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After living with either housemates or a partner for all my adult life so far, the first time I experienced living alone was as recently as 2018. I vividly remember the day I picked up the keys for my tiny rental, exuberant about having my own space. Four years later I’m still here, wondering whether I will ever want to share a home again.
This unremarkable one-room apartment has become my little introvert sanctuary – a much-cherished retreat to recharge, to be moody and tired and quietly happy without having to communicate my status to anyone else.
Thanks to McKinley Valentine’s great newsletter, I came across the essay The Fierce Triumph of Loneliness by Helena Fitzgerald in which she describes the joy of solitude she first felt as a kid when her parents occasionally left her home alone:
“It was about the solitude: the lack of obligation to arrange my face in a way that someone else would understand. Even at age twelve, I understood the weight of that burden, and the relief of its absence.”
Today, Fitzgerald shares a home with her partner. She doesn’t advocate against living together, but sees giving up her solitude for the sake of a shared home as a compromise, not an aspiration:
“The idea that we progress in a clear trajectory from single unit to couple form, and achieve a sort of emotional success by doing so, seems wrong to me. … A paired life is not an aspirational state, but a compromised one. Loneliness is not the terror we escape; it is instead the reward we give up when we believe something else to be worth the sacrifice.”
I’m sure many would disagree with her, perhaps even find this perspective selfish or bleak. For some, however, prioritising their need for ‘alone time’ can actually make them better partners and friends. I really love the way McKinley and her husband, who intentionally live apart, acknowledged their need for privacy when they got hitched:
“One of my partner and I’s wedding vows was ‘I promise to respect your need for solitude, without projecting my insecurity onto it.’”
It doesn’t always require living apart, though. (Tricky with kids.) Some couples choose separate bedrooms to create at least some space for solitude, realising that traditional domestic structures can sometimes rob us of the breathing room required to make relationships work.
I have many great memories of the years I lived with housemates or a partner – truly formative experiences. But I’m so glad I had the opportunity to live solo these last few years. This may sound odd, but I feel like I’ve never known myself better, never been more comfortable in my own company, and never felt more connected with and energised by the other people in my life. – Kai
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You receive this email because you subscribed to Dense Discovery, a weekly newsletter at the intersection of design, technology, sustainability and culture. Writing to you from Melbourne is Kai Brach. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Sponsor an issue or book a classified.
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Apps & Sites
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Free invoicing & accounting
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Akaunting is a free, open-source invoicing and accounting tool, ideal for fledgling freelancers or small businesses. Once you’ve outgrown the free plan, the paid plan connects with your bank feed for proper ledger accounting, offers client portals, expense claims and more.
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Akiflow connects with your existing communication and task management tools such as Slack, Asana or Trello and automatically imports time sensitive items that you can then place on your calendar. The goal is to centrally manage your time commitments in one interface.
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Alternative marketing techniques
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Below Radar seems like a great place to meet other ethically-minded business owners and freelancers “who don’t want to rely on Facebook, Google or marketing techniques that fuel surveillance capitalism. A space ... to help each other take a different route. By sharing our experiences, we can forge a path that breaks free of these platforms, leading the way for others.”
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On the hunt for a new podcast? The TED Audio Collective is a curated assortment of quality podcasts for the curiously minded: “for listeners as excited by psychology and design as science and technology – who want to dig deep into today’s most exciting ideas.”
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Worthy Five: Milly Schmidt
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A video worth watching:
Contrapoints’ almost hour-long video essay about Opulence is one of the most incredible things I’ve ever watched on YouTube. Aside from being a visual masterpiece, it’s funny, incredibly interesting and touches on all my favourite fascinations: internet culture, the decline of late-stage capitalism, class politics and aesthetics.
A Twitter account worth following:
@wedontexisthere posts machine-learning-generated ‘photos’ of ‘human’ faces assembled from a corpora of real photos of human faces. The algorithm is pretty great with faces, but not so good at hats, glasses or faces on the periphery of the frame, which appear distorted and recombined in a truly dystopian way. I’m morbidly obsessed.
A book worth reading:
I often come back to Dr Oli Mould’s Against Creativity. It articulates some of my thoughts around how capitalism interacts with art, creativity and design. Relevant for anyone that makes things of beauty and value, or as a primer for the whole NFT quagmire.
A recipe worth trying:
I made this Ottolenghi roast chicken recipe for my friends as our first dinner together after Melbourne’s latest lockdown lifted. It’s a no-fuss, low-effort, high-reward dish, and everything cooks in the same pan.
A podcast worth listening to:
In The Minefield Waleed Aly and Scott Stephens discuss everything from the epistemology of quotation to the ethics of Melbourne’s anti-lockdown protests and everything in between. The two hosts are very different people who have an incredible ability to explore their disagreements and strengthen their relationship through debate.
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Books & Accessories
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A healthier device relationship
Is your phone the last and first thing you touch when getting into and out of bed? Promising to be not just a critique of our phone-addicted lifestyles but a book filled with tested strategies, “award-winning journalist Catherine Price presents a practical, hands-on plan to break up – and then make up – with your phone. The goal? A long-term relationship that actually feels good.”
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A new sci-arts magazine
Seisma is a new indie publication that brings science and arts together: “We aim to stimulate arts with science and science with arts, encourage public engagement with both fields, and provide an international platform for innovation and creativity.” Their second issue is themed around astrophysics and looks fantastic! Friends of DD enjoy a 50% discount.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
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Overheard on Twitter
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I am so [tired] of our culture elevating ignorance and labeling it as free-thinking.
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Food for Thought
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Living alone is often portrayed as a dreadful, lonely existence (especially when it relates to women), but for some, the solitude that comes with a single-person household is pure bliss. “In popular culture we have ‘the bachelor pad’, and ‘the bachelor lifestyle’, but no such phrases for women. Women who live alone are objects of fear or pity, witches in the forest or Cathy comics. Even the current cultural popularity of female friendship still speaks to how unwilling we all are to accept women without a social framework; a woman who’s ‘alone’ is a woman who’s having brunch with a bunch of other women. When a woman is truly alone, it is the result of a crisis – she is grieving, has lost something, is a problem to be fixed. The family, that fundamental social unit, dwells within the female body and emanates from it.”
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To me, Forbes always felt more like a content farm than a platform for serious journalism. Still, this close look at just a few of Forbes’ many, many ethics violations shows a pretty shocking disregard for even the most basic journalistic principles. Take-away: treat anything you read on Forbes like ‘sponsored content’. “Forbes became a hub of pay-to-play journalism. Sometimes it’s the contributors being paid by marketers; sometimes it’s the contributors being marketers.”
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I was determined to not care about the Joe Rogan/Spotify saga until the latest The Culture episode started playing in my podcast app. I ended up really enjoying this conversation that was as much about Rogan as it was about media ethics and the problematic interdependence of capitalism and culture: “If we entirely outsource art and music and storytelling – if they sit entirely within the hands of people who’re only interested in those things as products that can be monetised – that’s a huge chunk of our humanity that we’ve just sold.”
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Aesthetically Pleasing
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A beautiful, cinematic short(-ish) film paying tribute to the wondrous creatures that are trees: Treeline follows “a group of skiers, snowboarders, scientists and healers to the birch forests of Japan, the red cedars of British Columbia and the bristlecones of Nevada, as they explore an ancient story written in rings”.
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Portuguese street artist Odeith creates three-dimensional illusions in abandoned urban spaces.
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The Geometric Artists Instagram account is a curated feed of artists that work with lines, dots and various other shapes to create geometric patterns.
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Space Grotesk is a proportional sans-serif typeface that retains the idiosyncratic details of monospace fonts while optimising for improved readability.
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Did You Know?
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Pantone 448 C was dubbed the ‘ugliest colour in the world’.
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Described as a ‘drab dark brown’ and informally dubbed the ‘ugliest colour in the world’, Pantone 448 C was selected in 2012 as the colour for plain tobacco and cigarette packaging in Australia, after market researchers determined that it was the least attractive colour. The Australian Department of Health initially referred to the colour as ‘olive green’, but the name was changed after concerns were expressed by the Australian Olive Association.
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Classifieds
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The Week in a GIF
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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
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