Dan's Notes / Issue 4: Designing a New Old Home • How to Use Your Regrets for Good

Hi friends,

I'm hoping to get into a little more essay-writing in the coming weeks, and perhaps narrow the range of topics into something a little more focused. (Or maybe some of you love a weekly email that touches on personal development, sleep science, technology, US fiscal policy, and supply chains – I don't know. Tell me!) Truthfully these emails haven't quite lived up to my own expectations, but that's why I was very clear from the beginning that is writing practice :) Honestly I'm just pumped that I've made it to week 4. Maybe next week I'll send this thing before midnight. Small goals.

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From Home, a series on Apple TV+ about innovative homes and the people who built them. It's a great series - I watched episode 5, 'Maine', last night, a perfect companion to the next piece. What strikes me about these homes is that "innovative" does not necessarily mean "high-tech", but rather: what materials are used? Where to they come from? How is the home respectful of its resource usage? How does it maintain a reciprocal relationship with the environment it exists in? We need to be doing a lot more of this type of building.

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Designing a New Old Home: Part 1

I love this ongoing series by Simon Sarris about his experience building a new traditional-style home in New Hampshire. (Any essay whose intro contains "proper use of light, space, ventilation, and passive cooling" is a guaranteed hit for me.)

Sarris notes the most common issues with new construction: bland design, cheap materials, no regard for sun position or natural ventilation, and an almost singular focus on maximizing square footage while minimizing costs. [1] We've effectively given up on building well-designed homes.

Homes are not built by people intending to live in them. Instead, they are built by builders, who mostly want to flash-form 60 “units” overnight out of sticks and drywall. Everything from sun positioning to doorknobs becomes not just an afterthought, but a no-thought. The major architectural decision is how to maximize square-footage, over all else, in order to maximize sale price, because at some point in the past consumers wanted more space, and space (considered as square-footage) was an easily legible metric to aim for. The other variables faded into the nondescript sameness of whatever the big suppliers were selling.

Sarris continues on to describe his process for collecting inspiration for his home, from the visual aesthetic to which way the windows face and how the house stays cool in the summer. I love listening to anyone discuss the intricate details of their craft, but beyond all the homebuilding stuff, there are some excellent lessons here in noticing the world around you:

The world is built from materials, I recommend that you become obsessed with finding out what they are. [...] Think about the tiles in the bathrooms you visit, even commercial, on the floors and walls. What colors are they? What does it look like where the tile stops? What makes up the ceiling of your basement? Can you see how the floor is built? [...]

You also need to notice when you find beautiful places. It is not just materials and components that create these places, but patterns and interactions between materials, light, and space that create an atmosphere. [...]

Fundamentally, whether you’re living in a palace or a tiny apartment, “Home” is the set of rituals you make for yourself and others there, in order to dwell poetically in a place. It is worth cultivating an understanding of beauty and rituals as compelling forces, and it is worth listening when environments speak to you, even if you never have the chance to design a home. Even in the very small scale, most people have more control over their environment — and their environment has more control over them — than they realize.

For more, check out Part 2, which has a glorious eight paragraphs about picking quality door knobs. Insta-bookmark.

We no longer think of knobs, hinges, latches, or locks as things worth making beautiful, and we think this at a time when it should be easier and cheaper than ever to make such things beautiful. When they were difficult to make, iron latches and handles resembled hands, lions, flowers, gargoyles, etc. Now that a latch is easy to make, they look like nothing. It is worth carefully pondering this, I think, beyond the words of this article and well beyond door knobs.

I really think if I weren't a software engineer I would design & build homes like this one. Hopefully someday I can do both!

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Networks Versus Tanks

Steven Johnson writes about the experience of watching the Ukraine conflict unfold in the age of Twitter. The outpouring of unity & support for Ukraine from the rest of the world is very evident on Twitter in a way that feels more "live" than even live TV - it really does feel like a "global immune response" powered by people, not just nations.

It all creates an enormous sense of momentum that is much harder to perceive in other forms of media; and crucially, that momentum is part of the conflict itself: we’re watching the world rising up to renounce the invasion, and the fact that we’re able to see it almost on a minute-by-minute basis creates positive feedback loops that inspire more action from other participants around the globe. [...]

But so far, it’s clear that something genuinely new is happening here, a kind of global immune response, rejecting this criminal act with astonishing unanimity, and using new tools to fight back against it.

For more on Ukraine, here's a helpful summary by military historian Bret Devereaux.

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How to Use Your Regrets for Good

Great interview with Daniel Pink about dealing with and learning from regret - the topic of his newest book, The Power of Regret. People's regrets signal what they value the most, says Pink, and digging deeper into those emotions - seeking to understand them, to turn them into learning experiences - is the key to living a life that's more consistent with your values, and filled with less regrets.

If you look back and confront your previous regrets—stare them in the eye rather than present this false bravado of “no regrets,” and don’t ignore them but don’t wallow on them—then you can create a life where in the future you have fewer regrets. You’ve learned the coping skills of dealing with negative emotions, and you have a better sense of what really matters and what doesn’t. [...]

If you only regret outcomes, then you’re really just disappointed. You’re looking at the external world. Because regret is so much about agency, you have to think about, Where do I have agency and where do I not? This ends up being a profoundly important thing that regret teaches us. The whole point of life is teasing out, What do we have control over and what do we not have control over? and dealing with the uncertainty of that. That is central to our development as sentient human beings who contribute to the world: Where do I have sovereignty? What is under my control?

See you next week,

Dan

[1]: Our rental in Los Angeles right now is an absolute gem and I feel so lucky to have found it: natural wood floors; minimal direct sunlight and yet enough natural light in every room to avoid having to turn lights on during the day; multiple sets of built-in shelves & storage; windows that look out at greenery rather than parking lots or highways; and even checkerboard diner tile in the kitchen, a favorite on my Zoom calls. The building manager who showed it to us kept saying it has great energy, which we chuckled at before we moved in - but she was absolutely right. I casually browse Zillow and everything in our price range feels sad and bland in comparisom. But god, I wish this place had a dishwasher.