🍂 Autumn, 2021 Edition 🍂
Wellcome Gallery London, October 2021.
““And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves...””
Seasons of Life.
Many people wait with excitement for summer. I, personally, wait with the same excitement for autumn. It's such a beautiful season with leaves on the trees changing colour every single day, with the fresh wind sweeping the same leaves off the street.
Everyone rushes somewhere during the summer to escape the heat or - if it is a cold summer - to escape from the cold. To me summer represents our ego, while autumn symbolises our soul.
Autumn slows down the pace of life and the pace of our thoughts. It helps us to take a pause and to contemplate about things that we have done over the past year without the rush and panic. We know that Christmas is around the corner (ask my local supermarket which already has put Christmas lights for sale), but the panic of buying gifts and organising what you're going to do on holiday is not there yet.
It reminds me of Virginia Woolf saying in her Lighthouse:
"And all the lives we ever lived and all the lives to be are full of trees and changing leaves..."
It might sound cliché but our whole life could be divided into the seasons of the year. We are born in spring, grow up in summer, reach consciousness in autumn and eat fruits that we've gathered throughout life in winter.
I've lived in four countries throughout my life and I can say that the most perfect spring is in Prague, the most perfect summer is in Armenia, the autumn season exclusively belongs to England and winter is fully possessed by Russia.
I often wonder how people's mentality is shaped by the climate they were born in.
The seasons of the year influence what books I choose to read as well.
Poetry, history and art books dominate my mind over the autumn. Below you can find some of my favourite reads so far. I know that in a year or two when I will look back to Autumn 2021 the covers of those books will come to my mind.
Hope you're all doing well my friends!
Vashik Armenikus.
Why do Big Tech companies serve free food?
Oliver Burkeman's 'Four Thousand Weeks'
It is not only free food. It's also gaming, music and sleeping rooms. You can also go to the gym without leaving the building. Is this done to keep their employees satisfied and happy or is there another reason?
For over a century, as Burkeman mentions in his book, employers had a problem to solve and that was that their employees had life outside of their work.
He gives an example of a Soviet experiment, which tried to address this issue in the 1920s.
In the first years of its existence the Soviet government introduced a new efficient working schedule for everyone across the country. This experiment caused a chaos, because it didn't allow people to have weekends at the same time. And since everyone had a different work schedule - friends and even family members - often couldn't see each other. (I have made a detailed video on it. You can watch it here.)
Soviets didn't invent this idea they borrowed it from an American industrialist - Frederick Winslow Taylor.
One of the reasons why Big Tech provides so much comfort to its employees inside their offices, from the Burkeman's way of thinking, is to make the workers forget that there's life outside their job.
If you can eat, exercise, play and socialise within the walls of your office, you don't need a life outside of it. Your work becomes your life.
However, you don't have to work for a company like this to fall into this trap. Burkeman's book is a great antidote to modern cult of efficiency and productivity. It's incredibly enjoyable to read.
This Aeon article also explores the gamification of our workplace.
This is how terribly short your life is - a video by The Pursuit of Wonder.
Check My Book Notes 👇
How Art Inspires Science? (and Why National Identity is Toxic?)
There Are Places in the World Where Rules Are Less Important Than Kindness
by Carlo Rovelli
Was Nabokov more a scientist than a writer? Why did Isaac Newton study alchemy?
Why will Vashik never eat octopus again?
These are just a few of many questions that the Italian physicist Carlo Rovelli explores in his collection of essays that was published in English recently.
I have explored some of my favourite essays from this book in my YouTube video, which you can watch here. But in this newsletter I wanted to highlight the idea that is in the quote that I placed above this section.
In our day, we forget that art and science were never separate from each other. Artists like Leonardo or Dürer, for example, were passionate about how the natural world works and converted their scientific observations into their paintings.
Art and science started to diverge with the birth of the idea of 'art for art's sake' that peaked in the early 20th century and continues to our day.
I like that Rovelli unites the scientific curiosity and artistic passion in almost each of his essays.
Although, I finished reading this book, I still keep it on my nightstand. I love going through those essays, because they remind me that the world is beautiful if you look at it through the right lense.
Check my notes from this book 👇
Where to Start Reading Nietzsche?
Hiking with Nietzsche: Becoming Who You Are by John Kaag
‘Wagner & Nietzsche shared a deep contempt for the rise of bourgeois culture, for the idea that life, at its best, was to be lived easily, blandly, punctually by the book.’
~ John Kaag, Hiking with Nietzsche.
It’s such a thought-provoking book dense with ideas, but ‘dense’ not in a sense of being blandly academically written, but ‘dense’ in a sense that it requires you to pause, to think, to absorb and integrate the idea into yourself and then move forward.
I’ve been thinking about the sentence that I quote above for years now. I am terrified when I see people who pursue easy, bland, punctual life. People who seek pleasure in entertainment than in beauty.
I am terrified not by them, but by the thought that I might become like them too. That I can focus on meaningless routines, which accelerate the speed of time, and could make me stop appreciating true feelings voiced in poetry.
In his ‘Birth of Tragedy’ Nietzsche quotes the story of King Midas and a satyr called Silenius.
Midas asks Silenius to explain the meaning of life. To which Silenius replies:
“What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach… But the second best is to die soon.”
It’s a dark and a morbid story, but I like stories like this, they reveal the truth that we often try to hide. There is not much choice in life… either to face the challenges and become who we truly are, or lead the life of easy, but callous and soulless entertainment.
(This is what Kaag’s book does to you… Two short sentences trigger an endless chain of thoughts)
You can find my notes below
