A couple weeks ago (Saturday, August 9th - to be exact), I was reading a newspaper in the park, something I don’t normally do but thought it’d be a good chance to do some casual reading and check out the park at the same time. It was a beautiful day and there were plenty of other people who had the same idea of doing something to make the most of it, most of them jogging or walking their dogs.
Nobody really acknowledges me, which I’m sort of glad for as I found myself quite self aware how pretentious I must seem reading a newspaper in public. A 20-something-year-old reading a newspaper on a Saturday morning, not just that, but doing so in public to ensure everyone can see how erudite he is. Anyway, the only thing resembling acknowledgement of what I was doing, is the subject of this note: a group of teenage girls walking past, abruptly changing their conversation.
Now, I will admit that this abrupt change in conversation could’ve been purely coincidental. But I will re-tell it how it happened to the best of my understanding: these girls were all out for a walk, there was a lull in the conversation and one of them happens to bring up:
“Oh yeah, me and so and so are going to get flip phones, and they can play spotify, use whatsapp, google maps… So you can use them for everything.”
Now as you can tell, I was already self conscious about the pretentiousness of reading a newspaper so maybe it’s self-absorbed to think that I caused this spark of conversation. But the thing that I couldn’t get out of my head was this: it’s possible that girl, from all appearances a normal person unlikely to have written critical analysis of the term meatspace, noticed me reading a newspaper, AND had her own personal idea of flowerworld, connected me reading a newspaper to that idea and then was inspired to discuss what she herself was doing in that vein.
I could not get it out of my head. I could not focus on the newspaper anymore, after reading book review and two articles, I was stumped, struggling to get through even a paragraph on the third.
Are these ideas so common? Is there such a broad groundswell of ideas in this vein and such a passion for them that people are jumping at the chance to discuss and explore them at the slightest reminder? If so, why am I not pushing myself to explore and communicate them further?
This is the feeling of urgency. This is why I had to create this website as soon as I possibly could. It would not exist without this experience.
The feeling extends even further beyond, because I’ve been talking to my friend about what a truly good dumb-phone would need. Using one of these Kai OS Nokia 2720s is, while well intentioned, actually not a good enough solution to what a lot of the needs are of modern phones. Anyway, that’s another article for another time.
Basically, I could not stand around after obsessing over these ideas for years and having nothing to show for it. I had to act. And this was my first action.