This was 8 years, 5 months, 22 days ago

a useful extrapolation:

often times, I think about when I first started working on ___, and the sense of scale I had, and didn't have, and had, and didn't have, and the various oscillations in terms of optimism I held. How hard is it to create a doorway? To punch a hole in a floor? To create a window? To make new stairs? To merge buildings? To move buildings?

Everything in abstraction becomes optimistic, or easier to grasp, or easily understood as 'easier to grasp'. Everything in practice, concrete actionable steps, becomes easily felt as an overwhelming mass of intricate, interlocking gestures operating within a complex ecology. The trick is: how are you optimistic about the concrete, actionable about the complex?

to some extent: everything is doable; everything is possible, just a question of resources and time. but: never doubt the collective efforts of a society, of groups, markets, companies, organizations, collectives, peoples, never doubt the mass of problem-solving desires that stretch out every which way (like a slime mold gathering for new pathways of movement); never doubt that the world isn't full of people who wish to figure-it-out.

everything necessarily undergone with a sense of levity. an over-subscription to the cult of the critical are for unmoving haters, not optimistic movers, nor galloping grumps. kitsch is an aesthetic anti-populist sentiment that defers a personal evaluation over one's own perception. concepts themselves are the byproducts of a belief that the world can not just be grasped but manipulated through thought alone.

everything is made out of people. everything exciting comes from people, or desire. one's arm rotates because the parallel bones in our arms are tugged to swivel by muscles grasping in such-and-such a way. everything operates because of the exertion of desire of and by people, through people.