Diary of a Cat, An Artist's Self-Doubt, Mental Health Days, The Anxious Generation, and Chilled Bananas
Baxter's Blend #2
Hey everyone,
Greetings from Austin!
This week I experimented with writing at night and found it to be an absolute failure. I couldn’t really dial it in at all. But this also could’ve been because I expended more cognitive energy during the day than I otherwise would have.
So in other words, there’s no new article this week. It’ll come out when it’s ready. But, as I’ve been taking my curiosity more seriously, I have some scrumptious things to share with you.
The Diary of a Cat
Right now, I’m reading and rereading Homer’s Odyssey. While looking for some lectures to help me process some of the poem, I found a lost piece of treasure from the 1990s. The teacher, Frank McConnell, is one of the most gifted public speakers and storytellers I’ve ever seen.
As he says about the human condition:
“You want everything to stay the way that it always was because that's comfortable for you. But at the same time you keep thinking, ‘there must be more to life than this.’ So you want to change, but you want to change and keep it the same at the same time.”
This, he says, is the difference between humans and animals. Animals live in a world of infinite repetition, as seen in a cartoon called “Diary of a Cat”:
A Great Artist’s Self-Doubt
Thomas Cole was a 19th-century painter who produced visual orgasms like the painting you see above. But what’s most surprising about Cole is that even he had self-doubt.
In 1842, he reflected on his Voyage of Life paintings:
“I dread the idea of taking them to England with me [because] there will be such an expense, risk and delay, and I sometimes think I have sacrificed my time in producing them when I might have been studying figures all winter. The taste of the English, particularly the artists, is so opposite to mine, that I fear my pictures will be scarcely looked at.”
On Mental Health Days
Something I find fascinating about our culture is how “taking a mental health day” is now a normal phrase. This refers to how people will take more time to do things like be in nature, get off their phones, sleep more, and generally just take better care of themselves.
But what if these are things we should just be doing every day? What if going outside on walks and spending time without our phones was the way that we’re actually meant to function as human beings?
The Anxious Generation
On the theme of technology, I’ve been hearing a lot about The Anxious Generation by Jonathan Haidt. Although I’ve currently banned myself from buying any more books from this century, I saw some appalling data for adolescent mental health trends.
Look at this one on daily time spent with friends:
Another one that fascinated me was the rate of technology adoption:
Even though I grew up with the Internet, it’s still very new in the course of human history. Yet we’ve adopted phones and media at a faster rate than any other technology. I’m guessing this relates to what Paul Graham calls “The Acceleration of Addictiveness.”
The Cold Banana Paradox
Something I’ve been struggling with is always wasting bananas. Bananas are now my go-to dessert, so it’s sad when I have to throw out a few brown and soggy ones every week.
So the other day, I had a radical thought: “if a fridge is used to reduce the rate of my food’s decay, why not throw my bananas in there?”
Well, this was a bust. The bananas went blacker faster.
As it turns out, bananas are a tropical fruit, so they’re sensitive to cold temperatures. Scientists say that below a threshold temperature of 13°C (55°F), something called “Chilling Injury” happens. Chilling Injury ends up damaging the cell membrane walls of the banana, which leads to faster browning:
See you next week,
—Baxter
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