Do something that won't compute

This morning I used part of the weekend to reorganize some kitchen cabinets. I started with our coffee corner. The De'Longhi espresso machine sits on a shelf, and the cabinet above it acts as our coffee bar. That cabinet could no longer hold all our coffee gear, plus the matcha and extras. I planned to move everything into the larger cabinet next to it.

Another cabinet held three jars for my NUUK mixer, five protein shakers, and seven kinds of glass mugs for coffee. Why do we need this many? I have no idea.

In the middle of this, I found Ordinary Abundance, an interactive apartment filled with everyday comforts that were once rare or astonishing.

People once celebrated ice arriving in Calcutta. I was standing beside five ways to make coffee and seven kinds of mugs, annoyed that they would not fit.

I had plenty in front of me, but I was focused on the one thing I did not have: more space. I do the same thing with my days.

A Life That Won't Compute

At night, the unfinished tasks are easier to remember than anything else I did. Sometimes I keep going over them instead of sleeping.

Wendell Berry's Manifesto: The Mad Farmer Liberation Front asks for almost the opposite:

So, friends, every day do something that won’t compute.

I keep looking for proof that my time was well spent, which makes this difficult. The poem keeps pointing to things that resist a daily scorecard: unanswered questions, trees planted for someone else's future, and soil that takes centuries to form. I cannot finish any of them today. They still matter.

I want to try doing one thing each day simply because I care about it. It does not have to make the day look productive.

A Unified Theory of Fucks

Mandy Brown's theory starts with a finite bag of fucks. Each time you care, one leaves. Later she changes the theory: care can also be received, so the bag can fill again. Then she says this:

Don’t give a fuck about your work. Give all your fucks to the living. Give a fuck about the land and the sea

Give a fuck about yourself, about your own wild and tender spirit, about your peace and especially about your art. Give every last fuck you have to living things with beating hearts and breathing lungs and open eyes, with chloroplasts and mycelia and water-seeking roots, with wings and hands and leaves. Give like every fuck might be your last.

I do not take this as permission to care less. Brown is asking me to look past "work" and name the living beings on the other side. A company, platform, or task cannot receive care. Care can reach my coworkers, the people who use what I make, the land and sea affected by it, and me.

That is how the revised bag works. Care given to an institution disappears into something that cannot give it back. Care given to living things can return as a gift. Not from everyone and not every time, but often enough that I can keep giving.

Work can be how that care moves from one living being to another. That is what makes the work good.

Making Life Possible

I like having a plan because it tells me whether I am on track. In Make life possible, Brown says uncertainty is painful, but it is also why we pay attention, make sense of what is happening, and open ourselves to other people.

Screens make uncertainty easy to avoid. Infinite scroll, autoplay, notifications, and delivery apps always seem to know what comes next, while hiding the people and improvisation underneath. The result feels predictable until reality stops following the plan.

Her advice is to take a small step, see what happens, and adjust instead of trying to predict everything. When the plan changes, creativity and other people can help with the next move.

Comedy of Survival

Austin Kleon's The comedy of survival compares carpentry and gardening. A carpenter begins with a shape in mind and works until the material matches it. A gardener can prepare the soil, water it, and pay attention, but cannot order a plant to grow according to a drawing.

Most of the post draws from Joseph Meeker's book The Comedy of Survival. Meeker uses tragedy and comedy as two models for how people try to survive. In the tragic mode, the hero treats the world as something to conquer and reshape. He may get what he wants, but the damage caused by that control becomes his downfall. Kleon sees our attempts to dominate nature in the same way: we call control a success even when it destroys ecosystems we rely on.

The comic mode pays attention, adapts, enjoys small things, and tries to keep everyone alive. Comedy here does not mean pretending disaster is funny. Humor lets us admit when we are wrong and continue without treating every mistake as the end of the story. Meeker thought play was the quickest way into this mode.

The gardener works that way too. A parent cannot design a child and build toward a finished result. They can create good conditions, notice who the child is becoming, and keep adjusting. I can see the carpenter in the way I plan my days: I decide what they should look like, then get frustrated when life does something else.

Kleon uses stuttering to show what changes when we stop treating one person as the problem. If the speaker alone is expected to sound "normal," they carry the entire burden. A patient listener can remove some of that pressure by allowing pauses and not rushing to fill the silence.

For me, the comic mode means giving up the fixed outcome, paying attention to what is actually happening, and adapting together. Tragedy lets one hero's goal decide everyone else's fate. In comedy, nobody has to be sacrificed for one person's perfect ending. That focus on surviving together is why Kleon connects it to scenius.

Egosystem vs Ecosystem

We call someone a genius when their work seems far beyond what everyone else can do. Once that person becomes famous, the story gets shortened to one brilliant mind having ideas alone. The teachers, friends, rivals, collaborators, and audiences around them disappear.

In Further notes on scenius, Kleon writes about Brian Eno's term for the part we leave out: "scenius," or communal genius.

good work isn’t created in a vacuum, and that creativity is always, in some sense, a collaboration, the result of a mind connected to other minds.

Genius is an egosystem, scenius is an ecosystem.

←→

The egosystem puts one person at the top and treats everyone else as support. An ecosystem has no single top. People share ideas, copy, argue, encourage one another, and add something of their own. One person may still make the thing that gets remembered, but it came out of that whole scene.

Individual talent still matters, but it grows inside a scene. I get more from people who make me curious, point out what I cannot see, challenge weak ideas, and share what they know than I do from sitting alone and wondering whether I am a genius.

I want to be around people who bring better work out of me, and I want to do the same for them. That seems more useful than worrying about whether any one of us deserves to be called a genius.