Dynamic Hypocrisy

I flip-flop on growth strategies. I always liked video games that strategic and about building up things. Like Civilization or Pokemon. But I always waver on if I should build a balanced roster, or if I should drive it all into one category to be best of.

My natural inclination is to balance it out. Smooth out the stats. If I had a D&D character with ability levels, it feels nice to have it all even (and high, of course.)

But in the same vein, I know that a Barbarian class really shouldn’t be messing with stats that don’t boost strength. Or taking away magical power from a wizard to feed into strength. So then I want to stat-max, and optimize for the role at-hand.

Which brings me to my own life. I can’t seem to be at ease with either strategy.

Sometimes I think, “Well, I’m an UX designer, I should hone that.” So I’ll buy books, read articles, look for conferences, etc.

But ever creeping and slowly, I’ll buy a podcasting microphone, or try out some new CSS on CodePen. And then start illustrating on my iPad.

And nice people will rebut with “But T-shaped people are good!” You should have a wide range of skills with one deep one.

However, no one ever really specifies how tall or wide your T should be.

Anyhoos, where I am at right now is I’m looking at a two-pronged specialty. A pi-shaped person as you will with UX and coding. But what I see as particularly saggy is business and sales.

I think it’s a third heat that could really open up options for me. But it’s always been my weakest skill set. And it bristles my sensibilities that I’ve avoided it forever.

The idea of “selling someone something” never felt right. Not that it’s wrong, so it’s all me.

That said, I took the first step, and got a book on negotiation. I figure even if I never do get into the business side, there can’t be any downsides in improving my ability to communicate the things I need to quantity that I think I’m worth. So here we go.

I’m reminded recently of what Jalen Rose talked about a while back. There are people in your life that add, some that subtract, some that multiply, and some that divide.

Finding people who add or multiply.

It’s hard to find those types. To meet new people, to feel them out, and then to invest time and energy into building something together.

But it might be harder actually to get rid of people.

Especially after you have memories and stories and experiences together. It’s like you tell everyone that those don’t matter anymore.

Early on, it was a bit easier to do. Acquaintances or occasional hangs, those people almost naturally slid out.

Recently though, I’ve had trouble being firm on a particular person. They’ve been around for a very long time, and have been there for a lot of key moments in my life. So there’s that.

But there’s an interesting wrinkle where I can’t quite convince myself that they haven’t been adding/multiplying for awhile now, and where they’re at in life–they won’t be.

And I mean that mutually. I’m very happy with where I’m at, and how I’ve grown, and the values I’ve established. And I’m sure they are too with themselves.

However, we’ve diverged in what we value now. So what we bring to each other don’t fit what each other needs.

Now there’s a difference than bringing a new perspective. Not like I want an echo chamber of my own opinions. That sounds horrific. But there is something about a perspective that while makes sense within one context, can be hinder or distract within another context.

And thinking it through that’s where we’re at, but I’m having a hell of a time convincing my emotional side about it. So that’s where I’m at. I’m staring at a pretty straightforward principle, I’ve assessed a specific situation, but the execution is harder than I anticipated.

We’re now seeing politicking and international policy-building being conducted on Twitter. And while the current flavor feels net bad / negative–I do wonder if there’s upside.

I think about a future state where borders are less strictly defined. That we define ourselves more as an overall collective. It feels more chaotic and vulnerable and uncouth. But I imagine it as us acting as a global brain. Where neurons fire seemingly just as randomly with our urges and desires and goals and plans all shouting inside our heads. But outwardly as a whole, we appear more cohesive.

I wonder if this electronic firings over the fiber optic cables is analogous, and we start envisioning ourselves as one organism. The human race as a one animal, and we act as the cells and organs that power it.

I read a book that isn’t worth mentioning because it wasn’t very good, but it’s preface had a nugget.

The author was contextualizing his work (aka preempting giving excuses for over-extended observations and opinions.)

And as a gist, he noted that even though he was about to explore in-depth a particular subset of a topic–the fact that he wrote a whole book about it doesn’t mean that the phenomenon is particular common or applicable in most cases.

In other words, if he was writing about say a rare tropical disease and in-detail, it doesn’t mean that disease affect anything widely.

Which is I think is a humbling reminder about the things I think about, or even my job.

That even if I spend a week researching about a HTML button, and then present it, and get it in the sprint–it doesn’t mean that button matters all that much in the grand scheme of things.

Or if I’m arguing about something or spend an evening debating it over beers–it doesn’t mean it’s important at all.

Exploring something deeply doesn’t suddenly make it important, it just means I or someone spent a lot of time on it. That’s it.

Starting with a small slice. Twitter. People talk about toxic Twitter or bad Twitter. And how it used to be great, but now it’s not.

But I wonder if good Twitter is still there. But proportionate ratio of bad Twitter outgrew good Twitter. As if the trees didn’t grow as fast as the weeds around it.

Broadening that to say Reddit or YouTube or the internet at-large. I wonder if the always been good internet as it always been, but it gets lost in the fray.

Not sure what it all means, but I think there’s a worthwhile distinction to make between “good existing” versus “all the good went away.”

Since the latter implies throwing it away, while the former gives us something to work with. More robust filters or discovery or a motivation to find a better way to connect.

I think about Imgur. Started as an image repository for Reddit threads. But it grew into its own social platform. With comments and voting and moderating. For me, it tends to be a softer side of Reddit. More frivolous and convivial, and its community self-aware of that.

For me, it shows me that harder-to-see “good” internet that was there when I first dialed-in from my NetZero internet account.

But also, I see all these free tutorial and critique videos from the illustration/drawing community on YouTube. Something that I had to pay tuition back in college, these people provide for free. And between all the contributors, you get the diverse set of opinions and techniques that would take years in the traditional world.

So again, the nuance might be small, but might be worthwhile holding onto while it seems like the internet is turning into a tire fire.

I don’t know where I’m going with this, but let’s say humans get an infinite lease. We’ll exist until the end of time for sure.

Given that span of time, we still write love songs and make movies and discuss things on reddit and paint paintings.

What will the be moment like when we say all the things and write all the songs and film every movie?

What is creativity the day after we make all the things, and express all the thoughts?

Is it Zeno’s paradox? That we would just write about how we wrote about that everything? And thus the distance to totality always grows ever so with every artifact made?

Is the final inch to totality just news then? To remark on what just literally happened as time ticks forward? Is that art? Is that a creative act?

What happens if we manage to get meta about it, and pre-write these phenomenons and cover that gap too?

What is the upper bound of creativity? And what would the thing or situation that moves beyond that boundary or ultimately holds it in place?

Dystopia aside, I wonder if the microphone will be the most important part on a TV moving forward.

Imagine an AI that vaguely knows story structure. Intro, the problem, climax, resolution.

Generate a few random human models (or not, depends on the Netflix user’s preferences) Blend together the averages of the films from the selected genre, and deep-fake the models talking the compiled dialog.

The clincher: the microphone is on.

The slapstick humor is only getting chuckles? Transition to puns and clever wordplay.

The breathing isn’t heavy enough for the horror film? Quickly slide in the villain lurking in the background.

It becomes like a comedian at a club. Quietly adjusting and moving with the crowd. Shutting down hecklers, and molding the tempo and mood.

The AI not spying to gather data on advertising tendencies, but rather listening to create a two-hour or eight-hour binge experience that fits the audience.

The web is as good as it’s ever been in terms of design. Code literacy and CMS’s has raised the general floor of websites and apps that make sense and good for users.

And yet I find myself a bit…bored? Dulled?

That seems harsh or jaded, and probably that’s a component.

But it made me think about why I felt that. It’s not just the sameness of everything. I think visually and interaction-wise, there’s plenty of colleagues doing great and fun experiments.

If I were to interrogate it then I want to point at a narrow expression of tactility. In both a pseudo-physical sense (it’s all glass on our phones after all) and an emotional sense.

We’re in a clean and rounded corner world. Even Google’s Material Design with its layered sheets metaphor—those layers move too cleanly and too slippery. The most brutalist rejection moves too smoothly on those instagram posts and dribbble shots.

Nothing feels rough. Or scratchy. Or fuzzy. Or sandy. Sometimes someone will mess with a bezier animation curve and it’ll be bouncy or oozy. But those are still cousins of liquid-ly smoothness.

On the other end, an emotional tactility. It’s born out of the previous observation, but from a limited vocabulary or palette—the expression and resonance will be similarly constrained.

Think of a famous art piece of a tea cup but it’s covered in fur. It’s disconcerting, it’s tense, it’s solidly rebellious. It’s something the web as a medium can’t do. Maybe with content or the message, but not with it the pixels and movement itself.

As we’re finding with its nature, this era of technology snuck up on us. Exponential and logarithmic growth with tech has elevated our world in surprisingly ways.

But it was led us to a novel issue to deal with: keeping up with it.

When I was a young designer, every new version of Photoshop was exciting. Finding out the new features, what changed, what was gotten rid of. All fun things to poke at. But as time wears on, it’s harder to take the time to invest into this exploration.

Or rather it’s hard to balance the time to execute known projects with existing knowledge while processing the changes that will influence future projects.

Anyways, this is permeating all industries. You would hope your doctor is up-to-date, but the time required to learn just all the new drugs is ever-long and sisyphean. Much less keeping on-point with new diseases that spread globally and locally.

To pile on, the structures that are to teach us to live to in this world, namely schools seem tragically inadequate. In one, comprehending this new world is a new thing. Much less, have we the chance to boil down what everything actually means, and codify it into something useful.

What we’re left with is a societal anxiety of feeling that don’t understand the world we live in.

24-hour news is great on paper to keep everyone aware until you realize without the tools to process that news–it negatively impacts instead of helping.

I’m reminded about an old hip-hop song, Sage Francis’ “Sea Lion.” In that song, he goes “You gave me the stone, gave me the chisel // Didn’t say how to hold em”

And it seems like we’re in the throes of that. We in an era of plenty when it comes to tools (social media, machine learning, global logistics, shared assets like ride-sharing, etc.) but nobody’s telling us how to really use them in a constructive way. (Constructive in the the purest sense too: how to build something useful for us and our lives.)

I’ve been trying to figure out the relationship between happiness, joy, contentment, and satisfaction.

Growing up in America meant I was taught to “pursue happiness.” That was the goal.

But what is happiness? What was enough happiness?

The answer seems to shift culture to culture, generation to generation, even individual to individual.

And is our ecosystem robust enough to give everyone their definition of happiness? But I digress.

I’ve been thinking that maybe happiness is a composite feeling. It might be more of a state than a feeling. That maybe it’s a combination of joy, contentment, and satisfaction.

Joy all the time is unsustainable like always sprinting instead of walking.

Contentment lives on the razor’s edge of pleasant quiet and stagnant compromise.

While satisfaction doesn’t seem to be a conventional feeling. It seems like an outcome than an experience.

But anyways, it’s interesting when you start mixing them though. Joy sprinkled with contentment seems like salt in a cake batter. It makes the sweetness brighter.

Contentment with satisfaction is like a blanket on a couch.

So I wonder if some dynamic ratio of these things can add up to being happy. Some ratio of quiet to loud, repose to exuberance, night skies to fireworks.

And if so, then the next task is even bigger: finding your preferred ratio over the course of your changing life.