This time I don’t want to talk about product, but about producer. The human component, the decision-maker, the acting being.
Pardon my bitter melancholy, but this pause on technical content echoes the loud noise of chaos that’s happening on this side of the screen.
Space
I’m fascinated about Ma. Don’t get me wrong, I think I check all the boxes in the cliché “let me import a Japanese philosophy concept to look deeper”, so give me a chance, please. I admire it like a kid watching a toys commercial in the 90’s, with this desire to explore unknown territories.
Now though, as an adult, I’ll put on my westerner’s coat and rely on aesthetics, though I still want to embrace the idea of extrapolating concepts through different planes where they resonate.
Ma, as my limited knowledge allows me to rationally reason, is the missing piece (pun intended) I was looking for. It is the intentional emptiness.
The idea of leaving room for creativity, for rest, for reasoning.
As modern humans, we’re getting used to hyper dense packs of information flowing through concurrent channels simultaneously. Not only that, we’re getting used to not interpreting, to not reason, to not process and to shut down the inner monologue.
We’re letting our skills fade by the subtle niceties of modern communication.
The anti-capitalist will shout “It’s all big tech’s fault! They want us dumb!” but I beg to differ. Not even the most vile of the evil geniuses would want to implement such a complected, intricate and unmappable system of communications. Too much work.
That’s our human nature and I think we’ve always been like that. But we’re allowing ourselves to lower the bar. We’re enabling the lazy inner demons to occupy spaces once reserved.
Everything is space
As a side note, I want to remark that we’re exceptionally well versed in mapping everything to spatial dimensions. You doubt me? Look at your calendar. “Time”, as a dimension, is neatly organized in a 2D plane.
Diagrams, information flow, text. Everything is - or takes - space. Because we’re exceptionally good in operating in this dimension.
But then I ask, why don’t we care more about aesthetics? About making things look nice in the space in they occupy? And what about making sure there’s some space they intentionally don’t occupy?
Time
Time is the most interesting dimension of them all. It’s the one we can’t tame. We experience it flowing through.
Interestingly, it’s not independent from the others. I hope I’m not telling earth-shattering news - as that would disrupt time as well - but time is related to space through gravity.
And why am I saying all that? Because it is relative. We give a lot of importance to small units of it, but perhaps no importance at all to large units. We treasure slices of it that we don’t have.
And differently from space, we suck at projecting in this dimension. When we estimate, we catastrophically fail. When we set our attention to future, we forget of the present. When we only live the present, future is doomed.
We zip thousands of things to pipeline and handle concurrently as if we’re optimizing our time. We’re not.
Structure
What is structure doing here? There’s no structural dimension.
No, but structure is a thing in space that withstand time.
Have you ever seen ruins of a castle, solid rocks on the coast or perhaps a simple castle of cards? They all have their own innate set of properties that allow them to stand still for some time.
Then I ask: In your empty-space-less time, have you worked on your own structure? What’s keeping you standing?
In my mother tongue there’s a saying that goes like that: Goes the fingers, remains the jewelry. We’re set to go, to expire from this land. But we’re not there yet, we’ll have things to care for.
Career, family, life, health. The stronger you are, the better you’ll be at withstanding harsh winds, angry waves, frightening wilderness and unexpected events with fairness, precision. No side effects, no collateral.
Conversely, a weak one will crumble and fall dragging others - even loved ones.
Closing thoughts
Was this too vague? Perhaps, but I really like Mikael Stanne’s advice about keeping things intentionally vague. Oh wait, that’s Ma as well. Here you go.
Truth is, there’s too much happening here and maybe vague excerpts are a great way for me to vent in ways you can relate.
:x