A few months back, I received two separate PR pitch emails at nearly the exact same time. One was an invitation to a speaking event in Texas hosted by a "free speech" conservative publishing company, featuring Kyle Rittenhouse as a keynote speaker. โ Read the rest
David Sax, from The Future Is Analog:ย
โThe ideas that come to our mind are around curiosity, creativity, exploration, which come to you when youโre out and moving around,โ said Joseph White, the director of workplace futures and insight at the office furniture company Herman Miller. White is a professional fabric designer (he owns a loom), who moved from Brooklyn to Buffalo in the midst of the pandemic, but the longer he worked remotely, the more White noticed how much physical, sensory information his work was lacking. He missed wandering around the rambling Herman Miller campus in Michigan, moving his body, walking between buildings, touching, seeing, and even smelling the companyโs different ideas as they took shape in wood, plastic, metal, and fabric. โI used to work from a dozen different spots throughout the day,โ White said. โNow I look at the same piece of art all day. I miss the variety of experience. My mind connects to concepts like embodied cognition โ our mind connects to the world around us, and by the process of moving around it, we get information that weโre not consciously aware of, and have meaning. We lose that when weโre stuck in the same place over and over again.โ Working from home was pitched as liberating, but as my neighbor Lauren discovered each day, glued to her desk, it can easily become a type of incarceration. โ[Remote work] degrades the human experience,โ White said. โI worry about sensory atrophy. I worry about curiosity, because as soon as curiosity ends, that is the beginning of death.โย
Hmmm. I have some questions:ย