So many options, so little time.
A friend asked if he should put his podcast on YouTube.
After all, that’s how many people are consuming this sort of content, it’s low cost. The comments and subscriptions offer interesting tools for engagement, and it could grow their base.
But just because something might be worth doing, that doesn’t mean you should.
More always comes with a cost.
If you can’t do it as well as the medium demands with the resources you have, you should either find more resources or take a pass. And if the not-silly thing you’re considering is going to add more metrics, not better ones, then walk away.
Annoyingly, yet productively, we keep coming back to, “who’s it for” and “what’s it for.”
Luxury goods are special: they are scarce and expensive, and they earn us status with some folks because it shows that we paid more than we needed to.
Luxury isn’t about quality, suitability or performance. Luxury isn’t a more accurate watch or a faster processor. Luxury is a marker that we can afford to do something others might consider wasteful.
A Birkin bag is a luxury good, and so is reading an entire non-fiction book, listening to a public radio broadcast or attending a concert when we could stay at home and listen for free.
By ‘wasting’ our attention on nuance, narrative, experiences and everything except the checkbox takeaway, we’re sending a message to ourselves and others. A message about allocating our time to something beyond optimized performance or survival.
If you’ve signed up to offer an attention-luxury good, you undermine it when you also try to make it quick and convenient.
Enrico Fermi found a paradox: If there’s intelligent life on other planets, why haven’t we heard from them yet?
Perhaps the answer is this:
Any civilization sufficiently advanced to travel great distances will have to work in community.
This pro-social behavior, combined with the tech they develop, will inevitably lead to some sort of social media.
And once social media arrives, the civilization will struggle to survive.
I’m more optimistic than this ‘law’ would have you believe, but it’s worth acknowledging that we become the stories we tell, and the social media algorithms we live with cause us to tell stories we might regret.
It’s not our job to be used by social media, or to become tools of the algorithm.
Hat tip to Hugh.
Even though it’s possible to design an oral thermometer that measures body temperature to a hundredth of a degree, there’s no reason to do so. In fact, 98.6 is overkill. 98 is enough information.
More digits don’t give us more information, they simply distract or confuse us.
The same is true for time. Knowing what happened in a one-second snapshot interval is useful for judging a horse race, but hardly interesting if we’re measuring interest in a new Broadway show.
Just because we can add more digits doesn’t mean that it’s significant. We can intentionally ask for less.
A powerful metaphor from a long hike:
Every hiker is intimately aware of their backpack. They picked it out, choosing from dozens of options. They know which straps are loose and which are digging into their skin. They can tell you if it’s lopsided, and what is in each pocket.
And yet…
Even after days on the trail, they probably couldn’t tell you a thing about anyone else’s backpack. Except, perhaps, that everyone else has one.
That’s the first step toward empathy: Realizing that everyone else has a backpack, and that it’s different from yours.
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