Accused (2023)

Conversation Queues

My best conversations lately have been thanks to conversation queuing.

How it works:

I maintain a daily log of my favourite sparks of inspiration and motivation, and discoveries, and thoughts.

Then, at the start of each week, I assign each of those sparks from the week before to the specific people in my life I plan on chatting with.

When it’s time to hangout, I’m prepared with a queue of conversations I’m eager to hear their thoughts on.

How I organize my weekly spark log:

🙋🏽‍♂️ Biographical

• List of unique things that happened to me

🧠 Thoughts

Reflect

• List of my favourite internal conversations

Memorize

• List of my favourite definitions and quotes

Imagine

• List of my favourite daydreams

💃 Actions

Research

• List of topics I’m interested in deep diving into

Play

• List of projects, exercises, and experiments I want to try

Do

• List of goals I want to accomplish

3 Benefits I’ve noticed:

• The protégé effect

When teaching, pretending to teach, or preparing to teach information helps us learn that information.

I’ve noticed that new and interesting topics become even more memorable and exciting when I plan on getting a particular person’s perspective on them.

• Life in stories

The most predictable questions in any reunion are “how are you doing?” and “what’s new?”. Having easy access to our most unique recent stories, minimizes the embarrassing amount of time it might take us to remember a single interesting event of our past week.

• Third things

A lot of my favourite conversations are about third things — the topics two people talk about when they’re not talking about either of themselves.

Listening to and talking about life stories can be fun, but they often lean to being one-sided conversations. Conversational cuing has been a great way of optimizing for the “third thing topics” that allow both sides to meet in the middle.

The Art of Alter Egos

🔗 / Cardi B interview with Elle / Hot Ones /

“To me music is art. And fashion is art. But fame… fame isn’t art. But the person you become when your famous, your alter ego, that’s art.”

I don’t know if it’ll ever actually be possible to be free from a personality shackled by some degree of social shame.

But I love a reminder to be more surreal.

To become a carefree caricature of ourselves, to consider their costume design and to come up with their character traits.

We are a canvas and our alter-egos are our art.

Seijaku

🔗 / Dense Discovery Issue 256 /

The Japanese word and concept for finding serenity amidst life’s chaos — stillness in the midst of activity.

Elastic Mood

🔗 / Haley Nahman Substack / Dense Discovery Issue 256 /

“When a mood is so overwhelming you mistake the intensity of it for the longevity of it.”

Reality Creation

“Not every day contains a story-worthy moment for me, but I found that the longer I did my homework, the more days did contain one.” 🔗 / Storyworthy Book / Ali Abdaal Video /

The homework mentioned refers to the act of writing two sentences at the end of every day about the most story-worthy thing that happened to you.

The author’s practice reminds me of when I started to keep a dream journal; the more I attempted to take note of my dreams, the more dreams I was able to remember.

How we shape our mind, shapes how we see the world.

The reality we’re looking for is just waiting for us to clearly define the reality we’re looking for.

Liking Lenses

There’s no topic we can’t like as long as we look at it through the right lens.

Maybe our lens for liking chemistry can be found in the study of molecular gastronomy.

Maybe our lens for liking history can be found by studying our family ancestries.

Maybe our lens for learning to like our fears can be found by studying fear itself.

Human Farming

What does farming mean in the context of “people produce”?

Humans being herded into social media platforms.

We are animals in an attention economy.

Farmed for our data.

I wonder in what other ways we are being farmed?

What would you invest in today assuming you had to hold the investment forever?

🔗 / Sahil Bloom Newsletter /

My impersonal approach

The Lindy effect — a statistical tendency for non-perishable things with longer pasts to have longer futures. 🔗 / Samuel Pedro video /

I figure the most resilient investments will be the ones with a proven track record of longevity.

My personal approach

Unless we’re investing for someone else, forever only lasts as long as we do.

It’s worth considering which elements make up our life.

My life blocks are body, environment, finance, mind, operations, recreation, and social. And one of my main goals in life is to consistently invest into each of those.

In my opinion, the sooner we define our life blocks, the sooner we ensure that we have a well-balanced life portfolio. And the sooner we can be more intentional about where we invest our time, energy, money, and attention.

What is the central question of your life?

🔗 / Danny Miranda /

I think my question could be “how can I turn my imagination into reality?”

It would be really interesting to hear how other people would go about approaching this question.

Creative Reading

🔗 / Writing with Andrew Video /

“Creative reading is just as important as creative writing.”

How can we go about reading more creatively?

Planned Obsolescence with a Twist

When do companies intentionally exasperate the problems they solve?

If I was an evil genius working for an air freshener company, I would fill every bottle with several drops of a slightly bad after-smell. Just like oil in water, I’d engineer the after-smell layer to float to the top of the bottle, so that it was the last thing customers sprayed into their home. Subtly making them want to buy more air freshener after finishing each bottle.

I feel like this dark pattern has to exist in real life and it’s got me wondering where?

Exhaustive Shinigami Eyes

What if we had the power to predict when anything will perish?

Just like with death sense where we’d have the power to see a person’s death date and time, it would be neat to extend that power to seeing all sorts of expiration dates.

The expiration of places, and relationships, and items, and ideas.

Auditory Interfaces

I think it would be such an interesting challenge to design an auditory interface.

I listen to videos like this:

And I realize the fascinating potential for immersive sound interfaces. It’s got me wondering what it could look like to make these even more interactive and responsive to user input.

Educational Rollercoasters

Inspired by an immersive space exhibit I went to this recently, I’ve been wondering what the future of immersive and educational rollercoasters could look like.

Who’s going to invent the Magic School Bus of the future? And what’s the closest experience we have to that today?