The Thirty Best Ideas of 2022

Thirty of the best ideas I came across this year. If you like this list, you’ll enjoy my Five for Friday series, from which this is compiled. You may also like my monthly reading newsletter.

• This complex, and quite sad, story of a Lithuanian library of significant historical value which has disappeared into a recent compilation of books. I’m left asking, “How often does history get altered or completely destroyed in the process of being preserved?”
  
  
• Herman Melville’s meditation on the conflicting energies and influences which must meet and combine to produce that most moving of all man-made creations, Art.
  
  
• “Our problem is not how these games are played, but the fact that so many people in positions of power keep taking them seriously.” Cal Newport – drawing on Jonathan Haidt’s recent Atlantic piece – tackles the recent fever of headlines surrounding Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter. What if, we simply didn’t take the chattering class so seriously?
  
  
• On digitizing everything, and what is lost when we insist on flattening history into a single format. 
  

• Olympic Art competition: From 1912 to 1948, painters captured the action and were awarded medals according to five categories: architecture, painting, literature, music, and sculpture. All had to capture the spirit of the competition and had to be original. This painting is called, The Liffey Swim by Jack Yeats, and was painted at one of these art competitions.

• Consensus is not a dirty word. There are plenty of things reasonable minds agree upon because they are evidently true. In the current climate of suspicion of numbers themselves, where everyone is out to share a “shocking truth they don’t want you to know,” a reminder that “boring things can be true” is sorely needed.
  
  
• I found this profile of the Last Classical Music Store to be illuminating as to what we lose when everything shifts online. In a word, community.
  
  
• Erik Hoel’s theory that society stopped making Geniuses because of the decline in aristocratic, one-on-one tutoring, allowing the most proficient to spend time and resources in their area of expertise, appears to be a bit of a breakthrough in thinking about the potential of education.
  
  
• “How do you know you understand an idea? When you understand why it succeeded where others failed.”
  From David Perell’s “How Philosophers Think“
  
  
• Surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.” Even something which appears relatively simple is composed of several, component tasks all brought together to work as a whole. Taking a walk involves putting on shoes, grabbing your housekeys, locking the door, choosing a direction, navigating traffic, winding your way towards your destination, remaining on the sidewalk, maintaining the correct direction, then doing the same on the return trip. That’s just for taking a simple walk by yourself! Building and creating new projects are exponentially more complex, with dozens of details to take note of.
  
  
• The entire address has great points; though my favorite was this; ” “Everyone is entitled to know everything.” (But this is a false slogan of a false era; far greater in value is the forfeited right of people not to know, not to have their divine souls stuffed with gossip, nonsense, vain talk. A person who works and leads a meaningful life has no need for this excessive and burdening flow of information.)”
  From Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s 1978 Harvard Commencement Speech
  
  
• Why all logos today look alike? “There is a trend in logo design that started around 2017-2018. It’s as if many companies decided that being unique was a handicap and that it was better to be like everyone else.”
  From Velvet Shark
  
  
• We live in an era where the language of feeling outweighs the language of fact. From the abstract: “After the year 1850, the use of sentiment-laden words in Google Books declined systematically, while the use of words associated with fact-based argumentation rose steadily. This pattern reversed in the 1980s, and this change accelerated around 2007, when across languages, the frequency of fact-related words dropped while emotion-laden language surged, a trend paralleled by a shift from collectivistic to individualistic language.” This, paired with Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language”, indicates we have a real problem on our hands. People speak in terms of feelings because feelings are subjective and impossible to refute, whereas facts and claims can be verified or disproven.
  
  
• Bruno Cucinelli on tending to the things which cannot be bought; those things which make us function well as humans.
  “There are three things you cannot buy. Fitness: You have to keep fit, whether you’re rich or not. Diet: You cannot pay someone to be on a diet for you. I think that diet is the biggest sacrifice in my life. Then, looking after your soul. No one can possibly treat your soul but you yourself. This is something you can do through culture and philosophy.”
  
  
• “How can parents respond to silly questions from their children without stunting their creativity or inquisitive spirits?”
  
  Mortimer Adler’s response includes advice applicable to us all. The most telling sentence is , “They [parents] should be able to tell a hard question from a silly one, and not treat everything that perplexes them as foolish.” “Not treat[ing] everything that perplexes them as foolish,” is a great goal for any and all adults engaged in discourse. The complexity or confusion of a fact or idea doesn’t mean the idea or fact is not worth understanding. Somethings – many of the greatest things in life – are worth persistently thinking through.
  
  
• “The deep life cannot be reduced to concrete steps. But without concrete steps, you’ll never get closer to it.” This is what I’ve discovered about most important things; they can’t be set on a schedule, but if you never set time aside for them, you’ll never come close to doing them.
  
  
• “Recently, one of my favorite questions to bug people with has been “What is it you do to train that is comparable to a pianist practicing scales?”  If you don’t know the answer to that one, maybe you are doing something wrong or not doing enough. Or maybe you are (optimally?) not very ambitious?” from Tyler Cowen’s Marginal Revolution.
  
  
• “Accept the truth from whatever source it comes.” – Moses Maimonides
  
  
• People consistently underestimate how engaging thinking and waiting is.
  
  From the abstract: “The ability to engage in internal thoughts without external stimulation is a unique characteristic in humans. The current research tested the hypothesis that people metacognitively underestimate their capability to enjoy this process of “just thinking.” Participants (university students; total N = 259) were asked to sit and wait in a quiet room without doing anything. Across six experiments, we consistently found that participants’ predicted enjoyment and engagement for the waiting task were significantly less than what they actually experienced. This underappreciation of just thinking also led participants to proactively avoid the waiting task in favor of an alternative task (i.e., Internet news checking), despite their experiences not being statistically different. These results suggest an inherent difficulty in accurately appreciating how engaging just thinking can be, and could explain why people prefer keeping themselves busy, rather than taking a moment for reflection and imagination in our daily life.”
  
  
• While I am endlessly curious about the daily routines of those around me, I can’t say I’ve ever been specifically curious to visit writers’ homes. Mason Currey’s visit to the home of Robert Graves – and the attention expended to maintain the home  – have sparked my creative interest, however.
  
  
• John Gatto on his experience teaching in America, opining that the public school system actually teaches dependence, confusion, and consistent reliance on someone else’s opinion. It’s an explosive article, to be sure. What I found most compelling was the discussion around school teaching children to be dependent and not care too much about any one thing. This was illustrated in his description of the bell as “the dictator of the school day,” rather than finishing a task or completing a project. This also sends a message that the most important thing to consider is the time, despite the fact we know when someone is truly absorbed in an idea or project, the time flies right by.
  
  
• A Vonnegut short story about everybody finally being equal, ‘Harrison Bergeron’. Vonnegut remains king of readable absurdity.
  
  
• The concept of paragone, the practice of stacking creative efforts against one another in an attempt to see any real significance in one piece or the other. This is based on a quote from Leonardi da Vinci, “You will be ashamed to be counted among draughtsmen if your work is inadequate, and this disgrace must motivate you to profitable study. Second, a healthy envy will stimulate you to become one of those who are praised more than yourself, for the praises of others will spur you on.”
  
  
• Something which doesn’t make sense to me; Who is clicking on Internet ads these days? I don’t click on them; I’m sure you don’t click on them, yet, they persist. It turns out virtually no one clicks on them. It strikes me as rather silly that the Internet advertising industry rakes in billions of dollars ($189 billion in 2021 alone), yet only has a click-through rate of 0.46%. All that money spent on a prospect which stands less than a 1% chance of even being viewed, much less purchased? It makes no sense. Enter this theory.
  
  
• Al-Biruni was an 11th century polymath, distinguishing himself in his command of history, as well as mathematics, astronomy, and languages. In his role as a historian, al-Biruni cautioned that while, “The life of man is not sufficient to learn thoroughly the traditions of one of the many nations,” the historian’s duty is “to gather the traditions from those who have reported them, to correct them as much as possible, and to leave the rest as it is, in order to make our work help him, who seeks truth and loves wisdom.” Centuries before The New York Times, or military strategist B.H. Liddell Hart were adamant about the attention given to the “first draft of history,” a Middle-Eastern polymath was alerting us to the same danger.  In this passage, he reminds his readers that because history relies on reported events and analysis, and the historian must take care to verify those reports as accurate.
  
  
• Food, especially one considered a staple, is a key part of a culture’s blueprint. The baguette has been voted onto UNESCO’s cultural heritage list.
  
  
• “Poor evidence can make a very good story.” —Daniel Kahneman
  
  
• Many of the rising costs in college education are due to the growth of administrative jobs, not to increases in student admissions or resources to teach them. This bloat demonstrates Parkinson’s law, and kills both the student experience and university instruction in the process, because everything must be run through “admin” in order to actually make its way to being realized. It’s an ever-widening bottleneck.
  
  
• “If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop money-makers but not necessarily men … The curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life. On this foundation we may build bread winning, skill of hand and quickness of brain, with never a fear lest the child and man mistake the means of living for the object of life.” – WEB DuBois
  
  
• Choosing a pace you can sustain will mean you eventually have to set an upper limit on the number of opportunities you will take on. We often think about success in terms of doing at least x number, but setting upper limits will ensure you produce great work without overextending your resources (including your mental capacity). Steady, methodical growth will yield strength and resilience because the infrastructure exists to support it.
  

Photo by Sai Abhinivesh Burla on Unsplash