Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
I think everything will be fine soon.
On Thursday I went to Berlin and the train arrived one minute early. This came so unexpected, I didn’t know what to do with all the additional time, so I just spent it waiting for the subway.
But I really do think things will be better. Germans have been complaining for so long now while everybody else wanted to know what Germans where complaining about for no reason at all. Now I think people are getting tired of complaining and I also think they begin to understand that voting for right-wing extremists is also not the smartest thing to do.
Maybe I am delusional, or just hopeful. Or both. But I think all the airtime those idiots are getting now finally starts to work like a deterrence.
The people holding up the internet
Your alarm, a boarding pass, a meeting in another country, the day your salary lands: anything on your phone that shows a time has to know where you are. Underneath sit every Android phone, every iPhone and most of the servers on the internet.
They all get local time from one text file, the time zone database, which holds every clock rule a government has ever announced. Paul Eggert, a lecturer at UCLA, keeps that file up to date in his spare time.
It’s quite fascinating to me that even after more than 30 years of commercializing every aspect of the internet, there are still so many building blocks that are being taken care of by individuals who just love what they are doing.
The Nordic Formula for Prospering in a Dangerous, Fragmented World
Few countries thrived as much from globalization and the end of the Cold War as the Nordics—Sweden, Denmark, Norway, Finland and Iceland.
That world is gone. Russia threatens their territory, China threatens their markets, and they can no longer count on the U.S. to defend either. A recent visit to Denmark and Sweden showed me how they are pivoting to this new reality: sinking more money and manpower into defense; tackling vulnerabilities in payment systems, supply chains and trade relations; and integrating their economies, defense industries and militaries more tightly with each other and Europe.Far from paying a price, they seem to be thriving, an encouraging sign for the rest of the world.
I’d rather spend all this money on education, health care and a ton of other things instead of tanks, battleships, drones, ammunition and what not. But I guess this is the world we live in right now and we need to be prepared to defend our liberal democracies and our way of living.
How to Care about Everything without Carrying Everything
One big way the world has changed in the past thirty years and especially the past ten is increased polarization. When my parents were young, people lived in communities with folks on the opposite side of the political aisle. You went bowling with your neighbor who didn’t vote the way you did but you knew he was a good guy.
These trends have changed quite a bit, and now we are more likely to demonize people who don’t vote the way we do.
And again—two things can be true. It’s hard to feel close to people who are working against what you hold dear: your health care, bodily autonomy, faith, livelihood, or the right to commit to the partner of your choice. And it’s hard to stay nuanced about the person in front of you if they are demonizing you.
But, reaching across the aisle has to start somewhere. If you can stay open to the humanity of the person in front of you, being curious about their point of view, even when it’s hard, that person is more likely to respond with curiosity instead of judgment, and is more likely to return the favor with curiosity about you.
Not everyone will.
Be the change you want to see in the world. It’s small actions like these that change hearts and minds over time. For those of you whose opinion about gay marriage changed over your lifetime, it was likely these personal connections that helped the change happen.
In addition, resist tribalism and polarization within yourself. It’s easy to farm out your political point of view to a party or movement. Resist that. Cultivate your own points of view. Be curious about other ways of seeing things, and hold those other ways of thinking in tandem with your own. Be on the lookout for narratives that are too simple, and look for ways to complexify them.
I know this is the right thing to do. It’s just not something I can easily do.
The more we rely on tech, the more we deskill our bodies
We have fallen into habits that are steadily deskilling the human body, eroding capacities honed by evolution to support our wellbeing as we move through the world. Some of these capacities are weakening through disuse: we have come to rely on our phones, for example, and now, increasingly, on AI, to rapidly do work that would once have required something more physical – like looking around, or asking someone, or going to find and consult a book. Reliance on GPS may weaken both our spatial attention and the fluency of our wayfinding. In surrendering to a quick technological fix, we are, moment by moment, doing less sensing, navigating, remembering, walking, choosing, and attending. Other capacities are being retrained by machines and algorithms to work against us: for instance, smartphones and chatbots can train us to keep reaching for them even when we no longer enjoy using them, turning a conscious choice into an automatic habit and a colossal waste of time. The body that results is less able to assess its own condition, improvise and regulate itself. The crucial distinction is between technologies that strengthen our capacities and those that repeatedly substitute for the actions through which those capacities are formed.
The author has a point, but the techno-optimist in me thinks that we are reskilling, not deskilling.
The dreadful decline of hosting at home: ‘I feel shame any time a friend comes over’
“When you host, quite often it feels like you’re just a spectator to your friends’ evening,” says Simon, 37, from Glasgow. In the past, he’s found that, as host, he spends so much time making sure his guests are catered for that it can be difficult to connect with them on anything other than a superficial level. “You’re not fully present because you’re either trying to anticipate their next needs or you’re not even in the same room – you’re ferrying back and forth to the fridge and you just can’t get deep in the conversation. It can feel like everybody else has more of a bond at that time, because the host is just a wee bit separate.”
We haven’t always felt this way about having people over. In fact, anthropologist Robin Dunbar, best known for “Dunbar’s number” – a theory that suggests humans can only really maintain about 150 stable social connections at once – believes we would still rather entertain at home given the choice, but circumstances often conspire against it. “One reason is that our social networks may have become more scattered as cities have got larger,” he says. “If we live in smaller villages and towns, it is easy to visit for casual get-togethers. There is a thing called the 30-minute rule: if someone lives more than 30 minutes away, we pretty much stop seeing them regularly. The time/effort required becomes too great.”
My parents had people over all the time. But they also didn’t have unlimited TV and internet access back then. And they had a house. I love having people over, but it can be a bit exhausting after a while…
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico