Our Storewide Aphorism & One-Liner Blowout Sale!
Classic Technohumanism, now with a great new name.
If the Substack gods are smiling, you are receiving this post under a new name, “The New Curiosity Shop.” As I indicated earlier, the name “Technohumanism” wasn’t getting at the range of things I was writing about. Moreover, Jason Crawford over at The Roots of Progress Institute has been using the term, and will have a book out with “Techno-Humanist” in the title. I like his stuff and wish him well, and don’t want any confusion between us.
I like “The New Curiosity Shop.” Besides a nod to a Dickens novel, has a sense of offering a range of things, and stays close to the original idea I had of writing about the relationship between scientific and artistic creativity. People are curious. And my more curious anecdotes are better suited to the new title.
To mark this auspicious moment, I’ve collected several of the curious observations I’ve put into notebooks over the years. Shop around!
I think aphorisms and one liners are particularly well-suited to our short attention-span era. The right ones punch through, and hold you. Many of you seem to like them too: I had positive comments about Richard Smoley’s “Man is the animal that believes something is wrong,” and my own “the future arrives consisting largely of the present.”
I tend to collect them, too. Among my favorite lesser-known lines:
“The world of the unhappy man is quite another than the world of the happy man.” - Ludwig Wittgenstein
“Reality is the world in its relation to a soul.” - Oswald Spengler
“Even a single subatomic particle interferes with itself.” - Paul Dirac1
You could spend a day, a week, a lifetime on each of those ideas.
I can’t guarantee that level of quality, but I hope you enjoy these, grouped in themes:2
1. Reality & Perception:
Truly understanding reality would mean seeing the colors that bees see, feeling the magnetic forces that guide birds.
When we remade the physical world, we remade the invisible world too - our ideas about emotions, long-lasting historical forces, Heaven and Hell, the self.
The most presumptuous lie, “I understand my life.”
Meaning is information and experience combined. Intuition is meaning and imagination combined.
Science is precision. Humanities are abrasion and ambiguity. Which matters more in the long term?
2. The Human Condition:
Life is like a game of Frogger. Particularly if you've been sitting on a couch playing Frogger for the last 20 years.
The nostalgia of listening to Jackson Browne singing “These Days” - God, to again be that young and depressed in that low-cost way!
I realized I did not want happiness, for it no longer held certainty.
Compassion is not finite, I was pleased to learn. Then, grief is not either, a less satisfying realization.
Strangely, extending life has made people more cautious.
3. Social Commentary:
Silicon Valley has two barbell archetypes - relentless salesman and near-autistic mastermind.
When you convince yourself you are building the future, it’s also easy to convince yourself that today’s rules do not apply. You believe that what you’re doing is so much bigger than anything they cover.
The power of terrorists is to destroy your reality. In that sense, there are many terrorists.
Australian women are too stuck up, said the cabdriver, presumably meaning that not enough of them are interested in sex with a fat, bitter, late-middle-aged Australian cabdriver. Lots of people are stuck up that way.
The modern art in galleries isn’t particularly better, but the people looking at it are much better looking. Younger, thinner, less consciously dressed, with more of a faraway and disaffected look.
4. Creativity & The Artistic Process:
When you dream of writing something that could permanently change someone’s day, try, “Put all the small bills in this sack...”
“The tower's flame burned eternal, holding the all-searching, all-smelling nose of Sauron.” First drafts are a bitch.
Why do love songs always have the same rhymes? Moon, June, soon, raccoon...you, true, blue, raccoo…
Hamlet becomes aware of the necessity of madness in describing life, and turns Horatio from a philosopher into an artist.
Damien Hirst’s “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Something Living”: The point is, it looks nothing like a shark. It’s not moving. You’re meant to see the wires and stuffing. Yet guys discuss which part you’d have to punch to ward it off. Women linger, trying to understand. The art is in how people treat the art, which is a decent accomplishment.
5. Absurdity:
Bigfoot must be pissed at the way everyone focuses on his worst feature.
They say comedians are running away from a miserable childhood. Lots of other people had them too, but comedians run.
“Doggedly catty” is an excellent pet phrase.
Like that lucky old sun, I’ve got nothin' to do, but fuse hydrogen atoms in a hellish fury all day.
Of course a dog's mouth is cleaner than a human's. Dogs can't talk.
If men breastfed, they’d have shows on TV: Iron Nipple; Quest for Quarts; Lactation Nation; The Feed; Milk Men.
If anyone tells you that you are delusional, believe them. Then decide they don’t exist.
Dirac, who wrote the first ever thesis on quantum mechanics in 1926, is regarded as one of the most influential physicists of the century, and a very odd guy who rarely talked. But when he did, he was either very literal or very funny. It’s hard to know.
-”The result is too beautiful to be false.”
-”Pick a flower on Earth and you move the farthest star.”
-“People who equate all the different kinds of human activity to money are taking too primitive a view of things.”
His most famous equation is also inscribed on a stone in Westminster Abbey, at Newton’s burial site.
Full disclosure: I had an AI do the grouping! I think the order worked pretty well, and would have spent a long time coming to something like it. First time I’ve found a practical use for it in writing - organizational, not creative.
Love the new name, but the old one is still at the top of my screen and in my inbox.
I loved the Dirac quote of “even a subatomic particle interferes with itself”. But where did he say this? I hunted for a source and was only able to find a slightly different wording: “each photon interferes only with itself” which I found mentioned in regard to the double-slit experiment. Can you tell us more? Your version sounds so much more intriguing!