5 Things I Consumed Last Week (fodder for thought 🌿)
on good old neon, advice for when you get stuck, mind mine, why you should be a mutant and wintering
It’s ironical how eureka moments gradually turn into questioning yourself at times. For instance, when I started this newsletter, I was proud of keeping it generic and sharing a mix of things. My initial issues did not have any theme (yes, these brackets you see in the title) but if anything Maria Popova has taught is to build associations between themes and hence I kept finding a common link.
I tried really hard to connect things from this issue (hence the delay) but this is all I could come with. Feeding you the fodder, ruminate and chew on it before you digest it.
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Good Old Neon | David Foster Wallace | Short Story
If you are a reader you know how reputed Foster’s writing is and how Infinite Jest is on everyone’s reading list. Foster’s writing speaks to you, it hits all the right notes and makes you think about things that go unnoticed.
I read this short story multiple times during the week, it has undertones of how mimetic behaviour, people pleasing and finding your calling lands you in a difficult spot but it is much more that that.
It’s a difficult window into the mind of a depressed person, narrated by a ghost from beyond the grave. Given that the author took his life a couple years after it was published, I suspect that it was a way to grapple with the warfare inside his own mind. ~ via David Perell’s newsletter
That it’s what makes room for the universes inside you, all the endless inbent fractals of connection and symphonies of different voices, the infinities you can never show another soul. And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees?
Advice for when you get stuck | My Sweet Dumb Brain | Newsletter
I have been following Katie and her work on this newsletter for a long time now. It is almost like talking to a friend or else journaling or thinking out loud.
Putting words to what you are feeling is an onerous task and Katie does it too well. This issue is about writing as a profession and the subtleties involved with it.
Still, I write. I force myself to quiet those voices, sit at my desk, and put words on the page. I have no idea where those words are going or if they’ll be any good, but I continue writing. I keep showing up.
Humility vs. Hubris | Mind Mine | Newsletter
Being a person with a professional career in business/finance, I am expected to read finance, talk finance and preach finance and yet I find solace in reading psychology, understanding my emotions with myself and the world better.
That’s why Isabel’s cute newsletter! No, it’s not generic self-help. It is an antidote to overthinking, breaking things down and overthinking again ;)
Though this issue about humility vs. hubris is about people with high-ego and low-ego, I would not restrict you to just one issue, read em’ all!
Differentiation | Not Boring | Newsletter
Whenever I think I am short on ideas and reading resources to meander through, I just open this newsletter and I have 10 links to check out by the end of it.
This issue is part about letting your curiosities wander, part about how AI should not be perceived as a threat and also part about getting out there & doing whatever the eff you want to.
Memorize, code, write, and draw if you love doing those things, if getting your hands dirty helps you think better, if you’re trying to earn your corpus of basic knowledge the hard way so that you can jump off from a stable base, or if you want to do them differently than anyone ever has; otherwise, don’t waste your time. It will regurgitate better than you ever could.
The only answer is differentiation. Call it novelty, creativity, mutation.
How Wintering Replenishes | Katherine May | On Being Podcast
Using winter as a metaphor — which explores the biological, psychological, neurochemical, and philosophical subtleties of our state of being — Katherine May explains her thought process behind her book Wintering.
But actually my understanding now, as I get older, of being human, is that my life is fundamentally cyclical; that everything repeats itself; that nothing lasts.
~ Excerpt from podcast transcript
[Since childhood] we are taught to ignore sadness, to stuff it down into our satchels and pretend it isn’t there. As adults, we often have to learn to hear the clarity of its call. That is wintering. It is the active acceptance of sadness. It is the courage to stare down the worst parts of our experience and to commit to healing them the best we can.
~ Excerpt from the book
That’s all for this time! Have fun reading and listening :)
Next week is going to be a gratitude issue about one of my fav artists, stay tuned!
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With warmth and love,
The Hummingbird🌺
I found the second, third, and fourth Zen illustrations to be very relatable.