This is a continuation of a topic started long ago, but one that I feel I can answer more accurately now.

We were looking at it wrong before. Sure, the barrier for entry of creatives and everything is more or less true, but it’s a pretty superfluous part of the overall experience: recognition.

Typically – and I say this in the predominantly pre-internet sense – you had to actually do something to be famous. Movie stars were good looking and occasionally might act well; musicians played in clubs and may or may not be seen by some record producer. We don’t really have that anymore. I love this blog and I’d write it even if no one was reading, but I didn’t do anything particularly special to earn your readership. I’m not particularly smart or talented, and my devilish good looks (surprisingly) don’t actually help my writing. I’ve slowly grown this network because the internet is word of mouth on a non-geographic level. Someone somewhere started liking me and they told other people and so on.

Tumblr operates the same way: people post something and then everyone who follows that person sees it. If they like it (or they think their readers would like it) they repost it, repeating the cycle anew. This creates for a lot of reposts and a lot of word-of-mouth spread.

Cool. Makes sense. Often works. Nice.

Now, I don’t want to discount the people who are making content because they are the true heroes here, but for the most part, people don’t actually make content. Even the photos they start in the chain – that they upload first – probably weren’t actually taken by them. They were taken by some photographer on some other part of the internet and then introduced into the vast eddy currents of Tumblr by them. Without getting into IP and attribution issues, this is innocent enough. It’s like a less centralized Pinterest: a board of things people collect and like.

It becomes dangerous, and this is my conclusion after… nine months? or something on Tumblr myself, when people start thriving on the fame aspect of things. These are people deriving celebrity and self worth from reposting things they didn’t make. Literally, they look at all the feeds of things coming in, pick the ones they like and repost them. They are glorified sorting machines. I am, as a Tumblr user, a glorified sorting machine. I don’t even mind knowing that. I’m guessing they don’t even recognize it and even if they did would say: “So? People like what I post. I have 1700 followers.”

Is this okay? Sure. I don’t really care. I won’t say it’s undermining true creativity or anything because it really isn’t; they probably wouldn’t be creating anything with or without Tumblr, so why not let them have their fun? Bask in their quasi-celebrity. And this is where I’ve diverged from both the original post and the essay to which it replied – I’m perfectly fine with this now.

I mean, curation is at it’s heart a sorting machine. Everything I post to this blog – a so-called “real” blog – and everything magazines publish and everything museums hold is just stuff that some group of people like put together into one place. Someone somewhere had to curate it, had to sort what to include and what to leave out. Is this inherently bad? No, of course not. Museum curators, and likewise magazines and bloggers such as myself get paid to do these things. We are paid sorting machines. In my case specifically, I also write original works such as what you’re reading now, but that’s because I love it, not because of money. In Tumblr’s case there is no money (typically) and so they need to be paid via “prestige” and the promise of holding follower counts. Also, the fact of the matter is the consumption of the media itself is rewarding: there are lots of cool things on Tumblr and we as users like to come across them. This is a human thing. This is why we listen to radios and watch TV and browse Reddit for hours. We like the media. Tumblr is just a never ending stream that swirls around itself as the viewers interact with it.

So sure, complain about the broken youth or lack of true creativity but that fact of the matter is, I’d much prefer teenagers do that to watching TV. Develop your own style and find people who also appreciate it? That’s something pretty unique to the internet as a medium. I’d worry that sometimes intention is misplaced, but I’d like to think the media is, on average, more important than the perceived prestige.

Would this be an inappropriate time to shamelessly plug the Acrylo Tumblr? Because you know, my fragile ego is riding on your clicking “follow”…

The Verge came out this morning with one of their longest articles to date, and it’s a gooder.

As a personal aside, I do really appreciate the more journalistic investigations that they do occasionally. It transcends tech-blogging as a reactionary publication and moves into proactive story getting simply for the sake of interest and coolness. So, for that I really hold them highly.

I won’t go over the article in it’s entirety – just go read it yourself – but I want to illustrate what really bothered me:

As a maker, there’s this disconcerting gap where success in life, as defined by the material and wealth related types, is easier to get by being a scammer. By laying down those morals and ethics that I hold so dearly not for the people, not the dubious legality but for the product. Is it sad that I’m more concerned about shipping a mediocre product than ruining the finances of innocent people? Perhaps. But my ethos point that way naturally; I am a perfectionist and for things that people pay me to do, it’s going to be the best possible thing I can do.

And I think we all get a little bitter about the success stories of people who simply ‘cheated’ their way to the top (I say cheated, but I won’t ever claim that what they did wasn’t a lot of work – just in a different, less honest method) because we feel robbed as honest people. We’ve been wronged somehow.

I feel wronged because they’re allowed to ship a rubbish product and still succeed monetarily. We as makers have to ship the best possible product and still may or may not ever make it in the finances department. It’s a reverse meritocracy. Not inversely proportional, but reversely acceptable.

So I wonder what makes up that space in the graph between the two: is that what we call selling out? Or is that, perhaps, what we call entrepreneurship? Accepting things won’t be perfect and in the meantime trying to make it as good as possible, while still operating a profit margin?

It’s a rhetoric – I don’t know the answer – but an interesting thought: to take something so utterly complex as not only market theory but personal and business ethics and try to distill it into two axis of variables.

Because there’s this concept of value: we should get back what we put in in order for it to be a good deal. Scammers are the disparity between that equation. But there’s motivational speakers, and that’s where value returned gets hazy. The hypothetical He could be an entirely honest man putting on an event and people, if they already knew what he was saying, would feel cheated because they didn’t get value back in proportion to their money spent. Is he a scammer?

If you haven’t already, go read the Verge article

Also: how to hire employees that will work for you, not just for your money.

I came across this and sat dumbfounded. I thought back to all these things I’ve been searching for over the years and realize this is the subtle clicking of pieces, the thing that’s been on the tip of my brain and needed just a gentle nudge to get rolling: operate not on what but on why.

And it’s true (though not in the neuropsychological sense – his brain map is a little bit off) – we have these other divisions for it: classical and romantic schools of thought. That one controls the concrete and the other abstract. Logic v. intuition. What and why.

Because ‘why’ isn’t really a thing. It’s just a reason for a thing, and even then, just as often not because it’s a precursor; a filter for bad ideas, for things that have silly answers to itself: why?

It’s also the answer I’ve been searching for with regards to a specific subsection of the market I call curated brands. Best Made Company stands out, but there are endless examples. They aren’t a company that makes and sells axes. They’re a company that believes people should be well equipped for adventuring. That’s why they also sell all of these other, often unrelated things. They don’t exist to sell axes, they just happen to sell axes.

So I think this is a piece that slots into my artisan question – how can I, as a person, feasibly do these things? It’s “unheard of” (which, as I’m learning, isn’t true :: it’s far more common than we think) to be such a generalist. Every startup advice book I read repeats the mantra of focusing on the one thing you’re truly good at but I wonder – what if that one thing is curation? What if, and I ask this about myself specifically, my passion is in the act of curating and the store aspect isn’t actually the point? Best Made, by those definitions, should only sell axes. That is the core one good thing they’re good at. But I suspect that if they only sold axes they would be fulfilling the ‘what’ and not the ‘why’ which would result in a lesser business because the people who follow them aren’t interested in axes, they’re interested in adventuring.

There’s something of a paradox there, and it’s very interesting. Maybe not a paradox… a tipping point. There’s a graph with a curve that says doing the one thing you’re good at is a good thing – it’s focus – if and until you can generate more support by selling a belief or passion instead of a product.

But there is a self loop inside there: that one focused thing should also be inspired by a belief or passion instead of simply shipping for money.

My new conclusion, from the above two paragraphs, might be something like this:

All business ventures should be driven by a belief or passion and the number of types of goods sold should be inversely proportional to the amount of internal work required.

So that allows you to sell one awesome idea – let’s say… an app you’re developing internally – and really focus on it. Or curate, since while it’s work in itself, it’s still supplied by external manufacturers and therefor less internal worry. It’s a spectrum. Best Made falls in the middle: smaller selection, but they also make a lot of things in-house. Same with Apple. So the scale of the company is independent of the spectrum’s scale and location. It’s a 2D spectrum, then, really. Okay, so maybe it looks like this:

Size v. scale is an interesting subtle difference. I’m not sure I’m using them quite right here, but up is bigger (often richer) companies and down is smaller, more indie companies.

You can place people as you like: Apple v. Dell, Ferrari v. Ford, Best Made, Instagram, Facebook, Red Lobster.

In the end: sell your passion, not your product. In successful companies, that’ll be one in the same, but remember the order for marketing.

This is something rampant and widespread in level-based games, don’t get me wrong. I’m picking on Tomb Raider specifically because I know exactly why it has to be this way, it still bothers the player’s subconscious. It happens a lot in Dues Ex: Human Revolution too, but that at least could be explained by, say, defense turrets and other devices unseen but dangerous until you deactivate them from the inside when you’re ready to leave. That’s plausible.

So the levels are generally something like this:

You start at the bottom there and grapple up some mountain or have your butler in a helicopter or yacht drop you off, then you figure out the puzzle to open the door and proceed through this gauntlet of traps and trials, killing the animals that have been sealed in the tomb for countless years waiting just for you to come. Maybe that’s why they’re so ferocious: they haven’t eaten in a long time. After dispatching all danger and overcoming all ridiculous odds, you finally come to the main room containing the crystal or amulet or key or whatever and proceed to grab it – here there’s two options: one, a secret door in the back opens up and you just run out happily. Two: the temple starts to shake and crumble and you go back through all of those traps again until you get back to the front door where some bad guy with a terrible fake accent thanks you for retrieving the goods for them, proceeds to knock you out and takes it.

Now, I’m entirely happy with this. The games are still entertaining and I quite like them. The puzzle rooms are often clever and that side of the level design is actually fantastic. If you can ignore the very obvious and conveniently placed ledges and gaps that are perfectly sized for Lara, the environments are actually very cool. The way some of the rooms fit together to allow you to do some things while certain areas are activated / switch when not are nothing short of brilliant on the designer’s part – commendable.

But then there’s the bit that bothers me.

All of these tombs, save for some of the darker corridors, are naturally lit by huge chasms in the ceiling. Looks cool, sure, sunlight streaming in. Makes for a workable game, since it isn’t completely sealed and black, which is, you know, nice. But it raises the question: if you have the helicopter there, why don’t you just drop in, grab the crystal amulet of cosmic power and activate the winch to pull you back out. It’d be so much easier!

The better question is why the bad guys don’t do that. They thank Lara for retrieving it because they know the traps would kill them, so they just wait for her to come back out – I would too – but they have helicopters and winches – go for the huge skylights.

Now, it’s a petty nit to be picked but I’d argue that it’s this sort of subconscious disconnect that hurts video games’ realism without you even ever fully knowing it.

Image sources via clickthrough.

“One of the interesting things about success is that we think we know what it means. A lot of the time our ideas about what it would mean to live successfully are not our own. They’re sucked in from other people. And we also suck in messages from everything from the television to advertising to marketing, etcetera. These are hugely powerful forces that define what we want and how we view ourselves. What I want to argue for is not that we should give up on our ideas of success, but that we should make sure that they are our own. We should focus in on our ideas and make sure that we own them, that we’re truly the authors of our own ambitions. Because it’s bad enough not getting what you want, but it’s even worse to have an idea of what it is you want and find out at the end of the journey that it isn’t, in fact, what you wanted all along.”

I’ve been writing to myself a lot on this topic lately. It’s one of frustration and strife in my new freshly graduated world. But also: hope. I’m not afraid at all.

There’s two things that come to mind when I look back upon myself. One. Two. They sum up nicely: knowing that life is finite, how do I choose to spend each hour?

I’m not sure industrial design is my answer. It’s awesome, yes, and I love it with incomparable passion, but I’m also attracted so deeply to the artisan ideals. Wabi-sabi. I want to make things for people. Sometimes there are things that are supposed to reach a lot of people – this is where industrial design is used – but sometimes I just want to make one of something for someone and know that they’re using it and probably will continue to as long as I know them. If they stop, of course, I will never live it down. Just jokes. But seriously. One knife. One chair. Maybe a handful of lamps or guitars. I want to make things for people. That, in whatever form it takes, seems to be the resounding root of my self worth and ‘success’ in life.

As best as I know right now. I mean, the older types would argue I haven’t even begun my life yet.

And now, to begin.

Donald Glover is a talented man. His ability to change personas at a whim is remarkable, leading to a career that goes from witty writer to rap star to actor. He isn’t even thirty yet.

And I ask myself, how do people gain such widespread fame so fast? How do these candles burn so bright and so hard that it’s impossible to ignore them?

When I was young I believed deeply in meritocracy. To be famous you had to be good at what you did. I say fame here not in the celebrity sense, but in the leader in your field sense. Do most people know who Donald Glover is by name? Maybe quite a few. Do many know who Jony Ive is by name? Probably not many. Still, I consider that fame in that field.

When I found out about Snooki, that worldview sort of shattered.

My theory could be summed up “If you build it, they will come” as if people just had a talent detector and they would somehow magically find you if you were good enough.

Now, it’s a sort of false dichotomy to compare an entertainer – a person who’s job it is, literally, to sell themselves as fun, likeable people – and a professional whose job it is to make things and otherwise stay out of limelights. There’s also a cultural divide when we look at design specifically. The Scandinavian designer philosophy is very different than the American one.

It isn’t my explicit goal to become famous (it’s been pointed out that prestige is often just another way to get you to do something you don’t like for free) but I do wonder how we can, as people who devote our time into our work and not into our personal marketing, try and sync those up into a resonance that burns bright as tribute to both.

In the meantime, since I don’t have an answer yet, keep burning.

The question is usually slipped into the footnotes of emails. Normal big picture questions are posed and then at the bottom this by-the-way “How do you have so much time to do all these things?”

Since I usually answer it with some witty one liner I feel like a proper open reply is in order:

It’s not a secret, it’s just a matter of priorities. Most people look at my average 47.7 posts per month and although they range from lengthy writings to one sentence links to videos (the average is 373 words per post) they wonder where I get the time to do it at all. It’s not really about words, it’s about content and unfortunately that I can’t quantify to average. I admit it varies a lot. There are posts that are utter rubbish. There are gems of inspiration that I like; one sentence among many that really speaks back to me.

There was a saying in school:

• Sleep
• Work Quality
• Personal Life

Choose two.

I’ve chosen, so it seems, sleep and work. I’ve chosen what I see right now, at this moment in my life, contentedness. I’ve been fortunate in that a lot of my work is with the people I would hang out with in my personal life (and I do, it’s not that I’m 100% shut in) so it creates a sort of mixed bonus.

People wonder where this comes from because they imagine adding it and maintaining their personal life which is simply busier than mine. I’m an introvert in the true sense which means that while I appreciate my social life, which I do enjoy, I can’t stand it for very long. I need this alone time to recharge. While I’m alone, I tend to do the things I love: reading, writing and working (I say work, but it’s synonymous with play in my case). I rarely watch shows or movies by themselves; I consume them while drawing or modelling. Compared to my friends, my video game play time is pretty low.

I enjoy what I do, which is this, so I do it.

It’s about priorities. Mine just happen to be here. No secret magic multitasking time travel involved.

It should be noted that I don’t condone violence or weapons, but I do really appreciate the design of them.

I watch the two videos and love both of them in their own right. Projectile weapons, as terrible as they are to the health of living things, tend to have a really cool design outcome. It’s raw functionality. I can’t really say they’re precision things, because there are many examples like the AK-47 whose famous reliability is based entirely on working with sloppy tolerances, but there is something inherently precise about the design of weaponry. It’s rarely arbitrary; the outcome design is based on examples and data. The aesthetic is the realm of the neo-classical mind and is appreciated for it’s reasons and purpose, not it’s overlaying being. It’s gorgeous. Like the tiny gears and ticks inside a watch.

Part two is the difference between them: one is made in a factory or machine shop and each will come out 99.999% identical to the others. The other is made from a plant that is found and chosen by a man and then crafted into something by him, by hand (or foot, as it may be) and will be very different from the one beside it in form, but ideally identical in function. This, I feel, is an important distinction.

You can tell, for those who have already read the book, that I’ve been looking at the world though these lenses (or divisions of Phaedrus’ knife, as his metaphor would suggest) lately. It’s not a new concept to me, certainly, but it’s nice to look through someone else’s eyes for a while; see the world anew.

I’ve learned something about myself recently: I’m much more artisan than I thought. Originally – and realize this is untrue – I equated artisans solely with hand spun clay pots and woven wicker baskets. The people who sell laptop bags on Etsy made of sewn together scraps of old mens’ tweed jackets. The essays with reference to Yanagi Soetsu in Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams (towards the back half, pages ~716 if I remember correctly – forgive me as I don’t want to look it up) feature his philosophy as a counter-point to Rams’ (representative here as all of industrial design) way of design for not only specific objects, but how those objects relate in context to the mass production and usage in culture. His point, from the perspective of craftsmanship, looks at objects in an uncannily similar way to the mass produced method: a means to achieving a goal. If the industrialist and the artisan both make a thing it should look to first achieve it’s intended task. Makes sense. This is where my misguided preconceptions come in again; I thought they inherently had to differ after they agreed on that. The industrialists to the neo-classical function and the artisans to the romanticist to the aesthetic. But! As I’ve recently discovered, not true. Not quite.

Aesthetics, of course, are a tricky thing to nail down. They’re different for everyone. I equated function with minimalism and practicality and ruggedness and the things that I personally appreciate and like. I was an industrialist, then. That’s what they do. The things that are frilly and useless and mass produced are just misguided. The artisans who made minimal things were rare and the minimalism was probably a result of skill lacking rather than intentional functionalism. They’re supposed to make what I deem gaudy. The ornamented and decorated. The bright and flashy and visually loud. They’re artisans, which I say (and, I apologize, still do) with a certain pretentious derision.

So aesthetics aren’t a function of romanticism but rather outside of those classifications, like a heading under the two forming a four box chart.

You’ll laugh, but these past few months have led to a lot of personal discoveries that are so obvious. I’ve shared a few others previously. How did I miss them? I’m not sure. But I guess that’s the point of being young and curious. I’ve come out of it with an even more apathetic spirit, though. Before there was a conviction for “right” and “wrong” where my personal standings were concerned, and while I still vehemently defend things, they are broader ideas instead of specific (and often meaningless) examples. Namely the ‘problem’ or ornamentation. I hate it and that’s okay, but I might design something that’s ornamental because I know you like it. I wonder though where the line is drawn between selfless and spineless, but that’s a question for another article.

If aesthetics are independent that implies I can be a minimalist artisan. I still dislike that word. Sorry. But I like the design philosophy of wabi-sabi so much. I’m not saying it can’t be incorporated into mass manufactured things because the design definitely can use elements of it, but there’s something inherently at odds when having objects being made identically imperfect. The idea of the imperfection is the beauty of it’s uniqueness.

Uniqueness. Each of those Yumi bows is unique, but they all provide the same function – accelerate an arrow using a string and the materials’ natural properties. Each of those crossbows has the exact same function and as a result of mass manufacture has the exact same form. There’s something beautiful in both, though, don’t you think? Something romantic in buying a hand-made bow (or a hand machined gun) but also that there’s a machine somewhere in the world that makes the same piece over and over again at a speed that would stagger the mind and that piece gets assembled perfectly into that spot on every single product. It’s just, beautiful to think about for me. That’s my fear though; I think hand made things resonate with people better in general. It takes a very functional mind like mine to appreciate a factory.

Now, am I giving up my industrialist tendencies for a life behind a potter’s wheel? Certainly not. But I do wonder where that broad, overarching line is. I have such a passion for the method and craft itself that the outcome seems almost secondary – whereas a true blood would set up a factory without a second thought and have the focus be entirely on the output product.

I’ll be coming back to this topic; I have other examples and explorations.

TL;DR Aesthetics are independent of design philosophy divisions and form and function are independent yet again of both each other and the previous classifications, creating unique possibilities I hadn’t considered before.

Warning: contains math, graphs and statistical figures.

So. Are the wealthy actually happier than the bohemians? I could point to any number of studies but the long and the short of it is no, not really.

But I have another theory that goes back to the cause and effect of things.

In the past, let’s say the last 100 or so years, we’ve had a lot happen; we’ve had markets crash and boom, wars fought and depressions hit. We’ve gotten to here, the internet age, and things are different now than they used to be. Entertainment is different. We still have wealth gaps which although shifted haven’t really changed in the grand sense – there are still poor and there are still wealthy. “The lack of money is the root of all evil.” and so on. But wealth meant something different then, and this makes up my theory.

Using ultra basic variables I’m going to assert that wealth, for the most part, in the past, would allow for more entertainment. Not only did you have more time on your hands, but you could also afford to buy lavish dresses and fancy cars. Remember, this was an age where the average, boring car could cost 8x (v. yearly salary) what they do today. We’ve got it pretty good now, relatively speaking.

Entertainment too has shifted. I can buy games for $5 and get 50+ hours of enjoyment from them. I’m making a bold and completely unfounded guess here when I say that’s probably the most amount of entertainment per dollar you could get, ever. A bit of math proves that if these numbers are to be trusted you could get roughly two movie tickets for the price of our $5s (relative to average wage again, which I’ll be using for buying power). Now, that isn’t terrible – nearly 4x cheaper than 2 movie tickets’ worth today – but still, the evolution of these things has shifted such that it’s much, much cheaper now to be entertained. Does that make you happier? Debatable. But I’m willing to bet it’s not hurting.

Piracy. I won’t go into the moral, ethical or legal issues but suffice to say, if you really wanted to, you could be infinitely entertained for the price of your internet service which is a) something you’re probably paying for anyway, even if you bought all your movies, music, books and games and b) decently cheap. It’s worth about 46 couple’s movie tickets, if we’re holding on to those numbers. Now, this seems expensive, but that means they’re getting 2 people x seven reels (~70 minutes) per week for 46 weeks. That’s 26.8 hours per person for the same buying power. Back to us: a firehose. Like, you’re literally limited by sleep deprivation when doing these calculations. There are enough movies, enough music, enough books and enough games out there to fill that entire year’s worth of time. It is, for intents and purposes, unlimited entertainment. Even if you ignore piracy and go legit, Netflix is $8 a month. Plus your internet connection, plus your computer or whatever you’re playing it on, plus the biggest screen money can buy you’re still laughing. There’s just no comparison.

The big difference is that no matter who you are, if you can afford that internet and have something to watch it on, you’re the exact same as the wealthy people. There’s no gap there. They would pirate the exact same things you would pirate. Their entertainment – at least, in this digital facet of life – is exactly the same as yours. Back in the day the poor looked at the wealthy enviously because (in part) they could afford more entertainment, but if it truly is as infinite as I make it out to be, that’s rubbish now. It’s the same.

So what does this all mean? Surely I have a point.

Well. Not really.

TL;DR I had a theory that entertainment is much cheaper now than it used to be (and so it is) and how wealth as a measurement of happiness via entertainment is therefor much less of a thing now. The internet breaks down at least one part of the disparity gap.

Algebraic!

Oh, and I regrettably don’t have sources for the above car photos because Tumblr is remarkably bad at keep track of those sorts of things. My bad.

I don’t want to be a negative Nancy, and don’t misread my intention, the technology is all well and good and I daresay cool but there’s something that’s been bothering me since the ol’ Google Glasses thing a few weeks back.

The photo above is via this post by @Sidv who is a cool guy and I do want to give him mad props for the post itself – it is an idyllic future.

Buuut…

I’m not sure I want it.

Time to relate something seemingly unrelated: last weekend was Easter and I pilgrimaged to my hometown in search of chocolate and ham and had the pressing excitement because I’d finally get some time to play Civ 5, which I had bought on Steam sale over a month ago and was promptly pushed to the wayside in shadow of actually important things. This post isn’t really a review of said game, because lots of people like it and my point doesn’t really apply to those who do / those who know what they’re doing. For my n00b level there are these advisers that inform you of the things you should be doing and hold your hand throughout your civilization’s evolution. This is nice because I’d be entirely lost without them, but I can’t help but feel like the game isn’t really mine anymore. Like I’m just a lackey that pushes the buttons they tell me to push. It’s not really a game anymore as much as it’s a list of instructions. Like, they should just press the buttons for me and play out the whole simulation and then tell me at the end if I won or lost. It’d be like flipping a coin and getting excited for the outcome.

Sure, it’s my fault I don’t know enough to fly solo, but my metaphor stands: augmented reality is a double edged sword that could downplay the more intuitive parts of life. The parts, I’d argue, that are the most rewarding and enjoyable. The marathon runners in the photo above; is it really a race if you know exactly how much energy everyone has? You’re just reading bars at that point. The point of the race is to try and outplay the opponents. Are they saving their energy for a sprint near the end? Are they actually in a comfortable lead, or did they waste it all running off the line? It’d be like playing poker while seeing everyone’s cards or… flipping a coin and getting excited for the outcome.

Translated signage in other countries? Awesome. I love that. But I’d still play hard mode and do my best to learn the language, because that’s part of going to another country: learning culture that isn’t yours. I can stay home and read English signage anytime.

Maps? Cool. There have definitely been times where I’d have liked a map on my journeys, but I look back on some of my best memories and a surprising amount of them have occurred when I’ve been lost. It’s a triumph to find a landmark or something and figure it out. It’s a spacial puzzle. A big maze that you get to walk around in. Explore. I love exploring.

So I don’t want to be down on the technology, I am really excited for it. I’m just not sure I want the things in my life doing everything for me. It’s fun living on the edge, and it’s sad that walking through the streets without a map is considered “living on the edge”.