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Jay Gidwitz

Artist / Photographer

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Astrophe: The Feeling of Being Stuck on Earth

October 5, 2020 By Jay Gidwitz

It’s hard not to look at the ground as you walk. To set your sights low, and keep the world spinning, and try to stay grounded wherever you are. But every so often you remember to look up, and imagine the possibilities. Dreaming of what’s out there. Before long, you find yourself grounded once again. Grounded in the sense of being homebound. Stuck on the planet Earth.

THE DICTIONARY OF OBSCURE SORROWS

dictionaryofobscuresorrows.com The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows is a compendium of invented words written by John Koenig. Each original definition aims to fill a hole in the language—to give a name to emotions we all might experience but don’t yet have a word for.

ETYMOLOGY

From Greek. Depending on how you slice it, astrophe could mean a couple different things: – a/strophe would be the act of not turning, or – astro/phe, the act of turning to the stars. Reader Krokonil suggested an alternate etymology, from Greek astron “star” + atrophy, the wasting away of muscles or organs due to lack of use or trauma). “For us the stars are wasting away, because we will never reach them.”

TRANSCRIPT

It’s hard not to look at the ground as you walk. To set your sights low, and keep the world spinning, and try to stay grounded wherever you are. But every so often you remember to look up, and imagine the possibilities. Dreaming of what’s out there. Before long, you find yourself grounded once again. Grounded in the sense of being homebound. Stuck on the planet Earth.

The more you look to the sky, the more you find yourself back on Earth, confronting certain possibilities. It’s possible there are other names for our planet, that we will never know. That there are constellations that feature our sun, from an angle we’ll never get to see. That there are many other civilizations hidden beyond the veil of time, too far away for their light to ever reach us.

We dream of other worlds, and name them after our old discarded gods, and they seem almost as distant-too far to be seen with the naked eye. Only ever in artist’s renditions. Or a scattering of pixels on a monitor, with the colors tweaked to add a bit of flair.

Even our own neighborhood is impossibly vast. We’re used to showing the planets nested together-because if we drew them to scale, they’d be so far apart, they wouldn’t fit on the same page. And even our own moon, that seems to hang so close to Earth. But still so far away that all the other planets could fit in the space between them.

It’s possible our spacesuits won’t need treaded boots ever again. That one day soon we’ll tire of wandering and move back home for good. And we’ll get used to watching our feet as we walk, occasionally stopping to hurl a single probe into the abyss, like a message in a bottle. Maybe it shouldn’t matter if anyone ever finds it. If nobody’s there to know we once lived here on Earth.

Maybe it should be like skipping a stone across the surface of a lake. It doesn’t matter where it ends up, it just matters that we’re here on the shore. Just trying to have fun and pass the time, and see how far it goes.

The Infinite Pattern that Never Repeats

October 4, 2020 By Jay Gidwitz

What’s on the Other Side of a Black Hole?

April 20, 2020 By Jay Gidwitz

I.M. Pei’s Home – Art as a Lived Experience

April 11, 2020 By Jay Gidwitz

An Unordered Collection of Talks by Rogue & Contrarian Thinkers

July 28, 2018 By Jay Gidwitz

Some Contrarian Thinkers to Make You Question Everything (and Turn Your World Upside Down).

A collection of videos, interviews, and talks by rogue scientists, philosophers, artists, geniuses, and titans-of-industry to make you see the world with new eyes.

Naval Ravikant

More: https://medium.com/@noahmadden/navalism-quotes-perceptions-by-naval-ravikant-a5fd60ac5788

Yuval Noah Harari

More: Sapiens

Homo Deus

21 Lessons for the 21st Century

Derek Sivers

https://sivers.org/file/2015-12-DerekSivers-TimFerriss.mp3

More: Anything You Want

Chris Sacca

Silicon Valley has an empathy problem.

https://rss.art19.com/episodes/8a26b2f5-7db0-403c-ad49-b15b5c312adc.mp3

(via https://tim.blog/2015/05/30/chris-sacca/)

Chris Sacca Book Recommendations

Nassim Nicholas Taleb

More: Anti-Fragile

Alexis Ohanian

More: Without Their Permission

John Taylor Gatto

Philip K. Dick

More: Books

Movies

Chris Voss

More: Never Split the Difference

Jordan Peterson


More: 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos

Robert Anton Wilson

More: Prometheus Rising

& More: Robert Anton Wilson Explains Everything (or Old Bob Exposes His Ignorance)

Niel Gaiman

Daniel Kahneman

More: Thinking Fast, and Slow

Invisibilia

Scott Adams

Don’t Follow Your Passion:

http://blog.dilbert.com/2013/02/21/follow-your-passion/

Scott Adams

How to Learn

Josh Waitzkin

https://rss.art19.com/episodes/f4ed4dad-2631-4a72-888c-7daac8cfe7fa.mp3

https://rss.art19.com/episodes/cf652463-9388-413e-a278-a108b29b8e2b.mp3

Josh Waitzkin, The Prodigy Returns

More: The Art of Learning

The Titans

Peter Thiel

More: Zero to One

Marc Andreessen

More: Marc Andreessen Book Recommendations

Ben Horowitz

More: The Hard Thing About Hard Things

Charlie Munger

More: Poor Charlie’s Almanack

Ray Dalio

More: Principles

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