Two years ago I wrote a post about how weird it felt to not write anything here anymore. To join the ranks of those blogs I read growing up, where the authors went off to college or otherwise got busier in their lives in the way where writing was no longer an effective creative outlet anymore. I never posted it. A small reason being how weird it is to have something exist on the internet that I haven’t looked at in years, and yet it is read daily by others.
I’ve written less than a handful reddit posts in my life, most of them asking for very specific advice that was not easily googleable. Pre chat-gpt and all*. Anyway, I googled a thing recently and my own post popped up, I only realized by recognizing the familiar writing style. Sometimes, apparently, you can have the exact same problem five years later and find internet-you reminding you of the solution.
That’s all to say I don’t know if I can stand by every opinion on every book I’ve talked about on here, yet I don’t care enough to check. It’s book reviews after all. I’ve been on the Internet since I was 11 years old, thankfully not posting anything for 99% of that time. At 26 years old, I somehow find myself returning to the same views about the world I already had many years ago. Sometimes I read journal entries and find the past me more eloquent. Teenage me spent time to figure out her world-view and communicating it to people who asked. My early twenties was all about navigating it.
Now, there’s somewhat a forced balance in social settings due to the fact that I’m busy. It sounds weird, but in past real life situations I noticed when someone was acting in bad faith and I then had to navigate that. And that’s still something I make sure to deal with if it’s about groups or people other than me. Yet these days, I don’t recognize most snide remarks meant to affect me. Sometimes I realize three days later. And I feel no shame about it, because it means I don’t feel a need to conform. Yet, there’s new factors in my life that makes me able to do that now, so it’s somewhat due to age and experience, but not all.
*I have yet to find an use for AI directly in any aspect of my life. Last week it both gave me the wrong symbol for math derivation (the only logical way to write the formula was using partial derivative, not functional derivatives, so it was a major mistake on its part) and it gave me wrong advice on yarn was of which type. Apparently due to the mistake that in English “worsted wool yarn” is both a way to spin yarn to make it smoother and a way to describe the weight of the yarn. On a related note I’ve started to learn a traditional/indigenous way of weaving bands.
I’ll admit the Dunning-Kruger effect is something I battle with every day, mostly recently in getting up from the valley of despair about everything I cannot possibly learn, also about physics as a new master student. Yet as you are exposed to just how many niche paths in your own field there is, you do realize that it is impossible to know most things. That does not mean you can not find points or facts to anchor you in your view of the world, let it be facts about nature or small advice in your daily life.
In daily life I believe whole-heartedly in the idea of collecting what is helpful and discarding the rest, be it ideology or anything else. Applied to books, this might even mean you reread something and realize new layers the story had where you did not realize before. Or that it is shit except for that one character you did adore. Lastly an update about books; I’ve picked up so few fiction books compared to physics textbooks the past years, yet non-fiction audiobooks while running errands are the best.
There’s one book in particular I would recommend connected to this theme. I absolutely felt I got something valuable while reading it the first time, yet I also didn’t understand it as much as I wanted to until learning more and then re-reading it. “Braiding sweetgrass: indigenous wisdom, scientific knowledge and the teachings of plants” by Robin Wall Kimmerer was recommended to me for its well-written facts about nature by a professor in the subject, yet its whole message is useful both to those new to it, those from a biology background or those who have knowledge of the indigenous in other contexts. I would write a review with how it has helped shape my view of indigenous groups connection to academic institutions and science, especially as someone who is disconnected from my own indigenous background. For now, there’s physics textbooks to read and indigenous weaving to be learned with instructions in a language that is not googleable (and how surprisingly proud I was when I found that out, that certainly has to be a choice made). Google translate both tried and failed to add the language to their translator, so I won’t even have to ponder the ethics of that.
You will find me with weaving instructions from the library, a dictionary and the right type of yarn, despite AI and Google’s current best attempts. The future isn’t coming that fast, it’s been in the works for a while.
aquapages 