There’s a scene in the series about Fito Paez in which he is in his old bedroom. He is visiting the house where he grew up. The circumstances of Fito’s visit are dark but, in that particular scene, we find nostalgia, melancholy, and hope.

I’d love to take a snapshot of that moment but I cannot find it online. Anyway, this is in 1986 or 1987, and the bedroom looks eerily similar to my old bedroom, and I bet very similar to many youngsters’ bedrooms of the pre-internet era.

There is a bed, a nightstand, a few books on the nightstand. A few more books or magazines scattered in the bedroom.

In my case, there was a CD + cassette player. For it to play any music, I needed to go on day-long expeditions to the other side of the city to find good albums.

But that was it: a bed, a nightstand, a few books, a cassette player.

wtf changed since then?

There is a worldview in which there exists a duality between the nerd and the practitioner. I’m either stealing or deriving this from Nassim Taleb.

The nerd is the maximizer, the one-variable guy who thinks the world operates like a car engine, the nerd would sell one lung (we have two anyway) and invest the proceeds in the stock market.

The practitioner has a longer time horizon in perspective. He can read Thucydides and understand that man and the way to conduct life has not changed in 2500 years. The practitioner doesn’t pretend to know the cause, but he can observe the effect.

What the fuck changed since then? I have this nagging feeling that the nerd took over everything. Take, for instance, hyper-capitalism and the unrelenting year-on-year growth metric, or just watch one of those YouTubers that are obsessed with “productivity”.

simpler things

The title of this entry is a nod to two posts written by Simone S. titled simpler things and a new plan. Here is an excerpt:

Premise: my devices are at least 4-year old. My main music instrument was built in 1991 and bought a year later. My daily computer is now 10-years old. I maintain and repair them, because they are good.

I check his site periodically to see how he’s doing (and how he’s doing it) because, secretly, I’d like to go back to that late 1980s, early 1990s setup.