Editor’s Note
Last weekend I had my 36th birthday. To celebrate, I was lucky enough to be joined by my best friend and two other incredibly brilliant people as we backpacked Yosemite for 3 days. All three of these people are amazing thinkers and I consider myself incredibly fortunate to have had the opportunity to have a series of chats with them as we climbed the Panorama Trail and settled down to camp along the Illilouette Creek.
The prefrontal cortex (PFC) is the most evolved part of the brain. It occupies the front third of the brain, behind the forehead. It’s divided into three sections: the dorsal lateral section (on the outside surface of the PFC), the inferior orbital section, (on the front undersurface of the brain), and the anterior cingulate gyrus, (which runs through the middle of the frontal lobes).
Among other things, the PFC is involved with focus, empathy, judgment, organization, impulse control, and learning from your mistakes. On the other hand, the PFC can lead to lots of overthinking and too much self-control. Too much self-control might sound like an oxymoron in our hustle porn-obsessed culture, but if you’re not careful, self-control can kill spontaneity.
One of the many benefits of exercise is that when you do it your brain decides that it is more important to direct blood to your muscles that are working in overdrive than to your PFC. The effect that this can have is that it can dampen down your PFC and free your brain to think more laterally. To come up with insights that may not naturally make it past your PFC filter for rationality.
This happened a few times on the trail when talking with my backpacking partners. One of the insights I had is that when I’m discussing ideas with others people, I am able to (possibly) enter a state of Wu-Wei (ooo-way).
Wu Wei is the Chinese term for “effortless action.” It is probably most familiar to western cultures as being a sibling of “flow” - that state of effortless performance sought by athletes, meditators, and developers alike. But Wu Wei applies to a lot more than sports. Wu Wei is integral to romance, religion, politics, and commerce. It’s why some leaders have charisma and why business executives insist on a drunken dinner before sealing a deal.
Wu Wei comes from a couple of different schools of ancient Chinese wisdom, but the one that I’m discussing here comes from Taoism. Taoists do not strive. Instead, they seek to liberate the natural virtue within. They go with the flow. You might call them something closer to the “original hippies”, disdaining traditional music in favor of a funkier new style with a beat.
Anyways, however, Wu Wei is attained, there’s no debate about the charismatic effect it creates. It conveys an authenticity that makes you attractive, whether you’re addressing a crowd or talking to one person. In other words, the way to impress someone on a first date is to not seem too desperate to impress.
However, Wu Wei also contains a paradox. How can you try not to try? The short answer is you can’t. Perhaps this is what the genius’ at Weiden and Kennedy captured when they came up with the slogan for Nike “Just Do It”. You can’t try to enter the state of Wu Wei, you “just do it”.
One of my insights while on the Panorama Trail is that the only time I may be able to ever able to enter a state of Wu Wei is when I begin to talk ideas. Combining them, rotating them, mutating them, sharpening them (and dulling them), all of it is incredibly infectious. I don’t know what else to say, I just fucking love it. And I think the reason I love it so much is it just feels effortless. Like swimming with a current or riding with a tailwind. And because I love it so much I’ve subconsciously shaped much of my life to get into that state as much as possible. And I become extremely agitated when I feel like I’m being blocked from that state.
For example, I think the reason I’ve pursued my role as a UX Researcher with such a dogged determination over the past decade is that I subconsciously realized it gives me the best chance of discussing ideas. From hearing them from research participants to synthesizing them to sharing them with teams. And I also think this is why I enjoy spending time with a particular type of person so much. The generative type. The “yes, and” type. The curios type.
Anyways, that’s my moment of personal reflection this week. And it also flows into an invitation. If you ever want to discuss ideas, you know who to call. Thanks for making it all the way through that. Onto the issue!
What I’m Listening To
Music genre names can be silly, annoying and reductive - pop alone has 40 sub-genres, ranging from K-Pop to Indie Electropop to Post-Teen Pop - but when Mattew Perpetua wrote on NPR.org about “The Post-Brexit New Wave” I was immediately smitten. That’s because Post-Brexit New Wave contains some of my favorite albums of the last few years (Fontaines D.C., Shame) and at least 4 of my AOTY contenders of 2021 so far (Squid, Dry Cleaning, Black Midi and Black Country, New Road) if not more.
If using a taxonomy to identify the genre, Post-Brexit New Wave would be identified by speak-song, a style first popularized in The Velvet Underground’s “The Gift” in the late ’60s, volume, experimental guitar, discordant jazz, and well, a joyful disregard for genre. Restless, inventive, droll, and often searingly intense, each of the albums stand on its own.
There is Black Country, New Roads freewheeling, experimental opus For the first time that came out in February. Squid’s bold frenetic exploration of post-punk kraut-jazz Bright Green Field. The outstanding debut from London art-rockers’ Dry Cleaning, essentially narrated by lead “singer” Florence Shaw, New Long Leg is a droll album full of surreal images, bizarre obsessions, and sense memories. Culminating in something inexplicably wonderful. But those are just the tip of the iceberg.
As I listened to the playlist Matthew Perpetua put together to accompany his article (linked above), I found myself feverishly adding just about every track to my “Liked Songs” on Spotify. The Cool Greenhouses’ brilliantly evocative self-titled album from last year. Courtings’ debut EP Grand National full of groovy, catch, and infectious post-punk gems. Yard Acts’ catchy, funny, Dark Days. And those are just the first few tracks.
As Matthew Perpetua states in his write-up, something is going on in the UK and Ireland right now and whatever it is, it’s hard to ignore. Give a listen to Matthew Perpetua’s ongoing playlist trying to make sense of Post-Brexit New Wave here.
What I’m Reading
Let me start this out with a warning: the writing in this book is not good. This book contains important elements of a theory that I believe is critical to understand the secret of our species success, but the author instead has framed it as a self-help book, a “toolkit for freeing ourselves from chasing unfulfilling desires”. Nevertheless, Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life may be, and this is incredibly unfortunate, the most comprehensive book on French polymath René Girard’s brilliant work around mimetic desire.
Ever since Plato, students of human nature have highlighted the great mimetic capacity of human beings; that is, we are the species whose superpower is imitation. Indeed, imitation is the basic mechanism of learning (we learn inasmuch as we imitate what our teachers do), and neuroscientists are increasingly reporting that our neural structure promotes imitation very proficiently. Joseph Heinrich brilliantly explores this in The Secret of Our Success, where he demonstrates through natural experiments how mimicry allows each of us as individuals to bootstrap off of culture and how that bootstrapping has propelled our species' genetic evolution and shaped our biology. The classic metaphor here is “standing on the shoulders of giants”.
However, according to Girard, most thinking devoted to imitation pays little attention to the fact that we also imitate other people’s desires, and depending on how this happens, it may lead to conflicts and rivalries. If people imitate each other’s desires, they may wind up desiring the very same things; and if they desire the same things, they may easily become rivals, as they reach for the same objects. Girard usually distinguishes ‘imitation’ from ‘mimesis’. The former is usually understood as the positive aspect of reproducing someone else’s behavior, whereas the latter usually implies the negative aspect of rivalry. It should also be mentioned that because the former usually is understood to refer to mimicry, Girard proposes the latter term to refer to the deeper, instinctive response that humans have to each other.
The author of Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life treats this instinct to desire what others desire as a bug, but I would be more interested in a counter-intuitive exploration of it as a feature. That said, as I noted above, this is an important book to read because as Rory Sutherland notes in his blurb “it describes a force influencing human behavior which is inarguably powerful and universal, yet which we seem evolutionarily wired not to notice at all.” The author is correct, it is time mimetic theory became part of our toolkit, but not just for freeing ourselves from its grasp, but also for understanding how its grasp drives the self-organization of culture.
Find Wanting: The Power of Mimetic Desire in Everyday Life here.
Worth Your Time
Out-group animosity drives engagement on social media (PNAS) - “As digital subscription media eclipses physical ad-supported media, the battleground shifts from defending geographical monopolies to building ideological homes. And because out-group outrage is most viral online, the tendency is toward defining a fruitful enemy.” - Derek Thompson
Winners and Losers of the Work-From-Home Revolution (The Atlantic) - The “winner” that particularly stood out to be was Suburban-town-center developers. Quote “If white-collar workers, especially Millennials, transfer their time and money to the suburbs, they’ll take their aesthetic with them….All those exposed-brick coffee shops, dark-wood cocktail bars, boutique gyms, and everything-fusion restaurants that have been features of the 21st-century city may well become ubiquitous features of 21st-century suburban town centers.”
Seven Insights from “Creativity: A Short and Cheerful Guide." (The KCP Group) - Adapted from an interview between Rory Sutherland and British comedian John Cleese’s conversation on behavioral strategy, it is Tom Morgan’s (TM) summary of each of the quotes that make this article worth your time. Gems such as “Play is emergence - another boundary phenomenon - exploration within a safe container.”
The Attention Span. “The Next Big Thing.” (The KCP Group) - This is about examining a sandbox of revealed preferences for future generations. The online and offline worlds will increasingly coalesce, so pay attention to one for insights into the future of the other
Nietzsche’s eternal return (The New Yorker) - From one of my favorite writers on music, Alex Ross explores why thinkers of every political persuasion keep finding inspiration in the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
I just had another friend recommend Dry cleaning. They sold it as a 'less pissed off version of Mark E. Smith' so I was immediately sold. :) Love these Rob, and envious of the free time you're devoting to writing and reading!