a song that reminds us why life is good, don't be the turkey, and many more perspective shifters

Kalyani Tupkary down the objects of time 🐇🕳️

Welcome to the startupy newsletter, a laid back column about very serious ideas.

Also, wait. What’s startupy? Startupy is where curious humans curate and interconnect the best of the Internet. We're on a mission to build a more human and nourishing Internet.

---

Mood

Cool things curated in our universe

_

DON’T BE THE TURKEY

A timely passage from The Black Swan on not using the past to infer the future.

_

ON INTANGIBLE VALUE AND WHY GDP IS A FLAWED MEASURE OF HOW ACTUAL PEOPLE ARE EXPERIENCING THEIR LIVES

From Rory Sutherland’s Wiki Man:

Or take the value of Wikipedia. The creation of this is more or less akin to installing a Bodleian library in every house in Britain. Does this massive new wealth register on GDP figures? Not a blip. Or the new availability of blogs and podcasts. Tremendous writers who, just a decade ago, would have been lecturing to half-empty theatres are now read by hundreds of thousands. Again, almost no money changes hands, so not a wiggle in the GDP figures

To put a value on the digital world by only tallying the money that changes hands is a little like trying to place a value on sex by simply measuring the amount spent on prostitution

From Sacred Economics:

We have bigger houses but smaller families; more conveniences, but less time; We have more degrees, but less sense; more knowledge, but less judgment; more experts, but more problems; more medicines, but less healthiness; We’ve been all the way to the moon and back, but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor. We’ve built more computers to hold more information to produce more copies than ever, but have less communications; We have become long on quantity, but short on quality. These times are times of fast foods; but slow digestion; Tall man but short character; Steep profits but shallow relationships. It is time when there is much in the window, but nothing in the room.

And finally, a thought provoking essay on why the ways in which we measure economic productivity are BS and why we should measure well-being instead.

_

A LITTLE BIT OF SLOPE MAKES UP FOR A LOT OF Y-INTERCEPT

How fast you learn is a lot more important than how much you know to begin with.

_

WHEN SOMEONE DISAPPOINTS YOU, THEY ARE LIKELY DISAPPOINTED IN THEMSELVES TOO

Isabel⚡️ @isabelunraveled

the world becomes a lot easier to love when you go through it with the belief that everyone is usually doing their best, and is probably frustrated with their own shortcomings even more than you might be frustrated with them. when someone disappoints or angers you, remember:

Curating many more mind bending perspective shifters here.

_

THIS SONG!

There's something about it that reminds me of all the reasons that life is good.

Curator spotlight

KALYANI TUPKARY

hybrid product designer, currently product designer at Twitch
kalyanitupkary.com/

Rabbit hole: Objects of Time

Why is this topic interesting? 

Clocks and calendars play a fundamental role in establishing our everyday rhythms, shaping our consciousness of temporality. But these tools are not neutral. They are products of a biased perspective that time is linear. They codify values and behaviors while obscuring the politics of time embedded in their representation. After all, how we represent time affects how we conceptualize time.

While the current calendar is a mathematical abstraction, our lived experience of time is divergent. And yet our modern digital calendars frame time expressions through ‘smart’ scheduling, organizing, planning, quick syncing, to-do lists and progress tracking. A direct conceptual result of this is, time becoming objective, universal and inert instead of subjective, plural and malleable.

Global imposition of the Gregorian calendar denigrated indigenous calendars and demanded calibrating diverse senses of time to the colonizer's notion of time. Similarly, today's ‘smart’ calendars flatten other time sense to this centralized order. But the more we synchronize ourselves with ‘Standard Time’, the more we fall out of sync with our own bodies and the world around us. What if our digital calendars could support intuition, anticipation or care? After all, calendars are ‘designed’ tools. They can therefore be redesigned.

A podcast worth listening to on the topic?  

The Long Time Academy is a collaboration between Headspace and The Long Time Project. The discussions spans across time, art and long-term thinking. You can also find a neat set of tools for the ideas explored in each episode.

Near Futures Laboratory podcast by Julian Bleecker where he talked to futurists about design, technology, futures, and culture through the lens of design fiction.

Things worth reading and watching on the topic?

• Einstein's Dreams, a book by Alan Lightman that creates a fictional collage of many possible worlds

• Cartographies of time - A history of timeline, a book by Daniel Rosenberg about graphical representation of time

• Emma Willard’s Maps of Time for their innovative visualizations of time.

• How to do nothing  by Jenny Odell for the politics of time, specifically rest, idleness and empty time in the attention economy.

• 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep is a book that woke me up to the colonization of every hour (yes, even sleep)

• Time without Clocks is an article about alternate timekeepers that have existed before.

• The Week is a book that reminds us that weeks are, in fact, an artificial construction of the modern world.

Projects worth following on the topic? (with 1-2 sentences on why)

• Ted Hunt’s digital work on Sense of Time is a series of alternative watch faces offering critical new perspectives on how we individually and collectively perceive, inhabit, and value time.

• In search of personalized time, is a participatory endeavor to leverage subjective temporal perception against master time, facilitating a multitude of flows of time rather than bolstering the universal standard.

• 72 seasons is an app that depicts a subtle change in the natural world throughout the year. Some lovely illustrations and haikus.

• Taking Time has a collection of essays, thoughts and writings about the concept of time, how we value it, understand it and what we prioritize.

• Time Zone Protocols creates a space-time for rewriting the protocols of time, rezoning the time zones, and unmapping the imperialist global time colonization project utilizing Black Quantum Futurism tools and practices.

• Calendar Collective - my ongoing investigation is an archive of alternate calendars real and imagined traced through voicemails.

• In 2023, we are reimagining ways to restore the relationship between work and leisure with an Even Odd calendar layered on top of the Gregorian calendar. This calendar invites you to align yourself to a rhythm alternating between Even and Odd days. One for work and the other for leisure. Plus you can join the ongoing research study and help us bend the shape of time. Email at hello@calendarcollective.com to get involved. 

---

Thank you for reading!
Oh, and please pass this email on to any friends you think might enjoy this newsletter. We are trying to build up this corner of the Internet one curious person at a time.

Want to find us elsewhere?
☼ Twitter
☼ Instagram
☼ Spotify
☼ Startupy
☼ Search the startupy hivemind using AI