🐜✨The Nexialist #0053
🐜✨The Nexialist #0053
MRI Scan | The Sound of Purgatory | Renegade | The Future of Futures | Prediction Consensus | The Gay Science | Positive Thinking vs. Happiness | Burnout and Stress Cycles
Welcome to yet another list of brain-sparkles in the shape of zeroes and ones, The Nexialist
Last week’s Nexialist was the most read edition yet, so that’s a beautiful way to start the year for me. Thank you for sharing and signing up, and keep helping The Nexialist reach more curious minds. On the other hand, it has been a slow end/beginning of the year in the work department, so I’ll follow Amanda Palmer’s The Art of Asking and humbly ask you if you have or know of any projects for this Nexialist in 2022: workshops, inspiration/brainstorming sessions, desk research, etc. Hit me up, add me on LinkedIn, e-mail. Thank you and enjoy this week’s content.
🧠MRI Scan
Last Friday I did my first MRI scan. I haven’t seen the results just yet, but I do remember thinking about this video and song when going through that tunnel. Just a reminder of how the worlds and fantasies we’re exposed to can help us manage these moments. Put it on full screen, press play, and enjoy it. I might have shared this before, but I just love there is a sample of an iconic Brazilian song, Magalenha, at around 2:00.
🐜The Sound of Purgatory
Last week, The Weeknd released his fifth album and I can tell you I was listening to it and getting chills and jumping on my chair. It’s a whole experience, like listening to the “radio in purgatory” and the narrator is Jim Carrey (seriously.) The sound is super nostalgic and futuristic, like a mix of Thriller, Daft Punk and Justice. I recommend listening to the whole thing and the videos that are coming out. If you’re interested, there’s a nice video about the Symbolism on Dawn FM, including Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Kubrik’s Eyes Wide Shut.
"Picture the album being like the listener is dead. And they’re stuck in this purgatory state, which I always imagined would be like being stuck in traffic waiting to reach the light at the end of the tunnel. And while you’re stuck in traffic, they got a radio station playing in the car, with a radio host guiding you to the light and helping you transition to the other side. So it could feel celebratory, could feel bleak, however you want to make it feel, but that’s what The Dawn is for me." -
Read: The Weeknd - Dawn FM Review - Billboard
😎Renegade
Somehow, I think The Weeknd’s new album belongs in the same cyberpunk universe as Kavinsky, so I decided to mention their new video. Also, a nice time to remember Nightcall featuring our loved Lovefoxxx.
👁The Future of Futures
I just recently discovered the Future of Futures series on WIRED and my brain is thanking me for taking the time to read some of these. This specific piece (The Shady Business of Selling Futures) is one of those that you don’t blink while reading. I felt every paragraph spelled out and found words for the suspiciousness and distrust that take over my intuition when reading certain reports.
What’s certain is that selling futures is a business that feeds off uncertainty—and uncertainty is its true product. Too many futures, from too many places, with too many agendas doesn’t invalidate the enterprise of prediction but adds to the confusion, thereby making prediction feel even more necessary.
That’s why it’s important for everyone to be aware when the future is being used as snake oil to persuade us of the inevitability of what is really just another marketing plan. Asking who will benefit from a particular future vision is a good start; so is following the money. Interpreting and creating future forecasts is also a good reason for everyone to learn basic futuring methods like scenarios, environmental scanning, and backcasting. It’s also important to support organizations looking to reshape what futures mean, including Teach the Future bringing futures curriculum to schools and Afrotectopia empowering radical Black futures. We may not be able to stop the future from being trendy, but we can make it more on our terms. Our vigilance toward the futures being sold to us in the present is essential to ensuring a better future for the next generation, whom Neil Postman called “the living messages we send to a time we will not see.”
Thank you Devon Powers, metafuturist, “associate professor in the department of advertising and PR at Temple University and the author of On Trend: The Business of Forecasting the Future.”
🔭Prediction Consensus
First, I have to say I love this Bingo format from The Visual Capitalist, which grouped hundreds of trend reports. Of course, after reading Devon Powers text above, it makes me ask the question: Trends for whom? Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see the top 25 trends from these hundreds of reports.
Read: Prediction Consensus: What the Experts See Coming in 2022 - The Visual Capitalist
🫀The Gay Science
I don’t know about you, but I did not have access to this before (or at least I was not paying attention). “The Gay Science (German: Die fröhliche Wissenschaft), sometimes translated as The Joyful Wisdom or The Joyous Science, is a book by Friedrich Nietzsche published in 1882... It was described by Nietzsche as "the most personal of all [his] books", and contains more poems than any of his other works.” Of course, the fifth-grader in my brain immediately thought Gay Science was some kind of Gaydar, but then I learned this beautiful term:
The book's title, in the original German and in translation, uses a phrase that was well known at the time in many European cultures and had specific meaning.
One of its earliest literary uses is in Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel ("gai sçavoir"). It was derived from a Provençal expression (gai saber) for the technical skill required for poetry-writing. The expression proved durable and was used as late as 19th century American English by Ralph Waldo Emerson and E. S. Dallas. It was also used in deliberately inverted form, by Thomas Carlyle in "the dismal science", to criticize the emerging discipline of economics by comparison with poetry.
Read: Gay Science
😊Positive Thinking vs. Happiness
Juan sent this to me because of the Stoicism video from the previous Nexialist and I think it has some simple and great advice. First, Darren Brown invites us to rethink happiness and positive thinking. Something new that I learned is Daniel Kanehman’s idea of the Experiencing Self and the Remembering Self, which inhabits all of us. It’s so short that I will just tell you to press play.
☄️Burnout and Stress Cycles
Yes, I’m still trying to catch up with Brené Brown’s podcast, Unlocking Us. So this time I got hooked on this episode with the twins Emily and Amelia Nagoski about “Burnout and How to Complete the Stress Cycle.” In a nutshell, their research shows how feelings have a beginning, middle, and end. “In short, emotions are tunnels. If you go all the way through them, you get to the light at the end. Exhaustion happens when we get stuck in an emotion.” They talk about work burnout but also other types, such as caregiver burnout. And they say that we have to find ways to unlock the stress cycles that we might be bottling up inside us since many times we have the illusion that just swallowing it is dealing with it. (For someone that is still going through a facial paralysis, possibly caused by stress, this resonated really well). They suggest seven ways to unlock the stress cycle (I think I’ll write them and put them on my wall):
Physical Activity
Breathing
Positive social interaction
Laughter
Affection (like 20 seconds hugs)
A Big Old Cry
Creative Expression
I would definitely add nature to this list
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