Notes & Highlights from Reap3r 📚

Reap3r by Eliot Peper 📚

Fun fiction writing that has plenty of heft and research based in reality.

THIS!

It’s a powerful thing, curiosity—our species’ defining trait.

And this!

What are the important problems of your field? What important problems are you working on? If what you are doing is not important, and if you don’t think it is going to lead to something important, why are you working on it?

I discovered Peper via Seth Godin and there are plenty of quotes from Reap3r that sound like Sethisms.

Sethisms

professionals shut up and did the work.

It’s tempting to look at the world and see governments and businesses and schools and hospitals and institutions, but that’s all a convenient fiction. The truth is that organizations are just a bunch of people trying to move in the same direction, and technology is just the way that people do things.

never underestimate momentum.

Maybe the problem wasn’t selling herself short instead of long, but selling herself to the wrong people for the wrong reasons.

The thing you think you want is rarely the thing you need. Letting go of the former to embrace the latter is how you grow.

There was no endgame. There was only the game itself. History, memory, life, identity. Everything was revision.

And here’s one that sounds like Steven Pressfield:

“The struggle is real. The struggle is the work. The struggle is everything.”

Pressfield adjacent:

Destiny was not a muse, but a wrestler that grappled you into submission. You couldn’t win. You couldn’t even escape. You could only tap out and hope to live another day.

On Attention

It was amazing how far paying attention could take you.

Physical objects repaid attention with satisfaction—a quiet joy in the act of maintenance.

Best way to get noticed by the right people is to pretend you don’t exist.

On Technology

For years people had been waiting for virtual reality goggles to make good on the promise of the digital metaverse. But, as with so many paradigm shifts, the VR killer app had slipped in via a side door: audio. AirPods had ushered in a new reality as surely as the iPhone had. The metaverse was the internet whispering in your ear.

The internet warped spacetime to bend reality to users’ wills, but in doing so it severed the connection between action and the direct subjective experience of its implications.

Novels were printed, bound invitations to asynchronously participate in collective dreams that depended more on what the reader brought to the story than the words on the page. A reader didn’t sit in the audience, a reader conjured a nascent world from no more than a sequence of printed shapes.

On Stories, Ideas & Memes

We all know that stories spread, sometimes apotheosizing into memes. But much more interesting than straight sharing and reproduction is when stories inspire the telling of other stories in a cultural daisy-chain.
(via Lynn Chevalier)

stories are vectors for ideas. You can’t just explain something directly, it doesn’t stick. You have to wrap it in narrative like a capsid around a virus.

So many who aspired to sit in the director’s chair tried to earn the position on the basis of an original premise, a clever plot twist, artful turns of phrase, or impressive special effects. But they missed the key point: stories derived their power from characters—how what they did showed who they were, how they changed and grew. Technology was just a prop. Ideology was just decoration. The real magic lay in human agency.

You believed in stories because the characters believed in them, and you believed in the characters.

There was power in a name. Names constrained the possibility space of imagination. Sometimes renaming something—even just in your own head—could yield a flood of new ideas.

On Humans & Humanity

Humans weren’t unitary creatures, but waveforms rolling through the medium of life. A person was an organizing principle.

we have yet to adapt instincts honed by millennia of scarcity for a world of abundance

On Culture

Looked at sidelong, culture itself was an extended conversation in which many great works of art or scholarship were simply intriguing digressions.

At base, human civilization was the sum of everyone’s choices. It used to be that civilization consisted of overlapping physical communities of geographical proximity.

Now, to a large extent, civilization consisted of overlapping digital communities of shared interests, friends, and affiliations.

It used to be about where you were, now it was about who and what you chose.

civilization was the sum of everyone trying to do just that.

Maintenance got no respect in a culture obsessed with achievement. In the end, there was no end. Nothing was discrete. Everything bled into everything else, and any claims to authorship were vanity.

Society & Differences

If art divided people, ideals atomized them.

separated only by the narcissism of small differences,

the tourist demands, the pilgrim gives thanks.

People liked to talk about the connections art forged without acknowledging that any us cast a shadow of them.

On Systems

And the staid shepherds of the wealth Sansome wanted to deploy liked to think of themselves not as fungible cogs in a machine to turn money into more money, but as strategists of insight and initiative who chose to put their weight behind the kinds of people with ideas worth sharing,

A society was only as strong as its systems were resilient.

There is nothing more difficult to plan, more doubtful of success, nor more dangerous to manage than a new system,’” said Esteban. “‘For the initiator has the enmity of all who would profit by the preservation of the old institutions and merely lukewarm defenders in those who gain by the new ones.’”

as they broke, systems revealed themselves.

every living being was a world unto themselves, densely interconnected, interdependent at every scale, deserving of respect and simple kindness

Power

Power was the ability to offer false choices.

On Time

Years could pass in minutes, and minutes could take years.

the mechanical regularity of clocks belied the changeability of time, something that human intuition understood and yet rebelled against.

Time was a strange thing. You could keep on keeping on for years and then the world changed in a single day.

On Us

It’s only when we’re out of our depth that we can find out what we’re truly capable of,

The only way to make progress was edgewise, never looking at the task directly, sneaking through the alleys of your subconscious to arrive at a decision you knew full well you’d already made.

There was a difference between living well and dying well, a distinction modernity glossed over.

By defying your assumptions, the universe occasionally forced you to confront your own ignorance.

Neuroscience showed that your conscious mind didn’t make decisions, but rationalized decisions your brain had already made. The voice in your head was really a sports announcer narrating the action, not the athlete.

Everyone worried about the future. You obsessed over how tomorrow might be different. But it was the things that did not change that mattered most. If you wanted to make sense of the world, you had to focus on the finding the constants. They were the rare truths that everyone was too busy to bother with.

Strange how things like that could sneak up on you. Sometimes you only realized how much something mattered when you were about to lose it.

Transcending self wasn’t a permanent achievement, but a process of constant renewal.

Movement was life.

memory had a vicious habit of slipping through your guard when you least expected.

Crisis stripped you down to your bare essence, forced you to confront whatever dynamic was really at work within you, the source of your power and your suffering, a truth too darkly radiant to approach directly unless under duress.

People seeking the meaning of life got it backward. You didn’t ask life for an answer. Life asked you.

We don’t grow straight up. We branch and twist and turn back on ourselves, always reaching toward the light.

Poetic Morsels

Turned tubular temples

instead it was making him sick with nostalgia.

dream. To get things done, you learned to ignore reality’s surreality.

The sun was the sun was the sun.

Consciousness was forever trapped in the present, but nature waltzed in cycles.

the silence was cathedral.

as predator hunted predator through a shattered bourgeois dream.

Life was one grand improvisation.

reality was feral—and shone forth with a fierce kind of beauty.

Recipe to Try

Curtido