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And a Happy New Year! One of the more thought-provoking things I watched over the holidays was a talk recommended to me by a DD reader who responded to the concept of ‘resonance’ in DD267.
In this talk, German sociologist Hartmut Rosa sums up his theory of how we experience time in ways that leave us disconnected and alienated, and how resonance can counteract this. (Start at the 1:22 minute mark.)
He begins by distinguishing three different levels of our temporal experience. The first is our everyday sense of time: the space filled by our routines and the many daily to-dos we all juggle. The second level is our biographical time – the period from our birth to our death. This includes, for example, how we think about our career or our retirement. And then there is the third level: how our lives fit into the historical backdrop – how we contend with the ‘digital age’ or the age of globalisation, for example.
Rosa argues that in order to experience a good life, all three temporal horizons need to be integrated and form a coherent whole. He calls this “a healthy sense of temporality”. What we do on a daily basis has to fit in with how we want to spend our lives, which also has to fit in with the background structure – the age – of our time. If this mutual integration does not occur, we’re left feeling alienated and disconnected.
This disconnection occurs on the back of what Rosa calls “the process of social acceleration”. We live in a system that needs perpetual growth and technological and cultural innovation to function. Within this system, the pace of life is constantly accelerating (see also DD262), demanding that we keep reinventing ourselves and move ever faster just to keep up with the status quo.
In order to stay afloat, we start each day in a mode of aggression, trying to regain control of a never-ending stream of demands on our time. On our hamster wheels, we lose perspective on other temporal horizons until what we do day to day is out of sync with what we want for our lives.
Interestingly, Rosa thinks that depression or burnout can be understood as an extreme case of this kind of alienation. In depression, we feel no connection to the past or the future and instead experience time as frozen or suspended.
To overcome this sense of alienation, Rosa believes that simply slowing down is not enough. We need a new, resonant way of being in the world. This means relating to the world not through aggression but through deliberate listening and answering, through affect and emotion.
Think of a person or an idea or a film that has evoked powerful feelings of connection, that has touched you deeply and stirred almost spiritual elements in you. That’s you listening. The second part of resonance is answering to this experience, applying it and letting it guide your life.
A resonant experience makes you feel alive. It gives time not only meaning but a certain vibrancy. Resonance offers the kind of self-efficacy that enables us to connect our temporal horizons and to resist the dominant logic of aggression and alienation.
His concept of resonance deserves more unpacking, but I will stop here for the sake of brevity. You can dig deeper by picking up Rosa’s books or watching more of his many talks online. –
Kai
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Apps & Sites
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Clean-up & analytics for Gmail
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If you use Gmail (paid or free), Inbox Zero allows you to set up rules and automations that help reduce your email load. Handy analytics show you what emails you don’t read regularly, so they can be filtered or unsubscribed from. This tool needs to be able to read your emails, although their code is open source and therefore relatively transparent. Friends of DD enjoy a 10% discount.
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Simplified social network
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“No followers. No ads. No algorithms. No brands. Just your closest circles!” That’s how Sitch describes itself. You connect with friends (either individually or within a circle) and share short messages and emojis to update each other.
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Online interview magazine
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I’m surprised I hadn’t come across The Talks before. “Every week The Talks publishes an interview and portrait with a leading creative voice of our times, a curated selection of interviews with personalities from the fields of art, film, fashion, music, and sports.” It’s been running since 2011, so there are hundreds of interviews in the archive.
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Do you enjoy watching short films? Shortverse’s catalogue of almost 10,000 shorts can be filtered by genre, year, country, duration, and even technique. If you prefer a more curated selection, check out Short of the Week, made by the same team.
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Favourite Books: John Forbes Graeber-Scrugham
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by Ruth Ozeki
Ruth tells her own story of moving from a big city to an island in BC, Canada, alongside a fictional diary that she ‘finds on a beach’ of a girl sharing her journey and struggles with moving back to Japan from Silicon Valley. I love the style of memoir meets magical realism and themes of native/foreignness.
by Ayn Rand
If you read any of Ayn’s books, this is the one – simply because it’s a concise narrative (~100 page novella) of what she later expanded on in other books. It’s set in a dystopian future where technological advancements are rolled back and are carefully controlled. Then two people discover that there’s more to life than what they’ve been told.
by June Burn
This autobiography is about June and her husband moving out to Washington state and their few decades of life living along the west coast of America: homesteading on a tiny island, starting a family singing troupe, touring the US in a covered wagon. I like to think of my life as having many chapters like hers. And her sense of adventure and wonder inspire me to consider what’s next for me and my family.
by Frank Herbert
If you’re skeptical about this one, don’t worry. I was too after starting the book twice then quitting and feeling ‘meh’ after watching the movie on HBO. It wasn’t until moving to Tacoma, Frank’s hometown, that I picked it up again and stuck with it. It’s one of the greatest works of sci-fi/high fantasy as well as environmental, political, and religious writing.
by John Steinbeck
Steinbeck is well known for bringing early Californian white settlement (~1920s) to life and he does this brilliantly by interweaving a multi-generational, inter-family tale into this landscape.
by Italo Calvino
Colvino’s dreamy work is sort of fiction within fiction and could be called a novel but comes off more like interlocked poetry. It’s about Marco Polo recounting all the cities – in their unique colour – that he’s visited to Khubli Khan. If you’re a fan of city planning, travel, or romanticised history, this is the book for you.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like John Forbes Graeber-Scrugham in one click.)
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Books & Accessories
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Caregiving, dementia & psychology
I like that we live in a time when the important, laborious but inherently human act of caregiving receives the attention it deserves. Clinical psychologist Dasha Kiper turns the spotlight on caregivers in a profoundly compassionate study: “Travellers to Unimaginable Lands explores the complex and profound psychology of caregiving, illuminating how the healthy brain’s biases and intuitions make caring for people with dementia disorders so profoundly and inherently difficult.”
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How to live with technology
I know plenty of parents looking for ideas/help with introducing their kids to the digital world and encouraging healthy habits as a family. This book is for them. “Making conscientious choices about technology in our families is more than just using internet filters and determining screen time limits for our children. It's about developing wisdom, character, and courage in the way we use digital media rather than accepting technology's promises of ease, instant gratification, and the world's knowledge at our fingertips. And it's definitely not just about the kids.”
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Overheard on Mastodon
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I poured root beer in a square glass. Now I just have beer.
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Food for Thought
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As I discuss in my intro, in this thought-provoking talk, sociologist Hartmut Rosa presents his critical theory on social acceleration. We live in a high-speed society driven by increased time pressures in a reality that accelerates so rapidly that we cannot keep up. Resonance is the sublime state of being that we long for, but it has been subsumed beneath our drive toward mastering and keeping up with the world. (The actual talk starts at the 1:22 minute mark and runs for about 30 worthwhile minutes.)
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We urgently need to pay more attention to how we pay attention. This short piece highlights the growing movement of educators, activists and artists focusing on relearning the power of this precious faculty. They hope this kind of ‘attention education’ can produce a new generation of citizens who are equipped to take on problems conscientiously and with care. “For two centuries, champions of liberal democracy have agreed that individual and collective freedom requires literacy. But as once-familiar calls for an informed citizenry give way to fears of informational saturation and perpetual distraction, literacy becomes less urgent than attensity, the capacity for attention. What democracy most needs now is an attentive citizenry – human beings capable of looking up from their screens, together.” (Possible paywall – free archived view)
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We talk a lot about alternatives to traditional currencies these days, mostly in the form of crypto. This piece looks at the work of late German economist Silvio Gesell, who proposed that money should be perishable to better reflect the goods for which it is exchanged. Freigeld, or Free Money, meant that money held over time would decrease in value. “Is his idea of an expiring currency any more absurd than the status quo we inherited? Perhaps his greatest contribution is to remind us that the rules of money can be reinvented, as indeed they always have. Money is a construct of our collective imagination, subject to our complacency, yes, but also to our inquiry, values and highest ambitions. Gesell argued for an engaged, probing curiosity of our economic institutions so that we may reimagine them to better serve the societies we want to create.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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This renovation of a 1960s apartment shows that old, run-down buildings can be transformed into modern, welcoming homes. The work of interior designer Alex Johnson resulted in a timber-rich, compact unit with Japanese design influences, where custom furniture and handcrafted joinery take centre stage.
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Mitch Rouse is a Wyoming-based aerial photographer using a mix of drones and planes to shoot landscapes and industrial sites, including agriculture, transportation, shipping, and energy production.
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Ekow Nimako is a Toronto-based, internationally exhibiting LEGO artist, who crafts futuristic and whimsical sculptures almost exclusively with black bricks.
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Perfect for display use and free for commercial use, Monigue is a bold and strong condensed font that’s here to make a statement.
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Notable Numbers
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In December, Amsterdam joined Brussels, Edinburgh and Paris in changing their maximum speed limits from 50 to 30 km/h (19 mph), a measure that has led to 20–30% fewer road casualties.
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Humans consume a mind-boggling 360 million tonnes of meat every year. That includes 202 million chickens that are slaughtered every day, translating to 140,000 chickens per minute.
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Chinese companies have unveiled the ‘world’s fastest internet’ network. Spanning over 3,000 kilometers, the network links Beijing, Wuhan, and Guangzhou through an extensive optical fiber cabling system and has the capacity to transmit data at an astonishing 1.2 terabits (1,200 gigabits) per second.
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Classifieds
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