March 16, 2023

Non-Weekly Cucumber Salad #15 🥒

Intro: I’m kinda sick.

This edition has been slowly growing inside me like a parasite, and now it wants to come out violently through an undisclosed orifice.

I’ve recently self-diagnosed myself with burnout, I’ve been struggling a lot to work since February, and I decided to take some distance from work (shoutout to my friend and partner in crime Lucas, who’s taking over all of the projects I was responsible for) to put my head back in place (wherever the hell that place is anyway).

But I really don’t want to discuss burnout or its symptoms, not only because this topic has already been discussed to exhaustion all over the internet, but also because I don’t want to think about these bad vibes in general. Seriously, don’t ask me about it, I’m taking me time to heal and that’s all that matters.

Thing is that, while I’ve been paralysed when it came to work, I’ve been reading and researching a lot at the same time. I started to think about the last edition of the newsletter that I called “The Slow Cooker Edition”, and as much and I like that metaphor, now I believe a garden is a more appropriate description of the process in which I interact with the ideas and concepts I’m exploring.

I feel like in a slow cooker things get to expand their flavour and merge with other things and create new flavours over time, but they’re still sealed in an environment without any interference from the outside. In a garden, there’s a whole symphony of chaos that alters those things and how they can be perceived. It’s a much more complex and unpredictable environment than a slow cooker.

Thoughts on Complexity: a rant

Before starting with the essay I need to say that I wrote this in the heat of the moment, I plan to organise and properly edit this essay one day as a coherent piece, but I figured the newsletter doesn't have a lot of academic rigor anyway. What you're about to read is a draft of thoughts.

It’s hard to write about certain things, specially ideas I’ve been thinking about for a long time and there are so many takes about it inside my head, and I feel like in order to turn all that into a newsletter I need to elaborate everything into a cohesive story, but since this is about complexity and chaos I’m going to try something more experimental and just throw paragraphs here and there about some of the points I’ve been thinking.

I’ve been thinking a lot about complexity. This started when my friend Julia visited Spain and she posted some beautiful pictures of the La Sagrada Familia Cathedral and looking at those pictures gave me an insight about the humbling aspect of complexity.

The thing about life today, and how we’re being forced to understand life is that we value, pursue, and see reality through the lens of synthesis. This whole craze about Artificial Intelligence is the idea that a computer can synthesise immense amounts of data about everything that has ever happened on earth and give us clear answers and predictions.

Life right now is about eliminating friction, it’s about finding patterns in complexity, or worse, assuming that life’s complexity has patterns that can be understood and simplified.

When I went to Italy last year, we left the house in the middle of the night. Before the sun rose we were on the top of the mountains between Switzerland and Italy, mountains so huge they make you question the relevance of your existence.

We stopped the car for a second to take a look outside. The silhouettes of the mountains were intimidating, and I felt scared, they exuded an aura, a presence of some divine authority, and then I looked at the sky.

I saw millions and millions of stars, and the more I looked the more starts I saw, It was a sight of infinite complexity. I could look forever and never stop seeing new constellations. I finally understood what artists were trying to grasp every time they designed and painted elaborated celestial domes, the starry sky has a hypnotising force.

For a second I felt like the world had turned upside down, and I was going to fall into the sky, I kneel down in order to feel like gravity was still in place. I felt so scared I has to rush myself back into the car. Complexity is scary.

What I want to say is that I really think Gaudi was making a homage to this humbling and sometimes frightening aspect of complexity when he designed La Sagrada Familia. I think it’s so bold to make a project so enormous that It can’t ever even be finished. Through Julia’s pictures of the Cathedral I was again under the starry sky on the top of the mountains in Italy, I was once again in touch with the incomprehensible beauty of complexity.

It’s so hard for me to elaborate a proper text about this topic, I’m saying this again for emphasis. I feel like my life is so impoverished and I feel like ideologically forcing society to reject complexity is an awful thing. More than that, it’s ultimately disrespectful to the complexity of reality.

I’ve been using Instagram a lot because when I feel depressed my screen time increases and the “content” I get from there makes me feel suicidal. Things become more and more nonsensical, there’s this trend of people who carefully clean make up packaging and I’ve watched hours worth of that nonsense, while I could be looking at the fucking sky instead.

I’m losing touch with reality and and I’m losing sense of the richness of it’s complexity because I’m stuck looking at a screen being spoon fed niihilistic content. I’m not here to feel sorry for myself, but I’m here to feel angry at the people who created these tools in the first place.

Why the hell do I think life is happening inside that screen when the most insight I’ve ever had in my life was by looking at the sky? I’ll send my therapist’s bills directly do Mark Zuckerberg.

What makes me even more pissed off is how these technocratic evil corps are dictating the narrative of what technology is, what technological advancement is. Can you believe we were caught in a narrative where NFTs mattered? Doesn’t that make you feel like a fucking clown now? How do the people regain the narrative over what technology matters?

What I’m trying to say is that embracing the fact that some things are uncomputable is essential to actually understanding the nature of reality, and I feel so pissed off at the idea that someone thinks that a computer can understand the complexity of reality and give us “answers” about it because of the imaginary numbers of economy. The hubris! Do you know who understood the complexity of reality? Gaudi did, and he did a fucking beautiful statement about. The truth about reality has to be experienced, it can’t simply told.

I honestly feel panic at the idea that all of the questions are going to be answered, and all of the dilemmas are going to be solved and all of the aspects will be understood. What will be left to explore, to experience, to discuss? Life needs friction, and it is true that some aspects of it can’t be understood from our perspective as humans, and that’s ok! I love not knowing things, I love things that I’m not supposed to understand, I’ve watched enough David Lynch to get comfortable with that idea.

And I think people kind of feel this sense of desire to embrace complexity. I imagine people who live in Rio and adopted last Carnaval’s motto as “Respect the Chaos”, it felt very counter-cultural and timely in my opinion. Sometimes I think of it was a call for help, under the era of surveillance capitalism we live, idk food for thought.

With chaotic love,
Ana Luisa