The Timeless Way

The format of the book itself is really cool, a proto-version of that sliding scale 'read more detail' thing we've seen in a few gimmicky ebooks: where you can adjust how much detail you want to read and it pulls extraneous stuff out of the book entirely, condensing and expanding to your desires.

This book uses italics and non-italics to make points and elaborations, and outright says at the beginning that you can and should read only the italic main points if you were to read the whole book under a time constraint first, rather than reading the first two chapters in detail and then stopping.

Clearly this is how all books should be written, and gives me further ideas for even this wiki.

Notes

• All people have an innate desire and yearning to construct the world around them.

• I take this to imply also that our constructed world around us hampers our ability to do this: we don't realize it but subconsciously our inability to change our immediate environment is actually pretty uncomfortable and movements like DIY-ism are bandaid attempts to reclaim and sate this yearning. We want to fundamentally edit our houses, our yards, our neighborhoods, our towns, our cars, and so on, each of us with our own unique thoughts and desires and needs, but all alike in the need to do it.

• I also link this to thoughts like the popularity of Minecraft and Fortnite as constructive, collaborative building of houses and towns in servers. We are structure-builders at heart. Our third-spaces should be editable and constructed by us.

• Allowing this is the natural, healthy, unifying thing that humans and nature share. It allows "timelessness" which is this book's word for a sort of wholesome evolving creation flow.

• You cannot build something wholly from the start in the same way you can't make a flower in its final state, you can only grow it from seed.

• I have... opinions about this as a designer and architect, but I think that's a) exactly the thing I need to learn from this and b) kinda true? planned utopian communities and the like are notoriously bad at longevity. You can design all you want, even if it were all free and easy to construct, but then you shove people into it and no matter how idyllic it started, how the government was designed, it either evolves to meet the changing and growing needs or it collapses under its own rigidity. Stuff does just have to grow from a seed more than it can be spawned in final format.

• Incidentally, this is also why I get antsy around too-planned economic model talk. Markets are exactly the sort of engines that are good at evolving over time: they are literally never at rest and although their entire goal is moving towards equilibrium, they will never truly catch it. We invent, we grow, we change, we die; everything is always changing and centrally deciding prices for stuff is usually the worst possible method for reaching that smooth evolution.

• People respond to things that have the unnameable quality

• This feels a lot like Zen and the Art's capital-Q 'Quality' talk, the idea that some things just have an inner peace to them. They are exactly what they need to be, are humble and honest and pure and we understand this at some intuitive level as being nice.

• And, at a personal level, I liked the blurb on comfortableness which is defined by having no internal stresses out of whack: stress equilibrium is a huge metaphor in my mind as a physics nerd, and I truly do wonder if a big chunk of modern society's seeming anxiety is that internal stress turmoil. We get all wound up about stuff we can't effect or change, but the internal tension of feeling like we need to change it is a chronic stress point.