Spatial computing, an essay for the ages, and my kind of film

quality over quantity this week

Just a couple of recommendations this week, but I think they'll be worth your time. Especially Personal Renewal -- it is exceptional.

Andrew and I will have another podcast coming your way soon, for those of you enjoying it. I've been experimenting with some clips (The King of Kong, Morning People vs. Night People) from last week's if you missed it.

Before we get into the recs, a big new Apple product arrives in February:

Thoughts Ahead of the Vision Pro

The Vision Pro comes out in a bit over a week. I'm tentatively quite excited. I think it's being underrated due to the low quantities (est. 500K units), frustrating history with VR/AR, and perhaps AI's position as the "current thing."

That said, I think the Vision will end up being the most notable innovation in HCI since multitouch (iPhone) and GUIs + mouse (Macintosh). I've yet to try it of course, but I've heard special things. This probably won't play out until we get a much more affordable Vision 2 or 3 with a more robust app ecosystem. Still, I can't wait to play with it. I'm especially excited to see what indie developers come up with in the early days. At a minimum, it seems to be an amazing home entertainment device and potentially a great laptop "monitor."

I think the current computing dichotomy of PC and mobile is slowly moving toward a new one focused on presence: immersive (digital world) and ambient (physical world). The Vision will be the crown jewel of the former and we've got a long way to go before AI, hardware, cloud, and design can bring us to the latter where technology becomes more invisible in the real world.

Joe and I hosted a breakfast pre-order party for the Vision Pro last week. If you're in NYC and interested in spatial software for vision, we'll be holding another event when we get our headsets and enter the era of spatial computing together. Hit my line if you'd like to come.

I also wrote some thoughts on the vision pro, developer resistance, and positive-sum platform approaches. I hope Apple changes its position.

Read 📖📄

Personal Renewal by John W. Gardner

I'm grateful to Willem for sharing this thirty-four-year-old (!) essay with me. I'd never heard of it and yet it is clearly a classic piece of writing. Essential, even. It's among the most powerful and resonant things I've read. It was written for McKinsey & Co, of all audiences, but is to this reader hard-earned wisdom ripe for every person's attention.

I've previously written about topics like fighting against inertia, making meaning, and seeking growth and self-expression throughout life, far beyond what we might consider the "formative" phases. Gardner takes these on and then some, aiming to inspire his readers to yearn for more, maintain vitality, and reach beyond ourselves.

I often say that inertia is the strongest force in the universe. It's a constant fight that most people lose earlier than they hope to. Gardner's take on this idea is blunt and barnacle-y:

"Not long ago, I read a splendid article on barnacles...'The barnacle is confronted with an existential decision about where it's going to live. Once it decides.. . it spends the rest of its life with its head cemented to a rock..' End of quote. For a good many of us, it comes to that."

Then:

"I'm not talking about people who fail to get to the top in achievement. We can't all get to the top, and that isn't the point of life anyway. I'm talking about people who -- no matter how busy they seem to be -- have stopped learning or growing. Many of them are just going through the motions. I don't deride that. Life is hard. Just to keep on keeping on is sometimes an act of courage. But I do worry about men and women functioning far below the level of their potential."

This essay reaches deeply into the dilemma that life has a way of flattening us out, wearing us down, and compressing us into something not as full or dynamic as we once saw ourselves or aspired to.

"By midlife, most of us are accomplished fugitives from ourselves."

Another common fate among ambitious people: the illusion of a summit that, once mounted, means we've made it:

"One of the enemies of sound, lifelong motivation is a rather childish conception we have of the kind of concrete, describable goal toward which all of our efforts drive us. We want to believe that there is a point at which we can feel that we have arrived. We want a scoring system that tells us when we've piled up enough points to count ourselves successful."

These ideas aren't new to you or me. There's much wisdom about honoring the journey rather than fixating on the destination. Many of us admire or aim to become one of those who have found a way to play infinite games or who seek a way of being that resonates, even if it requires finding a ninth path. But it is one thing to know of the virtue of personal renewal, of continuous seeking and growth. It is another to believe it for ourselves, and Gardner lends a hand:

"Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. By potentialities I mean not just intellectual gifts but the full range of one's capacities for learning, sensing, wondering, understanding, loving and aspiring.

Perhaps you imagine that by age 35 or 45 or even 33 you have explored those potentialities pretty fully. Don't kid yourself!"

"There's something I know about you that you may or may not know about yourself. You have within you more resources of energy than have ever been tapped, more talent than has ever been exploited, more strength than has ever been tested, more to give than you have ever given.

You know about some of the gifts that you have left undeveloped. Would you believe that you have gifts and possibilities you don't even know about? It's true. We are just beginning to recognize how even those who have had every advantage and opportunity unconsciously put a ceiling on their own growth, underestimate their potentialities or hide from the risk that growth involves."

Then there is the question of finding and making meaning. Gardner's words here were surely relevant in 1990 but could have easily been written today. It's the age of the individual and we're losing or willingly giving up more communal, directive ways to derive meaning. It's every man for himself and the freedom that comes along with that isn't always what it's made out to be:

"In the stable periods of history, meaning was supplied in the context of coherent communities and traditionally prescribed patterns of culture. Today you can't count on any such heritage. You have to build meaning into your life, and you build it through your commitments -- whether to your religion, to an ethical order as you conceive it, to your life's work, to loved ones, to your fellow humans. Young people run around searching for identity, but it isn't handed out free any more -- not in this transient, rootless, pluralistic society. Your identity is what you've committed yourself to."

Before reading this essay and while reflecting on 2023 and looking ahead, I chose a word to embody my desired disposition this year: commit. It's not something I've done a ton of in my life. Freedom, novelty, and optionality on the other hand... I'm an expert at finding those. I turned 30 at the end of 2023 and it felt like the right time to prioritize it. This came at the right time. Gardner continues:

"People of every age need commitments beyond the self, need the meaning that commitments provide. Self-preoccupation is a prison, as every self-absorbed person finally knows. Commitments to larger purposes can get you out of prison."

These lines pair well with David Foster Wallace's from his commencement speech, "This is Water":

“the world will not discourage you from operating on your default-settings, because the world of men and money and power hums along quite nicely on... the worship of self. Our own present culture has harnessed these forces in ways that have yielded extraordinary wealth and comfort and personal freedom.

The freedom to be lords of our own tiny skull-sized kingdoms, alone at the center of all creation.

This kind of freedom has much to recommend it. But of course there are all different kinds of freedom, and the kind that is most precious you will not hear much talked about in the great outside world of winning and achieving and displaying.

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom.

The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race” — the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.”

So we have a multi-faceted assignment from Mr. Gardner. To fight through inertia and continually grow even without a comfortable rock to attach our heads to. To stay attuned with ourselves, and with others' help, see who we are becoming. To sniff out the gifts and passions we haven't even uncovered yet, to make space for them to be felt. To make meaning through all of this, and to find roots not in an unchanging world but through infinite, continuous change--by way of commitment to others, goals, work, service, belief. This is a tall order.

There is hope yet, with a dose of "tough-minded optimism:"

The future is not shaped by people who don't really believe in the future. Men and women of vitality have always been prepared to bet their futures, even their lives, on ventures of unknown outcome. If they had all looked before they leaped, we would still be crouched in caves sketching animal pictures on the wall.

Nothing is ever finally safe. Every important battle is fought and re-fought. We need to develop a resilient, indomitable morale that enables us to face those realities and still strive with every ounce of energy to prevail. You may wonder if such a struggle -- endless and of uncertain outcome -- isn't more than humans can bear. But all of history suggests that the human spirit is well fitted to cope with just that kind of world.

It's worth reading Personal Renewal in full. If you are still unconvinced, Gardner ends with this, which is by my count as good as anything gets:

"Meaning is not something you stumble across, like the answer to a riddle or the prize in a treasure hunt. Meaning is something you build into your life. You build it out of your own past, out of your affections and loyalties, out of the experience of humankind as it is passed on to you, out of your own talent and understanding, out of the things you believe in, out of the things and people you love, out of the values for which you are willing to sacrifice something. The ingredients are there. You are the only one who can put them together into that unique pattern that will be your life. Let it be a life that has dignity and meaning for you. If it does, then the particular balance of success or failure is of less account."

Watch 🎥 📺

20th Century Women (2016)

I love films like this one. They are a window that we can look at the world through, framing even simple parts of life and the people around us in new ways. They double as a looking glass, where we adjust our glance and see our reflection in unexpected ways. Memories of the past, perceptions of the present, and expectations about the future, all being bent and shaped with each glance. 

Sometimes a line or a scene is obvious and unforgettable. You know it’s one you’ll come back to because the effect is immediate. And sometimes they’re subtle, only working on us gently and gradually until we come back to them explicitly some days or years later. In either case, this is perhaps what I seek most from art. 

I'm 2-for-2 on Mike Mills movies thus far after this and Beginners (2010). His films are dreamlike. A mix of vivid imprints and drawn-out feelings—essences, really. Maybe that is what memory and much of actual life are like. Not perfectly coherent successive plot points but dashes of structure and essential moments with the gaps filled in with something closer to watercolor or light painting.

Art’s role in real life is to help us hold the messiness together. To aid us in meaning-making. To help us imagine her flying toward the sun.

“Men always feel like they have to fix things for women or they’re not doing anything. But some things just can’t be fixed. Just be there. Somehow that’s hard for all of you.”

“Mom, I’m not all men, okay. I’m just me.”

“Do I seem stuck to you?”
"What do you mean?”
"Well I guess I wouldn’t know, would I?”

“Whatever you imagine your life is going to be like, know your life is not going to be anything like that.”

And I must give the three fantastic leading women their flowers: Annette Bening, Greta Gerwig, and Elle Fanning are superb. Lucas Jade Zumann and Billy Crudup too.

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Use Your Words

Thanks for reading. Before I let you go, Andrew (frequent T+T character and my new podcast co-host) launched a new storytelling agency, Use Your Words. If you need help with copywriting, narrative building, or broader brand and marketing work, he comes highly recommended.