Original link: https://elizen.me/newsletter/2022/07/newsletter-036/
This is the thirty-sixth issue of “Three Ten Weeks”. Thanks to the new email subscribers this week, the number of subscribers has reached 506. My next target is 610.
Let’s go back to the beginning. The earliest idea of this newsletter was not to share some News, which is why I always use newsletters instead of Newsletters. It’s just that the communication is not accurate. When I want to provide some content related to “choice” and “happiness”, the best and most convenient way I think of is to tell you how I choose and what I think Life is closer to happiness.
It seems that this topic is still too big, too divergent, and difficult to focus on. It seems to have a core, but it seems that the core can connect all things, and it loses its meaning.
So what’s small enough and focused enough to be worth talking about. Today, let’s talk about this topic.
big and small
The mobile phone I use now is the iPhone 13 mini. On the one hand, my own hands are small. After years of habit, I like things that can be played in my hands. The size of the mini is just right. With my Apple Care+, I can run naked without worrying too much. .
On the other hand, the capacity is relatively large, 512G, because I often import photos from the camera to the phone, including videos. Yes, I rarely take official photos with my phone either. So there is a need for capacity.
The last phone was the XR, which was also relatively small. This is also a small hobby of my mobile phone. There are also some hidden benefits to doing so:
I can hardly do many things with this phone, such as watching dramas, reading e-books, swiping Weibo, swiping Twitter…because it’s too small to fit in at all. So much so that I now check the screen usage time of my iPhone, which is a little more than 2 hours a day on average. I can check the mobile phone with this function to see how much I am.
Then someone asked me, what do you do if you don’t feel comfortable watching these things on your phone? The answer is simple, switch equipment to do it, or don’t do it at all.
Read books, use Kindle, use WeChat reader; watch dramas, use projection, use TV; browse Twitter, use computer, and then have a large enough monitor. Tik Tok? quick worker? Circle of friends? Those that can only be operated on mobile phones are rejected.
The size of a page is very important, so any whiteboard software on a computer cannot match a white wall to make people think clearly. If a worker wants to do a good job, he must first sharpen his tools. Movies, for example, are not something you should watch on your phone.
One more addition, when viewing a painting, the scene is still online, the difference is huge, and it is also the best example of big and small.
In many paintings, when you stand in front of a huge picture frame, the impact is omnidirectional, and all senses are affected. It seems that we have been imprisoned by the screen for a long time. It is true that there is an infinite world within the screen, but it limits our eyes to an angle of ±15°, so we can’t talk about seeing the heavens and the earth, and seeing all beings. The same goes for exhibitions. This is the reason why I don’t like any Metaverse products at the moment.
Coincidentally, half an hour before I was about to send you the newsletter, I saw the following paragraph:
Some things are big when you look up close, but small when you look at them from a distance. The marriage of a king, the marriage of a princess, can be loud and lively in the newspapers, can become an overwhelming event in a country, but after a few decades, who will remember these things? There are also some things, which are trivial when they happen and don’t attract people’s attention at all, but as the years go by, its image is getting higher and higher, and its influence is getting bigger and bigger. In 1905, a small civil servant who lived on the top floor of No. 49, Bernic Ram Alley, wrote a thesis because of his genius and his diligence. At the time, there were only a handful of people who noticed the importance of this paper. A few years later, not much has changed. Today, however, such a line of golden characters is written in the chronology of mankind:
“1905 was the year of the revolution. There was a revolution in physics and the theory of relativity was born.”
A book that can save 90% of your leisure time
Excerpt :
“I have a suggestion, it will only take you twenty minutes; it’s a drop in the bucket compared to the time you can hope to save later.
Please take a piece of paper across the table, draw a straight line from top to bottom, and divide it into ten columns. Then, from left to right, use the past ten years to number each column, for example, 2010, 2011… to 2019. Now draw a line across the center of the sheet, that is, you have divided each of the ten columns into upper and lower halves. Then in the top half of each column, write down the most important news that happened that year as far as you can remember, without cheating or Google. The purpose of this exercise is to show you how short-lived news is. Let’s say you wrote “Trump was elected president of the United States” in the 2016 column, or “the war in Syria begins” in the 2012 column, and so on. You will find that in the past ten years, the 200,000 (!) pieces of news you have grabbed into your head have left almost no trace.
Next, in the lower half of each column, write down the major changes that occurred in your life that year: the victories you won, the hard blows you suffered, the epiphanies you had, the major development in your character , your family, career and circle of friends, your leisure life, spiritual life and spiritual world. Maybe you got married, maybe you had a child of your own, maybe you decided to go back to school or take a break, maybe you got fired, maybe you got cancer or lost your father, maybe you won the lottery, bought house, traveled the world, and started my own business. whatever that is.
Next, please think about which news message (from the top half of this paper) has directly affected your life (bottom half).
Please use a thicker pen to draw a line between that news and your life events. How many connections have you found in these ten years?
What? Can’t even draw one? In fact, you don’t have to be disappointed, because it’s normal. The world of news and your personal life are like two separate universes. That said, you can safely ignore the hustle and bustle of the whole news world. And even if you figure out a link, you probably don’t need news as a transport mechanism between the two. For example, if your mother-in-law tragically died (bottom column) in the Germanwings crash in 2015 (bottom column), the correlation between the two has nothing to do with whether there is news to deliver the message .
Still not convinced? My God, you are so stubborn! Well, here’s another piece of advice: Take a full day at the municipal library to look through old newspapers from ten or twenty years ago. You’ll find that almost all news coverage misses important issues. Journalists not only fail to discern the signs of the times, they even misinterpret the wrong signs. For example, you could look through any newspaper in 2007 and find little sign of an impending financial crisis. At best, it’s all about touting the super-successful financial business traders. The whole incident was surrounded by a thick fog of white noise made up of trivial stories, innocuous facts, and trivial scandals whose protagonists are no longer recognizable today. Flip through the news back then and you’d find it absurd; ten years from now, you’ll find the “big news” we consume today just as absurd. “
“Here’s an idea of how we can revitalize public spaces without relying on news that makes people stupid. Here’s how:
Sometimes I have a business lunch that I need at work, or a lunch party with a friend (yes, there are journalists among them, of course). No matter who I might be, I always ask this question: When we finally finish eating and we fold our napkins, by what standards are we going to judge whether it was a successful lunch party? The answer is likely to be: if I could learn something from my companion (and he from me) that I (or him) as yet unknown, but which is both real and important—one that helps us to be better New perspectives on understanding the world.
Especially valuable and enjoyable, it’s always a lunch where each meal partner’s topic can be focused on one thing. This allows for deeper communication, rather than just oscillating on the surface. In addition to that, I’ll learn how this partner handles his issue, how to fight it, and how to gain knowledge about it—and he learns from me. If my lunch partner was a journalist, he would paint me the most important story he has right now. Not two stories, not three, but one. That way I get to know the nuances of the story, the grey areas in it and the context of the whole thing, as well as the attitude of the reporter himself (the so-called “interpretive material”).
After fifteen minutes, we’ll switch roles and it’s my turn to speak. Now, in turn, he’ll learn from me about a problem that’s currently tormenting me – there’s only one, not two or three. That could be a chapter in my book, or a career idea. And it will take fifteen minutes, and then we will continue to talk about other topics, or more in-depth exchange of what we have just shared, before the Espresso is brought to the table and before checkout. This model, I call it “news lunch.” After the press lunch, I would take a brisk walk back to the office. A lunch like this has never felt like a failure, at least for me personally.
We could obviously take the idea of a 15-minute news lunch on both sides a step further and open it up to more people who are not just interested in eating fish, meat, or vegetarianism for lunch, but also want to absorb new ideas. We can rent a space or a restaurant downtown and hold regular press lunches. Everyone can sign up for (and pay for) the news lunch of the day through a mobile app or website. Every working day starts at around 12:00 noon, with two crisp and refreshing reports of 15 minutes each, accompanied by a healthy lunch. The specific procedure might go something like this: A journalist reports in fifteen minutes the most important story at hand, not one, not two or three. The focus of the story is not the headline, but its context. The reporter’s technique, that is, the way he handles the story, the atmosphere and the tone of the story, must be included in the content of the report. The more local a story is, the more relevant it is to most of the participants.
Then a scientist (or another journalist, if he’s also a professional) reports a story that’s nearly impossible to get to the media because it’s too slow and too abstract to provide explosive imagery or personal storytelling. s story. The second report also took fifteen minutes. What comes after two presentations is a healthy and productive lunch—whether it’s buffet style or someone serving you. The time required for the entire press lunch, including meals, is about sixty, up to seventy-five minutes.
What might be discussed during the meal? Of course, the two topics shared earlier. There is no better place to start when it comes to a conversation of wisdom at the dinner table. In addition, as participants, every time I have the opportunity to meet new people, they also come to understand the “mechanism of how the world works”. In short, news lunch is a kind of spiritual, dietary and social upgrading and refinement during the lunch break.
…
Avoid trifling conversation. Benjamin. One of Franklin’s thirteen life creeds says so. This is especially true at the dinner table: a good lunch should be nutritious in every way. “
– Rolf. Rolf Dobelli. The Art of Living in Refusing to Read the News [M]. Shang Zhou Publishing, 2020.
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See you next time ?
This article is reprinted from: https://elizen.me/newsletter/2022/07/newsletter-036/
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