Add up all the senses you use and the things you notice: that’s your umwelt.
It’s pretty obvious that your dog has a different one than you do. They see fewer colors and smell far more intelligently. Sea slugs see a much wider range of colors, and bats can sense vibrations.
Among humans, we each have our own umwelt. Paying attention, after all, requires payment.
If your default range of inputs is working for you, that’s fabulous. But for most of us, we’re missing something, something we might not even realize.
In 1959, three years after Columbia Records spent a fortune rolling out stereo recording, a senior A&R executive named Ward Botsman told the New York Times, “Let’s face it, the craze for stereo has not been as intense as expected,” writing off the format that would end up thriving for, as far as I can tell, forever.
It’s hard to tell a fad from a trend when you’re in the middle of it.
But often, that’s our job.
The easiest thing to do in the face of change (which brings fear) is to become cynical and to decide that the change you fear is nothing but a fad, soon to disappear.
But it’s also tempting to imagine that every fad is going to instantly and permanently change the systems of our culture.
Ward was paying attention to buzz instead of focusing on the structural changes that were moving in the other direction.
Cynicism is easy. And sometimes it pretends to be clear-eyed thinking.
The future creeps up on us slowly. But when it leaps dramatically, we notice.
One spam phone call a day is an irritation. 1,000 of them destroy the utility of the phone.
One photographer undercutting our rates is a threat. 1,000 of them means we can’t make a living at it any longer.
We’re facing several 1000x cliffs right now.
The most obvious is AI. (Or possibly not). Entire systems are going to be replaced. New careers are developing overnight, and old ones are going away. When an AI can read a standard x-ray 1000 times faster and 1000 times cheaper than a radiologist (and get better results) then something is going to have to change.
The more urgent one is the change in the climate. One freakish storm is something many economies and communities have a chance to recover from. But 1,000 days of weird weather is more than we can handle.
Systems are networks, and widespread changes compound exponentially.
A divo (or diva) is an opera singer with skill. Sometimes, though, that skill comes in a package that also includes imperiousness, skittishness and a fair amount of unpredictable drama.
It’s tempting to imagine that CEOs, painters or poets that bring the noise must also have skill.
But burning your guitar doesn’t make you Jimi Hendrix.
There are some film directors that have meltdowns, go over budget and fuel their creative work with feuds. And then there are the professionals that do great work. That’s it. Simply great work.
With few exceptions, we’re better off with just the skill part. The media loves the drama, but your co-workers and customers don’t.
I’ve never seen a resume that listed “low drama” under skills, but it might be a useful attribute.
The desire for 11 is proof that we often want to go all the way to ten.
While 11 is silly, there is a lot of pressure to give our all.
But there are problems.
The first is that if you try to sprint an entire marathon, you’ll hurt yourself. Systems can be stressed for short periods, but they burn out much more quickly if we overdo it.
The second is that a system running flat out needs constant attention.
This attention distracts us from all the alternatives, strategies and shortcuts that present themselves along the way.
When we’re at maximum all the time, there’s no acceleration or deceleration, both of which create opportunities for change and growth.
The hypervigilance required to go at full speed gives us no room to breathe or even improve.
And if we’re at a full sprint, we’ve robbed ourselves of the flexibility to turn it up, right at the moment when it’s most needed.
It turns out, it’s easier to remember questions than answers. And tools like Google Docs and photos in the cloud give us a chance to build our own personal search engine.
It takes 14 steps to construct the pages in one of my InDesign projects. Inevitably, when I return to the file after a few months, I forget some of them. I wrote myself a one-page manual in a Google Doc, and there it is, with links and screenshots, whenever I need it.
When you get a new electronic device, take photos of the manual before you toss it.
When a professional is showing you how to do something, take a video of it, label it and put it in the cloud for later.
Take pictures of all of your credit cards, IDs and important documents.
When you’re having a good day, go for a walk and record a ten minute audio sharing your optimism, confidence and possibility. You’ll want to listen to it again.
When a recurring event happens for the first time, put it in your calendar. The dog meds reminder will happen without you prompting it every month.
PS I wrote this post to remind me to do this too.
December 17, 2023
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