Continued Distillation

Sometime in 2023

Imagine listening to a vinyl record. Some of the songs you would love and savour, and some of them you would dislike and sit through.

• Listening to an album versus a song or a short music clip
• Watching a movie or TV show or a short video clip
• Spending your life with someone or casual relationships
• Reading a book or reading a clip or tweet
• You buy the chicken whole even though you only get two wings and they're your favourite part or you buy a pack of wings
• Eating Lucky Charms and savouring the marshmallows versus buying a kilogram bag of just the marshmallows on Amazon

Things weren't always amazing but people sat through the bad and savoured the good. Now everything revolves around the extraction and distillation of that goodness, that pleasure, and the reduction and evasion of the rest. It's so natural to reduce the inconveniences of life but so much of what it means to be human exists in that space of discomfort. Getting only a sliver of the thing you really like. Waiting, not knowing, boredom. Sometimes it's about wading through all that muck!

I don’t know to what extent we’d really like to backtrack progress in this domain, but at the same time something feels like it’s missing in the continued distillation of modern life.

Feel free to send in thoughts on the piece, I'd be interested to hear them: