Hello hello, Happy Gnu Year and all that.
It’s all the rage to bang on about how New Year’s resolutions don’t work because [insert something about the neuroscience of habit-forming here]. Well, sure. But the symbolism of a fresh year is undeniable [insert caveat about the Gregorian calendar here]. So what to do? Maybe do as Peter Williams does in the New Statesman and embrace January as the only truly honest month? Or roll with David Cain at Raptitude and make two lists setting the general tone of your year, instead of strict dictats?
Or, if you still yearning for a good old-fashioned resolution, maybe try a more esoteric one? Thomas Sharp offers several excellent consciousness-expanding options, including: ‘Try not to use the word “I” for a week’ and ‘Commit to including a sentence of beauty in every prosaic email you send’– eg: confirm sign-off of the designs, but also mention you have an infinity of warm yearning inside you that particular afternoon.
I had no idea the metaphor of ‘burnout’ was such a recent coinage. This New Yorker piece dates it specifically to 1973. It was a term drug users had been using to describe their suffering, picked up by psychologist Herbert Freudenberger to sum up the condition of the overworked, over-stressed staff of the ‘free clinic’ movement.
Related: what’s so utterly depressing about how so many in our public services are burned out is not just that it’s a result of deliberate under-funding [insert f*ck the Tories here], but of under-imagining. Check out Helsinki’s Oodi Library, and do a little weep for the idea that we might ever again be a society with a collective imaginative, positive, humane idea of living together better.
Still related, but with more sausages: it’s always jarring to remember most things that feel like they just are, were actually made that way – and so can be made some other way. Clearly, I’m talking about Cauldron vegetarian sausages here. Cauldron have changed the recipe so they’re vegan (a good thing) but in the process have made them look, taste and feel nasty. (an ungood thing). Quite apart from the inconvenience of having to find another favourite meat-free sausage [insert something about peak first world problems here], it got me reflecting on which of my favourite foods are recipes, and which are products.
Fish pie vs Fish fingers.
Ai writing, eh? Feels like we have our noses pressed up against the screen right now, it’s all too close to make any sense of. Tom Stafford’s ‘artificial reasoning as alien minds’ is the best thing I’ve read so far on it all. He runs ChatGPT through a series of philosophical reasoning tests. Best sentence: Ai is ‘mansplaining as a service’.
(Aside: the impending tsunami of bot-created content means having a distinctive tone of voice is more important than ever. If you don’t already get my other newsletter, Tone Knob, all about tone of voice, sign up! It’s peak zeitgeist rn.)
Pair Stafford’s piece above with this in N+1 about a year pretending to be an Ai chatbot by Laura Preston for timely existential facepalming. (My prediction: the phrase ‘HUMAN_FALLBACK’ will be as prevalent as ‘burnout’ soon enough.)
Bean casserole vs Heinz baked beans.
How to ‘be more creative’? Tbh, a good start is to stop spending so much time reading ‘how to be more creative’ advice, blogs, books, etc. Except! Two superb contributions are Jeff Tweedy’s How To Write One Song (applies to more than songs), and this conversation between Steven Johnson and David Byrne, in which Byrne talks about the importance of having ‘little beginnings, everywhere’.
Oh, I just checked, and the podcast is only available to paid subscribers of Johnson’s ‘How Ideas Happen’ newsletter. Though to be honest, that’s all you need. Those three words: little beginnings, everywhere.
That’s all for now! Bye!
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