302 - the arks of the golgafrinchans 🌎🚀
are you useless or do you die from a dirty telephone?
Hey there, !
I've just returned from Seoul so this is a bit of a shorter piece. Updates on the trip at the next life update!
Have you read the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy trilogy of five? (if you haven't, please do!) More specifically though for this post though, have you heard about the Golgafrinchams?
They lived on a doomed planet and came up with a great idea to escape...
“Yes, so anyway,” [the Captain] resumed, “the idea was that into the first ship, the 'A' ship,would go all the brilliant leaders, the scientists, the great artists, you know, all the achievers; and into the third, or 'C' ship, would go all the people who did the actual work, who made things and did things, and then into the 'B' ship - that's us - would go everyone else, the middlemen you see.”
"Hairdressers, tired TV producers, insurance salesmen, personnel officers, security guards, public relations executives, management consultants, you name them. We're going to colonize another planet.”
“And we were sent off first,” he concluded, and hummed a little bathing tune.
...
“Oh yes,” said the Captain, “well everyone said, very nicely I thought, that it was very important for morale to feel that they would be arriving on a planet where they could be sure of a good haircut and where the phones were clean.”
“Oh yes,” agreed Ford, “I can see that would be very important. And the other ships, er ... they followed on after you did they?”
For a moment the Captain did not answer. He twisted round in his bath and gazed backwards over the huge bulk of the ship towards the bright galactic centre. He squinted into the inconceivable distance.
“Ah. Well it's funny you should say that,” he said and allowed himself a slight frown at Ford Prefect, “because curiously enough we haven't heard a peep out of them since we left five years ago ... but they must be behind us somewhere.”
Turns out they were programmed to crash-land on a far off planet...that ended up being Earth! Ark A and C never left the planet - and so Golgafrincham was able to get rid of the 'useless third' of their population.
How fun.
When I read this when I was young, I was very much like 'wow I definitely want to be on Ark A or Ark C'. They're the people who really achieve things and get things done! I studied law, and engineering, and I was going to be someone who would be a productive and valuable member of society...
And then I became a management consultant and firmly ensconced myself in Ark B.
Do you reckon Ark B are the useless middlemen of the world? Perhaps.
But I think there's a certain kind of freedom that comes into being one of the 'useless third' in society. The Ark B Golgafrinchans seem to muddle their way through, sustaining heavy losses and becoming 'cave-people', trying to do the customer research to work out what colour the wheel should be before they discover it, and then wiping out the evolving hut-dwelling human race on Earth so that they would become our ancestors.
So, like, there's still an element of being able to, as an Ark B-ian, have enough generic skills to survive a crash-landing on a hostile planet and survive!!
We're all just muddling about in our lives, and it's nice, at least, in Ark B to not have anything really matter that much that the world will end if you don't do something right.
At the same time, nothing you do really matters...but does anything matter? There's the pathway down to nihilism, I guess, and it means we're free to do whatever we want to if nothing matters.
So, perhaps Ark B was the best one to be on?
And anyway, if you want to know the fate of Ark A and C...
The other two-thirds stayed firmly at home and lived full, rich and happy lives until they were all suddenly wiped out by a virulent disease contracted from a dirty telephone.
Looks like Ark B wasn't so useless after all, hey?
Chat soon :)
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📋Today's Question
Well, I mean, it's just interesting to see where you think you'd be, right?
✔️Real Life Recommendations
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Do The Right Thing - either 4.5 or 5 stars I think - I watched a bunch of films on the plane to and from Seoul, and this one was an absolute standout. It's a Spike Lee classic that I like to think of as a documentary or mirror of what race relations must have been around the 1980's in America. It's one of the first movies I've seen that has so much focus on how minorities interact with each other - there are Italians and Blacks and Hispanics and Koreans all living in one neighbourhood, with all the tension that entails, and the policemen / emergency services being the main white presence from 'outside' the neighbourhood. Interestingly, the friction that underlies a lot of the conversations were so human (a son of the local pizzeria wanting his dad to sell up and go be successful somewhere else vs the dad having pride in what he's created, the conflict of a young father spending time with his family vs making money to look after them) but all of them inevitably had to turn to conversations about race. I can't explain it more than this without too many spoilers - but highly recommend this one!
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Jagalchi Market - in Busan. Yes, sorry it's a travel recommendation so it's harder to get to, but I wanted to shout it out as soon as I could because it's such an interesting place to go to. I'll write about it another time, but the way they've set up the market creates perfect competition for the restaurants (all menus are identical), as well as the market sellers themselves (the prices are super easy to find and understand). And thus, you get SUPER nice seafood and SUPER good ways of cooking them, with the vendors trying everything they can to get you to shop with them. Fascinating ecosystem - and they do it every day!!
🚌 Adventures on the Information Super-Highway
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Increasing your practice surface area - this was an interesting article of getting your mind working on practice even without practicing all the time. I think the essence, though, is just that you need to make it your life and see it in everything you do.
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URL Snake - play Snake in your URL bar. It's that simple.
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Asking Good Questions Is Harder Than Giving Great Answers - one to delve into more deeply at another time, but yeah, this is the hard thing. People love answers for the closure of it, but the exploration of answering questions is so much more interesting as an adventure.