the final state, but rather the twisting and rotating. 

Musing off the last topic, as an individual–I wonder what motivates me to do work. 

I’ve been fortunate to be validated by a career of which my skills seem to fit and I find pleasant. 

But is there more to that?

I was listening to a pod episode of Dave Chang (that chef that started Momofuku) and David Choe talk about their addictions and their traumas. How that fueled their work whether it was this fire to be the best, or to prove other wrongs.

It reinforces what I call the Manic Genius. Van Gogh was one of the first ones I heard about. A brilliant painter that was driven by passion and emotion. Great for painting, but terrible for keeping ears attached to your head.

I also come to age a little past the Kurt Cobain era. The mythical 27 number, the age when many musicians tragically die. (Cobain, Winehouse, Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix)

It’d be easy to write off that pod episode as another log on that legend. But they twisted it, by the end they were pushing for emotional well-being. They lamented the passing of another fellow friend, Anthony Bourdain. Who they said was another man of addiction moving from heroin to workaholicism. 

So what do I make of this for my own career? I have little desire to be best. I want to do right by the client. But being the best at creating seems…I don’t know, dumb? To what metric does that even mean? Is it novel discovery or a deeper understanding? It’s one thing if it’s track & field (just faster than the other person), but design or art or food or dance or theatre? 

At the same time, I don’t have ghosts to prove anything to. My family’s happy with my occupation, nobody frowns on it. We’re in an era post-Steve Jobs and the glorification of “DESIGN.” 

Thus without external factors, what’s left is internal. 

So…what’s inside of me?  

(FYI: I have no answers.)

“It’s just business.”

It seemed pretty clear looking to the past. 5pm was the line between the job and the family/friends. What happens with blood and relations is personal, and will be dealt with.

But things that happen from 9am to 5pm, well it’s just business. Someone getting the credit, promotions, raises, quitting, it’s just business.

What does it mean nowadays though? 

In the age of collaboration, where your job should be meaningful, and our brand is being curated 24/7–can we afford to things to be just business?

Should it be? Or should some delineations be maintained from the past? 

As this/my/our age bracket moves into managerial and ownership positions, we are actively shaping the very rules that were foisted upon us. 

At least in the design world, the tools and methodologies being sold seem to eschew hierarchy and position. DESIGN THINKING promotes anonymous post-it notes of ideas, and democratic voting of ideas. 

No hiding in the shadows with Machiavellian politics. 

But what are the limits? Flat hierarchy gets inefficient past 50 people. And there’s only so many projects and so many chances to lead and direct. Hard decisions have to be made, and feelings will affected. 

Will business remain just business? (Reminder: I have no answers.)

I tie my ego to advice giving. It’s not great, I don’t really want it to, I didn’t even notice until recently. And I’m working to disentangling it, but until it I get really fidgetly until the other person praises me. 

Did they make use of it? Was it useful? Was it not? Why? Did they implement correctly? Or was the situation too different? How was it different? Maybe I have another idea. 

Or did they think less of me? Do I have to rebuild this relationship now? How bad is it?

Hrm, I could use some advice on this.

Twitch and Instagram Stories may not be super wide-wide, but I’m surprised I’m not hearing about more live concerts being held by musicians/bands. 

It seems like a matter of time before Twitch subscribers get special live show streams. Or you can tip the streamer for ad hoc collaborations. Or shared hosting streams. 

Seems like an easy venue for marketing and revenue with not too much upkeep. 

Imagining a world where everyone uses augmented vision. 

The natural version one is the user super-imposing what they want onto someone else. 

Maybe everyone wears red. Maybe everyone is wearing Nike. Maybe everyone is naked (and then we add government regulation at that point.)

But at a point that everyone has it then we get an inflection point where it reverses. We are able to project how we want to look to someone else. 

 Barring the technology, we there now. We dress the way we want, and when we’re in public–people see that but really they see what they want to see anyways. (Naked?) 

What is different though is theoretically how that other person sees you is now savable. A snapshot of their neurons fired when they saw you can be archived and stored somewhere.

1) Who owns that? It’s your image, but it’s their perception. Are you allowed to get that perception from them? 

2) Would you want to see that? Would you want to see how your lover sees you over the years? Does it stay bright? Does it match with your own self-image? Does it get blurry over time? More drab? Does your face distort? Or start to look like someone else? 

3) But also what would mean to get all the snapshots? To see an array of mirrors? Would it be helpful? Or just a fun house of twisted glass? 

4) What if you could send yourself out to the public, and get immediate feedback of how people see you? 

and 5) Are we already there? #instagram 

I don’t have an answer here. But when is it time to end a friendship?

When is it an unhealthy thing in your life? Versus your own mood being fickle or stubborn? 

What makes it worth keeping? Is it the weight of time spent? Or is it better to cut loose, and invest your time and energy into others? 

When are disagreements a good way to maintain wide perspectives, and when are they distractions from your central truth and goals? 

How does respect play into it? What does respect mean?

When is it not fun anymore? But when is tough love needed?

 

Not an uncommon thought as a kid, but I did dream that when I grew up — I’d finally have the freedom to really play videogames as much as I wanted.

Two decades later, I’m still playing games. But it would probably be far less than my childhood counterpart would have thought.

In a way, I am playing as much as I want, but it’s a far cry from the weekend binges of games. 

It’s interesting in how even when we aim for a goal, our conceptions of those goals can vary greatly over the course of time. 

Nothing new here, but mostly a placeholder for practicing it.

It’s the notion of approaching something as an amateur or blank slate to avoid embedding assumptions too early into a project. 

Much easier to read and agree than to do in practice.

Especially under a time crunch, it’s far easier to rely on previous experience. 

We’ll see how I do moving forward.