Rewilding
Helping Friendly Newsletter, 10.08.21
GM! ☕️
Here’s what you’ll find in today’s email:
Rewilding
The end of life
Espionage and management
Nap like a mother
1. Rewilding
In Rewilding Your Attention,1 Clive Thompson considers why and how we should free our attention from Big Tech. One problem is that social media and other feeds speak only to a mechanical, marketable version of who we are. We need and deserve more complexity.
It’s like intellectual monocropping. You open your algorithmic feed and see rows and rows of neatly planted corn, and nothing else. That’s why I so enjoy the concept of “rewilding.”
The metaphor suggests precisely what to do: If you want to have wilder, curiouser thoughts, you have to avoid the industrial monocropping of big-tech feeds. You want an intellectual forest, overgrown with mushrooms and towering weeds and a massive dead log where a family of raccoons has taken up residence.
—Clive Thompson
2. The end of life
October is the spooky season and an excellent time for practicing memento mori. I’ll be sharing a death education feature each week this month.
This week in death education: a primer on end-of-life planning. We cannot control, but we can prepare to be present for what unfolds. 🖤
3. Espionage and management
I agree with music critic and historian Ted Gioia: the Simple Sabotage Field Manual, a 1944 espionage guidebook, reads like a bad review on Glassdoor. Oof.
4. Nap like a mother
Thank you for reading
This newsletter is a labor of love. 💌 If you would like to show your support, you can forward to a friend, venmo me a coffee, or engage my services. If you’re seeing it for the first time, you can access the archive or subscribe here.
Treasure chest
I bet you find a gem ➔ support the lawsuit against neo-Nazi, white supremacist, and hate groups who organized the 2017 attack on Cville | the future of work should mean working less | it’s a new era for mental health at work | for the feast of St. Francis, let us weep for newly extinct species | how to be a woman on the internet | what does it mean to miss an artist? | poems for Indigenous People’s Day | advice for new parents | hear, hear👇🏼
Have a great weekend! I’ll see you again soon.
Jenny
Via The Art of Noticing.