Even though it is February, I have been living in January still. My liminal period is ending though and it is time to wake again. Hello to the new year.
While I write this Dr. Dog’s newest track Can’t Catch Me is playing and blooming out a very serious Spring vibe. How fitting. But 2019 has finally caught me, so now I will end my sleeping period by reflecting on my year and writing about the three most influential voices for me in 2018. I hope you can find an equal amount of joy and wisdom in them this year.
The year felt like a closing and opening.
Closings:
I basically finished my undergraduate degree in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering at NYU. Last Fall was the final semester of full time courses and the vast majority of difficult classes are completed. I am now taking the final Design course and Lab course of my program, only two classes and one day a week. It feels wonderful.
My two favorite roommates, my sister and girlfriend, left Brooklyn. I now occupy a small Bed-Stuy room in a cozy laissez faire three story house with eight roommates. Four years in New York for me, and now I can already feel the feeling of leaving in the summer.
I also left my position as the Research and Design Engineer at Aquaneers, a DoD and DoE funded nanomaterials startup. It was a Generalist’s dream. I got to learn rapidly as I was forced to be a Jack of all trades. I developed my CAD and prototyping skills.
Openings:
Last year brought the first serious contracts of my career. My girlfriend Tessa, friend Camilo, and I formed a Design & Engineering trio. We worked out of A/D/O in Greenpoint and met some amazingly talented artists and designers, getting a glimpse of a hopeful future and learning what it means to start and run a business. We had a summer sprint of creativity and cannot wait to continue pulling our ambition into reality.
I continued developing and roaming around my curiosity for working with wood and making other 3D forms of art. You can check out two pieces I made and really like here and here. I have a lot to learn but it is very fun.
I also received notice late last year that my first piece of writing will be published! Digital Infants (an essay on self-doubt, self-branding, the internet, and civil discourse) is set to be published by a Canadian magazine this summer.
This site grew a lot over last year and I wrote some essays I was really happy with. The goal of this blog is simply to write more and I am succeeding at that. Lastly, I launched my YouTube channel where I plan to keep developing a curiosity for filmmaking and exploring topics in a visual medium. Check out my video explaining what my channel is about.
That’s all that comes to mind for openings and closings for now! Onto my influences from 2018!
1.) Tristan Harris
Tristan Harris is now getting the attention he deserves for the value he has been putting out. He is the former Chief Ethicist for Google and one of the louder voices in the Digital Dangers crowd. Along with my girlfriend’s effortless abstaining from Social Media, Tristan gave me the first shakes necessary to alert me to the nefarious nature of Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube and the other New Internet companies and products. He is a measured voice on this topic. I recommend you check out this podcast and this essay.
2.) Jaron Lanier
A 2018 theme is forming. Jaron Lanier has been described as one of the fathers of the internet. He caught my attention from his podcast with Sam Harris that I listened to flying somewhere. He caught my affection for the many lives he has led: a systems thinker, digital designer, indie musician, VR founder, writer, and more. And just look at the serious vibes he is putting out.
He is jovial and thoughtful. The podcast changed my mind about Expecting Free Products when they happen to be digital, broadened my view of the many possible ways the internet could be crafted, and overall just made me really interested in Jaron as a person.
After hearing that podcast I picked up his book Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now and finished it the same day, nodding along as he forced me into introspection about my own motives for using social media platforms and the things I gave up in order to do so.
He isn’t sensational or absolutist and he writes casually but with a real ferocity about the nasty incentives that have sprung up around the advertising model. He uses the metaphor of a house cat throughout the book which for some reason I really liked. Once I finished his book I posted an Instagram photo of the cover (irresistible irony, and also a kind of baton passing) and changed all my social media passwords to keyboard gibberish. I haven’t been on since finishing the book threeish months ago. His most remarkable point for me: you can still engage with the beauty of the internet without engaging in social media. A simple and profound duh moment that has taken some relearning on my part. The old reflex of typing in “Tw” and awaiting the search bar to autofill the rest has just now finally left. It has been a real experiment to observe my habits that I had stopped noticing while in the waters of social media.
Thanks Jaron. I feel significantly more out of the loop, unique and creative, and calm. There are so many hot takes on what it means to be living in the digital age, but despite that Jaron has incredibly refreshing perspectives, amusingly because he’s been thinking about these issues since the 80’s.
3.) David Lynch
Before last year I had only known about Lynch from his Transcendental Meditation advocacy and the occasional reference to how weird his directing was. But when flipping through Tribe of Mentors, the most recent Tim Ferriss book where he asks over 300 experts the same ten questions and prints their best answers, I landed on David Lynch. All of Lynch’s answers were great but it was the last answer that sent me into a Lynchian wormhole.
Q: When you feel stressed or overwhelmed what do you do?
A: I sit and desire ideas.
This was the first hint of the strange philosophy Lynch has on how ideas end up in his head. Of course I am not a filmmaker (yet 😉 ) but his concepts apply to writing and really creativity of any kind. Lynch views ideas as things that can exist without any human being to create them, he describes his process of creativity as a process of catching ideas. When describing how he writes a film he says it is as if the whole script is assembled in bits and pieces in an adjacent room, and he sits and thinks until one by one little fragments present themselves to him and he can piece them back together.
This has led to me being way more deliberate with my creativity. I now allow up to an hour every day to just sit with music on and think about ideas. It has been absolutely wonderful. It is really strange how seldom we do this, even if we are in the business or pleasure of creativity. How often have you just sat and let yourself think? I picked up his book Room to Dream and was swept up into David’s world and the strength of his creativity, I recommend it to any creative person. Thanks David.
I suggest you check out this and this.
Those are the biggest three for the year, although there are many more I’d love to share eventually. And now I wake up, hit replay on Can’t Catch Me, and am suddenly in the new year.
Featured image from C. Chuot! Check them out.
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