(Pandemic Diary - day 107)

From my journal: 13 June 2020 (Saturday)

I spent the morning reading, which isn’t new, but the venue and type of content was an improvement.

There’s no newspaper today, and I haven’t looked at news from anywhere else (so no reflexive scrolling of newsfeeds, none of the latest pandemic news or protest news or the latest abominations from the president). Yet I’ve just spent over 2 hours reading, and I’m energized, refreshed.

That’s worth exploring.

The content I stumbled into that held and energized me was The Yak Collective (and “stumbled into” isn’t accurate — it was fed to me by a newsletter I signed up for with this sort of result in mind). It’s from the same guy that does Ribbonfarm and Breaking Smart (Venkatesh Rao), and it’s as good and stimulating as those. Maybe more so because of the “collective” part — it’s his ideas and those of a bunch of other like-minded people.

I read the slide decks for two of their projects, their collected thinking on selected ideas. The first was about business on the other side of COVID-19, about adaptation and so on. The second one, “The New Old Home”, was (roughly) about housing and homes on the other side of the pandemic.

Dry topics, right?

But these are so well done, and especially the second one had a powerful effect on me. In fact it nearly brought me to tears a couple times, and I’m trying to figure out why that happened, because I want to understand it, and I want to be able to do that to (for) my own readers (when I eventually have some).

First, it’s an emotionally loaded topic, this idea of homes and the role they play in our lives, in the interactions we have with our families and the outside world. The pandemic has magnified this, but it was true for us even before, with our decision to refinance our mortgage and commit to this house, and with Lucas establishing his new residence.

So, a loaded topic, but I don’t think that’s the main reason it effected me so intensely. I think it was the earnest nature of the effort, along with quality of the thinking, and the presentation of that thinking.

It was basically a collection of thought models applied to the question of the future of our homes and how we live, depicted graphically, one model after another. Part of the beauty of it was seeing the different approaches, how they each made sense, each related to the others, yet were each very different.

There’s no right or wrong answer, and each model gives a different perspective on current truth and future possibilities that you can integrate with your own process for thinking about the question.

Deep, clear, earnest thought, presented in a clear and concise way — an innately beautiful and moving thing to see. That’s what got me.

That’s a playground I’d like to play in.