#25 On "why", on complexity, and a few more Daniels rabbit holes
Turn down for what? Scroll down for why.
I’m not finding much time to write these days so this is all going out relatively loose and limber, unedited, hope that is ok.
At the moment, I imagine these newsletters more as a jumping off point for you to go have your own thoughts and adventures rather than any kind of authoritative piece of authentic authored authorship. So, read on, click things, be free, ask why.
TURN DOWN FOR WHAT INSPIRES ME
In my last post, I shared a great recent talk from film director duo Daniels, aka Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the creators of what might be my favourite movie in recent memory Everything Everywhere All At Once. They talk about their evolution from goofball online content makers to Oscar-winning surrealist indie filmmakers, with a multi-year detour into viral ads and music videos.
Here is Daniel Kwan, one half of Daniels, humping a television in the clip for Lil Jon’s Turn Down For What.
This is exactly the kind of guy I want to build my worldview around.
Watch here, specifically for the moment just before impact, as Daniel’s clenched fists release into an open-handed embrace of the future .. a giving-in to hope, and the potential for love and oneness.
Just before ass-impact, his heaving chest relaxes into an infinite microsecond of stillness.
In this metaphor, Sunita Mani’s ass is the knowledge that “suffering is when you resist what is” and the release of tension in Daniel’s body - just before that knowledge slams his face through the floor - symbolises how it feels to truly embrace the complexity of human existence.
Look at him smile. He’s ready to go.
I want to be that ready to embrace complexity. It’s hard though hey.
COMPLEXITY
We live in accelerated times for sure.
And while it’s never been easier to understand how to do things, it’s also never been harder to remember why we do things.
It’s not like the world wasn’t always complex - the natural world is pretty damn tricky, and miraculous, and kinda unknowable though our physicists and biologists and the rest are doing their best. But it’s like, I think maybe a big part of what we are doing in the 21st century as a species is wrangling with the simple revelation of deep deep complexity - the fractal and malleable nature of meaning - the reality that we can’t ever really know reality - the indisputible fact that shit is crazy.
Maybe none of us as individuals can ever really “get” “it”. We just gotta do our best and take care of ourselves and each other as we go.
Emergence, collective dynamics and non-linearity. Turns out these might be essential concepts to reckon with in order to understand the modern world. You learned about that stuff in school, yeah? Complex systems are kind of chaotic, and unknowable, and full of potential and fun and joy and random outcomes, and they are frightening as hell. Embracing complexity sounds like a vibey thing to do but you are not wrong if it scares, or simply just confuses, the shit out of you.
If you can bear the web3 aesthetic of it all, there are some really good thoughts on complexity and how we are struggling to cope with it right now, in RADAR’s Future In Sync report from a few years ago:
Humans are storytelling creatures. I think this is true. Consciousness is the personal act of storytelling. Our stories are us, we are as made out of stories as we are made out of flesh and bone. And as a culture we concoct stories and contest them and share them. Stories of the past collide with stories of the present and the future, and the collisions make wreckage but also heat and energy.
Stories help us process the complexity of existence - but good stories acknowledge complexity, provide wriggle room. Good societies don’t just tolerate different stories existing at the same time, they welcome it. They thrive on it.
MAKE WHY GREAT AGAIN
You’ve probably heard people talk about “finding your why” in guru-ish podcasts, or in professional development seminars, you’ve read it on the back blurbs of self-help books.
From writer and psychologist Emily Esfahani-Smith:
Without something worthwhile to do, people flounder. Of course, you don’t have to find purpose at work, but purpose gives you something to live for, some “why” that drives you forward.
I actually loved Emily’s TED talk so much that I ended up sampling it in a song a couple of years ago, which Emily graciously agreed to. She’s even credited as an artist on the tune, alongside Kiwi singer/legend Wallace.
It hits home when people talk about “finding your why” because it makes you realise how easy it is to live a life without asking why, especially in the developed world where our basic needs are met. Emily talks about how sometimes striving for happiness distracts you from the fact that most of modern life is set up to push us away from the things that actually create contentment for humans.
We have to keep asking “why”. We have to keep believing that even as the world’s complexity becomes more visible to us, that it is better to be chipping away at the “why” of it all than to be losing ourselves to nihilism, apathy, a kind of resignation to existing within a value system which is now measurably toxic to us and the planet.
As artists, we ask why more than most. In our current world, I wonder if maybe we more than ever have a responsibility as artists, to remind everyone how liberating and how expansive and how motivating it can be to truly interrogate the why.
JAMIE, ANNE & MURRAY: DANIELS DEEP DIVE
Here are a few rabbit holes that I’m about to go down, spinning out of the Daniels SXSW talk. Three people that they mention in their talk, in passing, that I want to spend more time with: Jamie, Anne & Murray. I hope none of them are cancelled or problematic, I haven’t gone too far in on them myself yet. Don’t fail me Daniels. Man I do love me them Daniels.
Jamie Wheal is a neuroanthropologist. I’ll be diving back into his appearance on Your Undivided Attention, one of my fave pods, and to quote them, Jamie “makes the case that in order to address the meta-crisis (the interconnected challenges we face), we must address the meaning crisis — the need to stay inspired, mended, and bonded in challenging times. Jamie argues that it doesn't matter whether we're staying inspired, mended, and bonded through institutionalized religion or other means as long as meaning-making is inclusively available to everyone.”
Anne Morrow Lindbergh is a writer whose 1955 book Gift From The Sea has her reflecting on the pace of life and the affect of rapid modernisation on the psyche. These ideas ain’t know hey. She writes that “the inter-relatedness of the world links us constantly with more people than our hearts can hold.” Sound familiar? I’ve ordered a copy of her book.
Murray Bookchin was an American social theorist and political philosopher who, by all accounts, gave good speech.
The quote above comes from a 1978 lecture, and it is in the context of needing to change how humanity functions in order to save planet, and how that might seem impossible but its actually the only choice we have:
‘Imagination to power’, as the French students said. ‘Be practical, do the impossible’, because if you don’t do the impossible, as I’ve cried out over and over again, we’re going to wind up with the unthinkable—and that will be the destruction of the planet itself. So to do the impossible is the most rational and practical thing we can do. And that impossible is both in our own conviction and in our shared conviction with our brothers and sisters, to begin to try to create, or work toward a very distinct notion of what constitutes a finally truly liberated as well as ecological society. A utopian notion, not a futuristic notion.
His notion involves smaller, more sustainable visions of community and neighbourhood than what Western societies currently model and his thinking deeply influenced thoughts around municipality but also, randomly, democracy in Kurdish Syria. A lot to unpack with Murray. The transcript of the full speech here, or listen to it yourself below - he’s a very powerful speaker.
OK … that will do for me today.
Tim