softcopy studio

in fifth grade, i memorized david foster wallace’s famous This Is Water speech for a declamation contest- where through one too many words, wallace implores a cohort of Stanford grads to consciously choose the way they perceive the everyday mundane.

memorizing 6 pages of text wasn’t the most meaningful or intentional experience, but repeating those words got me thinking about an idea that i recently revisited.

no two people experience the same situation the same way. we all have a similarly limited amount of time, but the information we gather and own and connect in that time has a huge amount of variance. i want my accumulated preferences and discernment to product impact, even by just being able to notice and appreciate the nuanced bits in people and environments.

there was a lot of talk about taste recently on the media- i think taste at the core is ability to perceive and distinguish. a non designer simply doesn’t have the time of day, observation practice, or spatial / visual acuity to have design ‘taste’.

on the subject of taste ‘compounding’, something like a connected graph comes to mind. every node in a connected component contributes exponentially to the amount of edges when a new node is introduced.

someone with typographic taste can see differences in spacing invisible to another person. jazz musicians have conversations within chord patterns and accumulated cultural context that someone else hears as noise. a programmer looks at an effect and decomposes it into geometry, light, material, interpolation, noise. someone who knows another person catches half-second hitches in their sentences.

it’s in our power to tend these clusters, connect them in weird ways, re-wire them, and prevent them from becoming boring echo chambers that flood our worlds with the sense of ‘same frustrating old’.

i’m terrified of my perception becoming stagnant. it’s a little different than the brain aging - it concerns the muscle that spends extra energy to make connections, find meaning, and own the information i receive.

losing the perception muscle would mean becoming a sad adult. most older folks have simply realized that their 9-5 doesn’t define happiness and moved onto more meaningful bits of life, but others are neck deep in in later-life confusion and frustration over the world that changes around them.

fear shouldn’t drive a pursuit, but it sure is now. + a lot of hope, too. i’m lucky to be in enough health to have energy for meaning-finding, in the company of wonderful humans of all ages who are nothing but alive, and in an environment where i can focus on maybe more selfish desires than immediately providing for myself / my family.

it might be more slow to appear in my work and self-perception. i’m probably in over my head for swimming in ‘big-picture’ thoughts before replying to old texts and getting one more bullet into that midterm cheat sheet.

but the world is so rich, with infinite rabbit holes and mechanisms and universes that just pass us unnoticed. i’m excited to learn new perspective, get shocked and humbled, and revisit every old point i thought was resolved with new connections and context.

my life goal, as it is currently, is to keep becoming capable of perceiving more and to use that to participate fully in everyday life. that’s how i want to serve my loved ones and the world to pay forward the privileges that make this pursuit possible.