Definition: Sonder

Sonder

The realization that each random passerby is living a life as vivid and complex as your own—populated with their own ambitions, friends, routines, worries and inherited craziness—an epic story that continues invisibly around you like an anthill sprawling deep underground, with elaborate passageways to thousands of other lives that you’ll never know existed, in which you might appear only once, as an extra sipping coffee in the background, as a blur of traffic passing on the highway, as a lighted window at dusk.

 

The profound feeling of realizing that everyone, including strangers passed in the street, has a life as complex as one’s own, which they are constantly living despite one’s personal lack of awareness of it.

 

This seems to be a word created rather than an actual word, but who cares? If it gives you a profound concept there needs to be a word for, then add it to your vocabulary! In this age of unprecedented narcissism with social media, a realization and appreciation of the complexity facing others is a very good thing!

How Much Does Your Name Matter? The Quantitative and Qualitative Research

One of the stories Freakonomics is best known for is their research into whether your name has any positive or negative impact on your economic destiny, particularly if you had a rare name, or name associated with cultures discriminated against widely. The study was focused on African-Americans, as heard in the podcast below from some time back.

https://twitter.com/digitalcitizen/status/1160037065846923264

 

Data, though, doesn’t always tell the full story. In fact, it doesn’t tell anybody’s story, just a group’s outcomes. Freakonomics recently followed up this story with one where Dr. Marijuana Pepsi Vandyck successfully defended a PhD about what it’s like for African-Americans with almost unique names to go through life, to get the personal stories of real people and see if their names really mattered in their lives. Have a listen to hear how the stories differ from the data, even if they may end up in the same outcome, and why the how makes a huge difference!

https://twitter.com/digitalcitizen/status/1162842346167439366

Do Humans Suffer from Zoochosis?

Zoochosis is a word used to explain the stereotypical behavior of animals in captivity, which tends to be ones that show a creature going crazy since it is not in its natural environment, as I discussed in this post. But here’s an interesting question. As a nomadic species for tens of thousands of years, and a rural one at that as little as a few decades ago that is but a blink in our evolutionary history, are we suited to the urban lifestyle that is not unlike a zoo for us? And can we answer that by seeing if we suffer similar symptoms to zoochosis we diagnose in animals, when we live in dense urban areas lacking much nature?

This Hidden Brain podcast provides some pretty interesting, if not conclusive, answers, even though the research wasn’t quite framed like that. I’m actually surprised they didn’t make the connection. It would have made the story and research a lot more relatable as we all know the concept of zoos and what it must be like to be an animal trapped in there for people to see, pet, and such, in a place very different than the ones they belong in, despite our best efforts to make the zoo areas similar to their natural environment.

https://twitter.com/digitalcitizen/status/1161451447579500544

The Value of a City Miniature Model

How much value can a miniature model of a city have? Why don’t you ask the citizens and officials of San Francisco? They have a roughly 40 feet x 40 feet model of the city from the 1930s that is a buzz in the city today for conversations around the city’s history, present, and democratic urban planning for the future. That’s despite the model having been recently rediscovered and restored, some 80 years after it was built and 70 years after it had been put away? But if you can’t talk to the San Franciscans, or the right ones, have a listen to the 99% Invisible podcast below and hear for yourself!

Every city needs a decent city model, it would seem to me. There seems to be something about seeing the entirety of something in front of our eyes that changes our minds and feelings about it. Think about the Blue Marble photo of planet Earth taken over 50 years ago. It still inspires many. But so few cities have such a model, probably for the worse, and that’s too bad.

https://twitter.com/digitalcitizen/status/1162843595839299584

Definition: Hostile Architecture

Hostile architecture

Architecture designed with intent to combat a problem to the user/s, or which the user/s deem a hostile condition.

Examples you see include:

  • Spikes in roof beams to deter pigeons from nesting there
  • Arm rests at the ends of short benches or in the middle of longer ones to deter people from sleeping there
  • Blue lights in public or retail bathrooms to deter drug use cause the blue light makes it harder to find veins for needles
  • Bright white stairs to public buildings to make people who might sleep there really visible
  • Waterproof paints for boats used on buildings around night clubs where people might pee outside in alleys or the back, away from sight of most others, only to have their pee splash back on them

Once you know the concept, you can see it in many more places you might not have recognized, as mentioned in the podcast below. Only a few examples above were in the podcast. The rest I thought about once enlightened to the concept!

The podcast, below, though, is one of THE BEST podcast episodes I have ever listened to, having listened to over 500 now. It’s not only eye opening, but ridiculously hilarious for real life developments (not jokes). I would highly recommend it!

https://twitter.com/digitalcitizen/status/1160717689544986631