Curation

 

There was one time when I was around 15. By then I had been in 3 different schools. I was digging REM. There was one time when I heard their song “Perfect Circle”. For a while it was my favourite song, and I played it 20 times in a row, which of course is a great way to ruin it. In a way it's great: one of its greatest qualities is that it's elliptical and mysterious. (Of course I ruined its mystery by listening to it so much.)

But one line stuck with me: “perfect circle of acquaintances and friends”. One day around that time, I had a dream where everybody whose acquaintance I had ever made, including friends, were in the same room with me. And then somebody said to me, “this is the last time”. And things were sliding apart, the certainties were fading, people were going their own way, and there's nothing that I could do about it. And that also has to do with it being around the same age as when peoples' tribal brains start turning on: up until puberty, at 12, everybody can be everybody's friend. By 14 years old, everybody is sorted into tribes.

One thing about growing older is that you end up hoarding stuff. At some point, you will lose control of the plot. Life will become messy and it will be punishing on people who don't clean up that mess. I once had an epiphany: nobody wants to live forever. At one point, you will have so many experiences that you will not be able to fit them into your brain. In a way I was both right and wrong. When you get to an older age, you will have a broader, more panoramic view of your life, but you will view each part of your life with lesser intensity. Large swaths of your life will actually disappear from view altogether.

It's like you can only really remember 20 years' worth of your life at any one point in time. So everything else has to disappear. Everything else has to be thrown away. There was a time when I thought that my life could only get better and better, and things that were coming into my scope were bigger and bigger. I was filling up like a balloon. But I eventually realised that some things have to disappear. I'll have to let go of them or else they'll burst. I have to cobble something together from what I have.

There was once I had a brief love affair with a girl from the other side of the world. That disappeared, and it's a branch of my life that has to be excised from memory. All the things I was when I was at school has disappeared, and that has to be excised too. When I was at the university, I took a lot of classes from different subjects, but I just exposed myself to too many ideas without fully mastering them or learning about their implications. They will have to go. I've bought a lot of books that I'll never read. I was a film buff for a period of time and that will have to disappear into the recesses of history. I lived in “Mexico” for years without really anything to show for it other than making money.

Steve Jobs said that what you do is not as important as what you do not do. He managed to pack an extraordinary amount of achievement into the last 10 years of his life because he had a ridiculous amount of focus. He oversaw the rollout of the iPod, iMusic and then the iPhone, and in many ways was the leader in these devices that basically changed the world.

In order to finish a project, you have to do all the things that make up the project. And not be diverted every single way. School is actually pretty bad at teaching people to be organised. Very often, a school syllabus is just thrown together without regard for how facts fit together. There is a very big difference between a piece of meat and an organism. An organism is living matter where almost everything contained within is an active entity contributing in some way to the organism's life. A piece of meat is merely a chunk of organic matter which doesn't actually do anything. Book knowledge, but especially that being taught in school, is more like meat than organisms.