repairman, writing about Material Culture rustyswarf.com
in loco harmonium
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We're all surrounded by clutter, and it's not particularly our fault, it's a historical phenomenon, downstream of the Industrial Revolution and the Consumer Value System. Nevertheless it is our problem.
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To solve the 'looking for keys under the streetlight problem' we've invented the streetlight that reassures you that you're definitely on the right track.
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"The modern economy is primarily composed of things and services available for money, ratcheting to allow fewer and fewer non-monetary costs."
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The actual path toward classiness is to elevate the vernacular. LARPing prestige shapes will get you nowhere.
Sit back, relax, and let your mental gears chew on this for an hour.
vimeo.com/18977827
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Time to pull my organizing practice out of dormancy and get started on the Ways To Throw Things Away megathread.
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I cannot recommend this book enough. Great book. Sadly it goes over most people's heads.
If like me you own and/or are restoring a Heritage property and do not have a huge amount of proper past knowledge and experience, I would strenously recommend you do the following things - especially if you are thinking of buying an old house, or have recently done so.
1) Buy this book
heritage-survey.org/about-us
2) If you get stuck and need a person to speak to, phone the SPAB (Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings) technical advice line.
Opening hours: Monday - Friday, 9.30am - 12.30pm
Phone number: 020 7456 0916
3) Never ever work with/hire/contract anyone who in discussions triggers these cowboy-bingo phrases.
- That wants a damp proof course !
- Tank the walls !
- Concrete is fine, its waterproof - ideal !
- Lime is old fashioned, nobody bothers with that now.
- Lets paint your stone with Stormshield, that will keep the water out !
- Lets get some silicon sealant on those gaps
4) Go and watch anything online by Nigel Copsey, he`s spent his life researching correct original lime mortars.
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Getting the box to its Final Destination is KEY for decluttering. SAME DAY! Everyone's usually so exhausted by the decision-making that it gets overlooked as "easy." Major failure mode.
An assistant is key, "Just take these away to Dump/Goodwill/Off-Premises."
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Except now it feels as though the Protestant Ethic has been cut from its original moral tethers which demanded the sacrifices be in service of *actual material productivity.*
Leaning into the qualities where you are an outlier feels very close to what the puritans called your "calling". Devotion through the labor of ones calling shattered traditional economic arrangements and unleashed the competitive forces of capitalism. We are once again entering an age of the Protestant Ethic.
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The pace of software updates is insane. There should be a global holiday, once a year, when software updates. That's it. You get the whole year to work on your update. Make it good.
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You think you can invent a coherent system of morals and etiquettes for a new communication regime in less than two centuries? I'm not holding my breath.
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"Intellectual freedom is synonymous with personal courage."
One of the greatest qualities any creator (be it a musician, writer, philosopher, or scientist) can possess is the ability to do what they love without a second thought about the quality of the outcome. Intellectual freedom is synonymous with personal courage.
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I believe it was Michael Polanyi who worked out the argument that every body of explicit knowledge necessarily rests atop a *larger* body of tacit knowledge.
Like a cultural Heisenberg Principle: you simply cannot concretize all the tacit knowledge.
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I suspect the thing future generations are going to think is most obviously morally wrong with our society is universal stimulant use.
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Anyway, that idea makes me chuckle when I read this genre of self-help advice, which takes "make a cup of coffee" as a given for the "universal basic task that someone can focus on if their ambitions are growing too crushingly grandiose."
the person who is obsessed with their "potential" and experiences it as a heavy weight would be very well-served by devoting themselves to modest work
rather than basing your self-worth on an imagined future, it would be better to base it on how you make a cup of coffee. if you must be judged by some imagined cosmic force, imagine that the criteria is "how you do one thing is how you do everything" - and that your entire life will be judged based on how you complete the task in front of you
"ah, but these little tasks don't matter as much" - are you sure about that? or is that an assumption you're making about the nature of reality?
the point here isn't that how you sweep the floor matters more than ruminating about your career - it's that we don't know what actually "matters"
really, your career matters more to you because there's more fear around it - which means fear is deciding your prioritization. in the absence of that fear, washing the dishes feels the same as completing a novel - both are a task that eminently deserves devotion & attention
the only things we can know for sure - there's a task in front of us, and there's a way we'd like to do it. see what it's like to let that be enough
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