Howdy, it’s Luke.
I’ve been reading East of Eden w/ my roommates recently. It’s really good. We’ve got this thing going where we picked out the 100 books you should read to become worldly and wise. Cultural classics like the Iliad and Tao Te Ching. And then we jam on it’s ideas to unpack it. I’m excited. We’ll see how it goes when we hit the 1150 page behemoth translated 5 times in Old English. But we’ll get to that when it comes. For now, it’s all rainbows and blue skies. Respond if u wanna join us.
That said, here is your weekly dose of noteworthy ideas & things I learned about last week. Click on the brown links to dive further on that topic.
1. Hasui Kawase
Great printmaking from this guy.
A friend sent this to me, and it really hit home. There are a lot of things that it described that I do, which limit the depths of my relationships / community. Most of which I only felt sub-consciously until hearing it described.
It also explains why so many Americans grow lonely as they get older, because "inconveniencing yourself" for your relationships is not baked into a lot of modern Western/American culture.
Some notes:
“In Romania, the purpose of community is greater than ‘I will get what I need from you, and you will get what you need from me, and we will allow ourselves to remain unchanged within the space that exists between those two things.’”
“Let’s say your partner is having an argument with a shared friend, and you believe that your partner is in the wrong. You don’t immediately take your partner’s side, because you’re not being culturally expected to abandon yourself. However, you also don’t get to just shrug and say, ‘That’s between you two. There’s no reason I should be involved.’
No, you are involved by nature of being a part of that connection. When you agree to a friendship or a relationship, you agree to be involved. That is what it means to enter any sort of relationship. The conflict is no longer just between the two of them. The conflict exists inside your own life, as well. The conflict now affects your loved one, your home, and the community you share. You are now involved.
So, whichever one of you recognizes the difference first brings it up. Then you argue. You disagree. You debate it and turn it over from every possible angle. You explain what you see, and the other person explains what they see, and eventually one of you may realize that the other is right. Or, more often, both of you will alter your respective opinions slightly until you arrive at a shared understanding that you can both agree on. The goal is not for there to be a winner and a loser, it’s to address that difference until it no longer exists as a difference. Then you stand together in your shared decision, and come to a shared reality of how to move forward as a unit.”“In my culture, to love someone is to allow yourself to be changed by them. If it sounds like work, it’s because it is. It’s effort. It takes energy, and it requires you to care, and to be involved. Romanian culture does not believe in relationships being ‘easy.’”
“Invest into this ongoing process of osmosis. Every person in a community is a river, constantly in motion, intersecting with other rivers and changing course slightly each time.”
Astoundingly great essay on where value accrues in the age of AI (hint: it’s not SF). I’m only halfway through the 100 pages, some notes so far:
The inventor of the steam engine or oil rig didn’t make the most money, it was the folks who owned trade routes and oil routes.
Same applies to all tech.
Applied to AI, that means Anthropic/OpenAI aren’t gonna be the only big winners. It’s going to be companies that allow the common person to access intelligence + facilitate that new world (think: Circle b/c instant settlement of USDC, Meta b/c they own WhatsApp / FB / Insta, CLEAR for trust network).
It’s a strange new world and those that are actively working on their world model will be in a good spot to take advantage of the new world’d unforeseen opportunities.
I’ve got just three for you today, hope you have a wonderful weekend and tell your friends + family you love them :)
Thanks for wanting to know more today than you did yesterday! If you liked this edition, send it over to a friend who would like it too 🤝
Cheers,