Yearly reminder that @worrydream.com has a frequently updated catalog of some of the very best material relevant to computation / user interface design over here: worrydream.com/refs/

I read Four Thousand Weeks by @oliverburkeman.com
a while ago. Feel that the philosophy it embodies is yet to make in roads into user interfaces of productivity systems. For example, this idea of treating your to-read pile as a river: oliverburkeman.com/river

Here’s something mindblowingly counterintuitive – Higher food prices can reduce poverty!

As a person in a country like India, it is almost blasphemous, for many (majority?) here survive on cheap food they buy with their backbreaking / stressful labour: www.tabledebates.org/research-lib...

Wabi-Sabi describes an aesthetic stance that embraces the ephemerality of things and gives space for life’s imperfections and incompleteness. It embraces the flaws and shortcomings as part and parcel of life.

Imperfections imbue things with character. Their rough textures reflect the essence of life in their surfaces. A great example from the book is how Uber decentralizes and automates away the small talk that used to happen when cab drivers huddled together in a central spot.

This disposition interlocks with the ideas in 4000 weeks. The act of embracing our flaws is a way of living authentically and attending fully to the complexities of life rather than fleeing from its ugly, unpredictable, and messy aspects.

This contrasts with seeing failures as judgements that box us to “not have it.” Growth mindset flips this around: failures are not indicative of flaws in our eternally fixed character but rather learning opportunities to course-correct the processes we employ in our lives.

Mindset gives good pointers here. A central idea is the perspective shift to see errors and flaws as pointers to missing pieces of knowledge. With this, we see failures and errors as informative events that enable us to grow, adapt, and rectify our life processes.

It is embedded in an ambient way in today’s instrumental world, where the idea is to optimize systems for their best throughput, and reveals itself aesthetically in the slick and clean interfaces/surfaces of the machines that are polished to shiny perfection.

Now on to something personal. In one of its degenerate forms, exerting extreme control over the world manifests as a psychological disorder called OCD. I read Tormenting Thoughts and Secret Rituals to understand its nature, as I started showing signs of OCD from a young age.

The same idea can be seen to recur in the 1927 movie Metropolis with the construction of a robot (a rationalist creation) to deal with the emotional trauma.

Perhaps the best angle to broach this topic is this tweet interpreting Nolan’s protagonists: x.com/Darren_Moone...

Here’s a synopsis of the key themes that are going to be addressed in this thread.

I read these four books over the last couple of months and felt they had an uncanny thematic coherence. This is an attempt to pull together these threads to point at a certain lingering idea that could potentially unify these narratives.