You are always internalizing the culture around you. Even when you wish you didn’t. So you better surround yourself with something you want inside—curate a culture.
This is excellent, looking forward to the rest of the series.
My oldest nephew is now a junior in highschool, and his brother a sophomore. My sister and I were homeschooled, which provided a milieu that, I think, turned us into significantly more thoughtful and interesting people than the standard route of public school would have allowed. But my sister has just sent her boys to public school throughout, which has disappointed me (actually it has made me mad at myself for failing to make the argument more convincingly, or to provide an alternative schooling environment).
I like the way you put it in the final section: you want to create a distributed apprenticeship in the art of being you. There is a vastly larger number of paints and brushes available for someone to learn to draw themselves in a thoughtfully curated personal milieu, than is given in the generic conformity machine of public school. Maybe it's not too late to impart some more color into my nephews' milieu.
One big part of me thinking through these things is to articulate to myself how to homeschool my daughters. They are still young, so for now it is my duty to do the curation, which entails a lot of complications that I do not cover in the essay, but I also want to articulate a way of viewing the world that I want them to understand once they become, what, ten maybe, and start curating more actively themselves.
But I'm also thinking about myself. We have such capacities now to curate our social milieu, and I have only just started to appreciate its power. So it is an ongoing process for me. I think we are in a transition as a society where we have still not rewired our norms and ideas to properly leveraged the internet, and I'm trying to do my small share in helping that along. Hopefully, articulating how you go about it can make it a little easier for people to get going, though savvy people are already doing most of the things I describe.
Looking through your Substack, I noticed the piece on ritual design. One of my friends from way back works as a ritual designer. https://www.ritualatwork.com/about
I'm all in on this series, and love where this is going. I've noted this curated auto-poesis in myself, perhaps as a result of my attempts at being both performer and audience with my teenage kids. The use of GPT-3 as a personal (possibly broader) cultural tutor and educator is an interesting avenue of pursuit. Thanks!
Thanks for the question Henrik. It's forced a bit more intentional attention and refinement of thought.
First, I've no doubt been influenced by Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke's extensive repertoire of content on YouTube. He speaks often of autopoiesis (coined in 1972 by Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela) within his 4E-cognition model. Having heard but not read about the concept, I've bastardized the spelling, perhaps as a subconscious tilt towards an emergent, ever-evolving systems theory art form rather than the bounds of reductive science.
Part of my own autopoiesis has been an opening towards the multi-perspectival through exposure to experts in various fields, akin to the cultural curation you've written about. Examining life at various scales, with several subject matter lenses (including the careful inspection of those lenses for unintended distortions & blemishes) builds a much more resilient and solid basis for meaning- and sense-making.
Metaphors have also become much more salient to me and have infiltrated the way I communicate ideas. This has been useful in communicating to my teenagers. Returning to artful autopoiesis, I've often used musical metaphors to relay the importance of "tuning" their instrument, good orchestration, and performing well as soloists or within the symphony. On the later point, communicating within the family has taught me a great deal about the utility of dynamics (volume), tonality, rhythm, repetition of themes through variation, and the deliciousness of unexpected syncopation & occasional dissonance.
While they attend public school, I've supplemented their education with my own curated list of fiction and non-fiction with a desire to expose them to a wider world of science, ethics, wisdom, history and philosophy. The list is a distillation of the historical & modern day mentors I've exposed myself to (or eventually intend to). My hope is that the exposure to this material will set them on a wise path, with a taste for the diets that lead to harmonized & healthy mind-body-soul-society-planet.
Ultimately, I'm not likely the best person to say how I've been changed. The process is slow and gradual. I'm trying to be more empathetic, well-grounded, stable and wise. For the time being I'm happy to align myself with practices that lean in that direction, and will trust the process until the feedback suggests otherwise.
I too like to read good books with my oldest. She's just five yet, but if I interpret and condense we can do a lot of fun books already. Animal Farm we did last year, now the Poetic Edda. She really loves the richness of the stories, and I find I can be more alert and present when I have to interpret and simplify and explain what we're reading, compared to when I read children's books.
The orchestra metaphor for communication I found rich. A lot of ideals around communication centers on being clear and concise, but there is a lot of power in counterpoint and dissonance and recurring motifs etc. I will keep that idea in the back of my mind as I keep deepening my writing craft.
THANK YOU! You've articulated something I've been trying to do, and feeling a bit mad/pretentious/ruthless and you've made me feel sane and justified. We are networked beings.
It is about tending you part of our collective culture. From a certain perspective, and if done without grace, it can look ruthless. But as I see it, we are all cultural workers - it is our responsibility to tend our corner of the culture, and this is how, from the bottom up, healthy cultures are made and spread.
I totally agree, and have mulled many a time how we create culture with everything we do. I left a city I'd been in for 10 years because I was in the wrong milieu.
This is phenomenal. I had some of these ideas already, half formed and only partially implemented. Thanks for helping make clear the direction I was already stumbling towards!
Mark, if you keep stumbling down this path you're in for a wild ride. The next two posts will be more practical, if you're into that sort of thing; one about finding influences/input, another about using online writing / working in public as a way to search for interesting connections.
I've had thoughts, for a while, about building my own ranking system locally to better filter out good from bad content. And i decided a few weeks ago that the entire purpose of me writing was to help me grow intellectually; when people say 'hey, your idea looks like this one other', or 'this reminds me of such and such author', that feedback is great. Having an audience also acts as an incentive to take concepts from vague intuitive hunch into something much clearer.
Many years ago, I read Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which investigated the nature vs nurture debate. Pinker argued (as best as I can recall) that parent’s primary contribution to their children was genetic, and accounted for roughly half of a child’s outcome. The other half was societally conditioned.
Pinker argued that parents have much less influence than believed. But even at the time, pre-kids, I wondered: don’t parents have the ultimate trump card, in that they can CHOOSE the environment in which their kids are raised? So even if children are more influenced by culture than parents, parents can choose the culture itself.
Thank you so much for this post! It's serendipitous that I found it, it so appropriate for me at this moment in my time. I had to leave my former milieu two and a half years ago in a small country town, and come to the big city for medical treatment. When I first surfaced after the cure, the internet commentators I'd been used to following, were all saying depressing, negative stuff. Not what I wanted to hear. Been floating since, but swimming hard now toward the next installment.
This is a beautiful, beautiful essay Henrik. Thank you. I chanced upon your page through a Twitter feed that led me to 'Looking for Alice', which made me think 'Oh, I wish I could write like this' [and just mere micro-seconds ago I noticed myself indulging in 'millisecond correction to fit my words']. Thank you for helping me articulate that feeling into words. :)
This essay is such a wonderful articulation of how I think, and have modeled my life around over the last two decades. And how I have tried to explain my actions to those who are confused (and perhaps offended?) by my 'avoidance of certain people and situations'. This is also something I continue to emphasize the importance of during one of those deep, meaningful conversations as I'm reaping the mental benefits of adopting some measure of this discipline.
Even though I've known about Substack for a few years now, it is only now that I'm in the right mental space to indulge in it. And I'm glad I chanced upon your page and this series to keep me hooked to the platform and hopefully this becomes the first step in my long future association with Substack. Looking forward to reading the next one.
This essay pretty much sums up the heart of my approach to growing as a writer. For many years, I was very deliberate about my reading diet. This days I read a strange 50/50 mix of 1700s essayists, on the one hand, and nische blogs and twitter threads on the other.
And since starting the Substack, which turned out to go much better than I had ever hoped - I had zero connections when I started, literally - I started to attract peers who really shaped me and pushed me on. And the last 6-8 months, I've also had people I would consider mentors, which is another level still.
But it is this process of curating a milieu (including books), letting that mileu improve you and attract an even more powerful milieu. And repeat. It is very powerful.
(and then of course as part of that I do a million other small things to improve my craft, and more importantly my mind - you want to see things strangely, and be crafty enough to be able to write what you see)
I hope I can become much better still. We deserve great essays in this age, and I'd love to write one.
"And after a handful of years of hanging about with people more skilled than themselves, our babies—these tiny, soft-skulled creatures—can out-compete chimpanzees in all but close combat"
I want to see the proof for the close combat claim. For science.
This is excellent, looking forward to the rest of the series.
My oldest nephew is now a junior in highschool, and his brother a sophomore. My sister and I were homeschooled, which provided a milieu that, I think, turned us into significantly more thoughtful and interesting people than the standard route of public school would have allowed. But my sister has just sent her boys to public school throughout, which has disappointed me (actually it has made me mad at myself for failing to make the argument more convincingly, or to provide an alternative schooling environment).
I like the way you put it in the final section: you want to create a distributed apprenticeship in the art of being you. There is a vastly larger number of paints and brushes available for someone to learn to draw themselves in a thoughtfully curated personal milieu, than is given in the generic conformity machine of public school. Maybe it's not too late to impart some more color into my nephews' milieu.
Thanks!
One big part of me thinking through these things is to articulate to myself how to homeschool my daughters. They are still young, so for now it is my duty to do the curation, which entails a lot of complications that I do not cover in the essay, but I also want to articulate a way of viewing the world that I want them to understand once they become, what, ten maybe, and start curating more actively themselves.
But I'm also thinking about myself. We have such capacities now to curate our social milieu, and I have only just started to appreciate its power. So it is an ongoing process for me. I think we are in a transition as a society where we have still not rewired our norms and ideas to properly leveraged the internet, and I'm trying to do my small share in helping that along. Hopefully, articulating how you go about it can make it a little easier for people to get going, though savvy people are already doing most of the things I describe.
This made my night - if not months. Thanks Henrik.
Thanks!
Looking through your Substack, I noticed the piece on ritual design. One of my friends from way back works as a ritual designer. https://www.ritualatwork.com/about
thanks Henrik! I've checked out his link - brilliant. And appreciate you pointing me to him. Warmest wishes
I'm all in on this series, and love where this is going. I've noted this curated auto-poesis in myself, perhaps as a result of my attempts at being both performer and audience with my teenage kids. The use of GPT-3 as a personal (possibly broader) cultural tutor and educator is an interesting avenue of pursuit. Thanks!
Auto-poesis is a lovely term. How have you been changed by it?
Thanks for the question Henrik. It's forced a bit more intentional attention and refinement of thought.
First, I've no doubt been influenced by Canadian cognitive scientist John Vervaeke's extensive repertoire of content on YouTube. He speaks often of autopoiesis (coined in 1972 by Chilean biologists Maturana and Varela) within his 4E-cognition model. Having heard but not read about the concept, I've bastardized the spelling, perhaps as a subconscious tilt towards an emergent, ever-evolving systems theory art form rather than the bounds of reductive science.
Part of my own autopoiesis has been an opening towards the multi-perspectival through exposure to experts in various fields, akin to the cultural curation you've written about. Examining life at various scales, with several subject matter lenses (including the careful inspection of those lenses for unintended distortions & blemishes) builds a much more resilient and solid basis for meaning- and sense-making.
Metaphors have also become much more salient to me and have infiltrated the way I communicate ideas. This has been useful in communicating to my teenagers. Returning to artful autopoiesis, I've often used musical metaphors to relay the importance of "tuning" their instrument, good orchestration, and performing well as soloists or within the symphony. On the later point, communicating within the family has taught me a great deal about the utility of dynamics (volume), tonality, rhythm, repetition of themes through variation, and the deliciousness of unexpected syncopation & occasional dissonance.
While they attend public school, I've supplemented their education with my own curated list of fiction and non-fiction with a desire to expose them to a wider world of science, ethics, wisdom, history and philosophy. The list is a distillation of the historical & modern day mentors I've exposed myself to (or eventually intend to). My hope is that the exposure to this material will set them on a wise path, with a taste for the diets that lead to harmonized & healthy mind-body-soul-society-planet.
Ultimately, I'm not likely the best person to say how I've been changed. The process is slow and gradual. I'm trying to be more empathetic, well-grounded, stable and wise. For the time being I'm happy to align myself with practices that lean in that direction, and will trust the process until the feedback suggests otherwise.
That's beautiful.
I too like to read good books with my oldest. She's just five yet, but if I interpret and condense we can do a lot of fun books already. Animal Farm we did last year, now the Poetic Edda. She really loves the richness of the stories, and I find I can be more alert and present when I have to interpret and simplify and explain what we're reading, compared to when I read children's books.
The orchestra metaphor for communication I found rich. A lot of ideals around communication centers on being clear and concise, but there is a lot of power in counterpoint and dissonance and recurring motifs etc. I will keep that idea in the back of my mind as I keep deepening my writing craft.
love this
THANK YOU! You've articulated something I've been trying to do, and feeling a bit mad/pretentious/ruthless and you've made me feel sane and justified. We are networked beings.
It is about tending you part of our collective culture. From a certain perspective, and if done without grace, it can look ruthless. But as I see it, we are all cultural workers - it is our responsibility to tend our corner of the culture, and this is how, from the bottom up, healthy cultures are made and spread.
I totally agree, and have mulled many a time how we create culture with everything we do. I left a city I'd been in for 10 years because I was in the wrong milieu.
This is phenomenal. I had some of these ideas already, half formed and only partially implemented. Thanks for helping make clear the direction I was already stumbling towards!
Mark, if you keep stumbling down this path you're in for a wild ride. The next two posts will be more practical, if you're into that sort of thing; one about finding influences/input, another about using online writing / working in public as a way to search for interesting connections.
Totally interested.
I've had thoughts, for a while, about building my own ranking system locally to better filter out good from bad content. And i decided a few weeks ago that the entire purpose of me writing was to help me grow intellectually; when people say 'hey, your idea looks like this one other', or 'this reminds me of such and such author', that feedback is great. Having an audience also acts as an incentive to take concepts from vague intuitive hunch into something much clearer.
Exciting!
Many years ago, I read Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate, which investigated the nature vs nurture debate. Pinker argued (as best as I can recall) that parent’s primary contribution to their children was genetic, and accounted for roughly half of a child’s outcome. The other half was societally conditioned.
Pinker argued that parents have much less influence than believed. But even at the time, pre-kids, I wondered: don’t parents have the ultimate trump card, in that they can CHOOSE the environment in which their kids are raised? So even if children are more influenced by culture than parents, parents can choose the culture itself.
I’m excited to see where you go with this series!
just came across this. wow. great read. I need time to reflect
Thank you so much for this post! It's serendipitous that I found it, it so appropriate for me at this moment in my time. I had to leave my former milieu two and a half years ago in a small country town, and come to the big city for medical treatment. When I first surfaced after the cure, the internet commentators I'd been used to following, were all saying depressing, negative stuff. Not what I wanted to hear. Been floating since, but swimming hard now toward the next installment.
I hope you are feeling better! And what an exciting time to be shaping a social and intellectual context for the next part of your journey :)
This is a beautiful, beautiful essay Henrik. Thank you. I chanced upon your page through a Twitter feed that led me to 'Looking for Alice', which made me think 'Oh, I wish I could write like this' [and just mere micro-seconds ago I noticed myself indulging in 'millisecond correction to fit my words']. Thank you for helping me articulate that feeling into words. :)
This essay is such a wonderful articulation of how I think, and have modeled my life around over the last two decades. And how I have tried to explain my actions to those who are confused (and perhaps offended?) by my 'avoidance of certain people and situations'. This is also something I continue to emphasize the importance of during one of those deep, meaningful conversations as I'm reaping the mental benefits of adopting some measure of this discipline.
Even though I've known about Substack for a few years now, it is only now that I'm in the right mental space to indulge in it. And I'm glad I chanced upon your page and this series to keep me hooked to the platform and hopefully this becomes the first step in my long future association with Substack. Looking forward to reading the next one.
Thank you, Anubha.
This essay pretty much sums up the heart of my approach to growing as a writer. For many years, I was very deliberate about my reading diet. This days I read a strange 50/50 mix of 1700s essayists, on the one hand, and nische blogs and twitter threads on the other.
And since starting the Substack, which turned out to go much better than I had ever hoped - I had zero connections when I started, literally - I started to attract peers who really shaped me and pushed me on. And the last 6-8 months, I've also had people I would consider mentors, which is another level still.
But it is this process of curating a milieu (including books), letting that mileu improve you and attract an even more powerful milieu. And repeat. It is very powerful.
(and then of course as part of that I do a million other small things to improve my craft, and more importantly my mind - you want to see things strangely, and be crafty enough to be able to write what you see)
I hope I can become much better still. We deserve great essays in this age, and I'd love to write one.
This was an amazing read, thanks for sharing!
Thank you, Lewis. It is such a kind gesture to let others now when you enjoy their work.
"And after a handful of years of hanging about with people more skilled than themselves, our babies—these tiny, soft-skulled creatures—can out-compete chimpanzees in all but close combat"
I want to see the proof for the close combat claim. For science.
Currently stuck in the ethics committee. But I'm sure they'll come around.