Your body of work thinks back at you | Hacker News Reader

Your body of work thinks back at you

photoni.st

112 pointssurprisetalk21 comments

This is why I started a diary. It's hard to understand who you are, what your interests are, what you were thinking about in the moment and how that changes over time. You have to some corpus of work that you can look back on to see that.

I would also append some caution to that. Your current biases can significantly distort your perception of the past. You can get caught up in zeitgeist or have rationalized away a ton of deeper truths you're now too old to comfortably confront.

You can easily overlook details you meticulously labored over in the past and fail to appreciate how much of it is now way over your head. You cannot assume you're "better" today just because you have more experience.

In fact, experience does have a tendency to throw away critical insights and give an arrogant and false sense of confidence. This doesn't only apply to judging your own work either. Just because something "worked out" for you doesn't mean you were right. Just because someone less experienced than you tries a different approach doesn't mean it can't work or maybe even be better than what you think you know now.

How many people spend too much of their later lives settling for the same patterns over and over wondering where their creative edge went? There it is, and it's all because you thought you figured something out that you never really did.

Well yes, but do you have a better approach than doing your best to capture the state at the time for later revision?

No. I'm agreeing with the person I'm replying to while adding something else to watch out for. Some people either cringe at the past or self-congratulate. Both are bad habits in my opinion.

The more you capture, the better your chances of catching yourself later.

Fair enough! I think both cringe and self-congratulations are healthy to a degree. The former signals that a change was made and the later that it wasn't (and it's good it wasn't). But I agree with you it's important to take a step back and try to look at it as objectively as one can.

Thanks for this wonderful reply. I don't have anything to add but did want to show I appreciate it!

Thank you for reading it!

I just felt compelled to elaborate since I think journaling can easily become toxic and narcissistic. I think we can all fall into that accidentally.

As someone who's kept a journal since high-school -- I genuinely don't understand your comment here? Which is to say, yes -- keeping the journal has prevented me from doing too much of exactly what you're warning against?

Your comment seems to have nothing to do with the original comment.

I sense a lot of frustration in your comment. Perhaps it would do you well to journal.

I've heard the benefits of a diary going two ways (sometimes both simultaneously):

- You realize that your life was following an arc that you didn't realize at the time. e.g. you worked on similar projects, dated the same type of person etc but you can only see that when you look back in retrospection.

- Your perceived arc was really a series of random events in your life that you made the best of.

Both of these can be true because lives are complex and multifaceted. e.g. your dating life can be on an actual arc but your career can seem like an arc in hindsight but your diary shows that you just took whatever job seemed to be most interesting at the time.

Hostile architecture, like many other aberrations such as everyone travelling solo by car, is a result of our refusal to police dysfunction.

We refuse to confront the problem head on so it instead comes up everywhere. A lot of things are like this. Repression only takes you so far.

The dysfunction needs more empathy.

Do you empathize with the fent addicts at the bus stop? Or do you not think about that in your car?

Personally, I empathize with the other bus riders who just want to get where they are going without being accosted.

I try to emphasize with everyone. I fail, more often than I succeed.

If you don't empathize with them, I find that concerning.

I think, it's sad that we live in a society that doesn't help those addicts.

Absolutely. Addiction is an illness. It just happens to be one that is more publicly visible than most.

I empathise with everyone I'm able, and recently struck up a friendship a Nigerian scammer as a result. After jerking him around for awhile, I broke him out of his script. Rather than blocking me or cursing me, I found a moment of sincerity. I told him that I understand the desperation of his situation, but that the people he was most likely to scam successfully would be others in similarly difficult situations.

Suddenly, I was talking to a real person. A young man in an impossibly poor country with few other options...facing the loss of his already meager accommodations and the prospect of begging on the streets. A young man whose heart still hurt him when he attempted to exploit others. One who'd not yet been so jaded by years of such activity. I have cautiously continued talking to him and learning about his situation. He's respected every boundary I've placed to protect myself, and not pushed me to give him anything, even preemptively rejecting what he interpreted as an attempt to send him gift cards at one point, when he misread the intent of my questions about the mechanics of the scam he had tried on me.

I learned he is quite skilled at designing and producing beautiful traditional garments, but has been unable to find a work that would allow him to take care of himself.

I'm now seeing if people I know might be interested in ordering his clothing, and if he successfully delivers the garments they commission from him, I'll build and host a website for him to begin selling online and work to help him find other customers. It may not only lift him out of abject poverty, but give him to opportunity to elevate others and save them from the same spiral of despair in which he found himself...which would mean fewer grandmothers and vulnerable people being scammed in the future.

Granted, he could be running a long con and masterfully manipulating me at every turn...but even if so, I won't regret choosing empathy over judgement and anger, if only for the chance that it might make the world a slightly better place...even if just for one young man in a small city on the other side of the world.

*our refusal to address/ameliorate dysfunction.

> I’m not claiming some unconscious genius or some innate sense of history. What I realised was that practised consistently over time, photography builds an archive that eventually thinks back at you.

Yes, I would have loved if this blog post elaborated on that more instead of repeatedly coming back to the topic of hostile architecture.

"The camera doesn’t create the consistent thread. It doesn’t decide to take an interest in hostile architecture, for example. It is your curiosity that does and that lets in details into your archived where they live unnoticed until one day you get struck by a realisation."

Or maybe this is just apophenia, with a sprinkle of confirmation bias.

Ah, the enshittification of street benches.

We're all very familiar with the concept now. Good to know where it all started.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com