The Flattening & Reshaping of Experience

I was flat, but now I see.

Digression and progress

This is a post about /life as much as it is about code. But it's an aspect of life profoundly affected by code.

Life has been made to be more flat. But life wasn't meant to be flat, or at least mostly flat. Even in a world where digital flatness defines much of our experience, it needn't define all of it.

We can, if we want to, reshape the experience of our lives to be as rich as it was intended to be.

Life with the digital

The digital world has brought good things to us. Its rise in importance and comprehensiveness has also cost us good things.

Here I share my ode of an outline peeking at this change. There starts a feeling of nature, almost from a prehistoric point. We live close to everything we experience. Then, through state of mind and technological enablement, we flatten our experience. At the terminal point of flatness, something that feels temporally and emotionally close to this moment, we have the optimistic possibility of inflection. What seemed to be lost wasn't lost; it was just missing. To get it back takes effort, re-establishing principles and action, so that while the digital experience exists, it's not our singular experience. We experience life as rich as we can make it.

Flatten & Shape

Sky, woods, fire, nature

Human, touch, warmth, emotion

Sculpture, form, shape, idealism

Painting, layers, texture

Print, mass production

Digital, scale

Glass

Simulated texture, gesture, no touch

Smaller, smoother

Terser

Flat design, consolidation of design

Minimalist, sans serif, block, white space

Virtual reality, artificially-generated

Texture, flavor, bespoke

Download, export, print, embodied

Wider, non-standard

Inspiring, art

Pen pal, meet up

Personal

Natural, material

Horizon, movement, real

Expand, experiment

Physical, exertion

Friend, relationship

Imperfection, character, human