Weeks #30 to #34

Hello friends!

If I had more time I would’ve written a shorter letter.

Blaise Pascal said that. It is absolutely true, and today's post is gonna be absolutely long.

I didn't spend much time refining it because I wanted to share the transformative experiences I had in the most authentic and accurate way possible (and I didn't have much time in the first place). Enjoy.

I never liked the taste of coffee, and its effects never worked on me (I’ve probably never drank a real and good coffee anyway). Though, when I discovered the idea of coffee naps1, I decided I wanted to try it.

It consists of drinking coffee, then taking a 20 minutes nap right afterward, and getting back to work.

The theory is simple:

My water bottle on the left, the app I’m building on the laptop, and the compiler build status on the right (yes, I use light mode in the daytime)

This idea of delayed gratification is something I'm valuing more and more.

The other day I rewatched Fight Club5 for the nth time, and I love the philosophy behind that movie more every time I rewatch it! I think it's my favorite movie ever.

Advertising has us chasing cars and clothes, working jobs we hate so we can buy shit we don’t need. We’re the middle children of history, man. No purpose or place. We have no Great War. No Great Depression. Our Great War’s a spiritual war… our Great Depression is our lives. We’ve all been raised on television to believe that one day we’d all be millionaires, and movie gods, and rock stars. But we won’t. And we’re slowly learning that fact. And we’re very, very pissed off.

Everything about living in the modern world is easy. Sometimes life is too comfortable to be meaningful or enjoyable. It’s the age of abundance.6

This has led to a generation of people who for the first time in history have access to a life where they can live purposelessly:

Watch 5 hours of TV a day to satisfy their desire for entertainment and human connection
Use porn to satisfy their sexual desires
Eat cheap junk food to satisfy their tongue and stomach and face no immediate consequences.

This creates a “zombie”-like existence – where people wonder why they exist, why they are dissatisfied even though they have everything they could possibly need, and what the purpose or meaning of life is.

A life of perpetual day-to-day entertainment yet perpetual day-to-day boredom.

The other day while I was buzzing through stuff (I'm packing to move city for university!), I found my dad's old camera, a 35mm film SLR. It's been a long time since my dear friend Jonathan made me appreciate the beauty of movies shot on film (Fight Club was shot on film too by the way!), and showed me see how and why he tried to replicate the film look in his shot-on-digital works. I had already gotten my hands on my dad's camera previously, but this time it was different.

I searched for “film photography” on youtube, and the next thing I know is a package full of 35mm film rolls waiting for me.

If you don't know about the Film Photography process, long story short: it’s magical, beautiful, and nostalgic, but it takes time, and it's expensive.

We're used to taking pictures with our phones these days, which is the opposite: ordinary, inexpensive, and instantaneous.

You can probably get a good SLR camera and lens for as cheap as 50€ (and you may find your dad's old one in your garage for free anyway). But then the film rolls will cost you around 1€ per shot. How many pictures do you have in the gallery of your phone? Imagine if you had to pay 1€ for each of them. So, when you take a picture on film, you care about it, it must be special and mean something to you.

It's only once you've finished with your roll (usually after 24 or 36 shots), that you take it out and proceed to the next step, the development. Furthermore, if you don't develop the film yourself and give it to a professional laboratory instead (and this is probably what you'll do at least for the beginning months of your film photography journey), it will take 3-7 days before you'll finally see your pictures.

Imagine the curiosity and surprise involved in the process! Then, look at a couple of film photos: I don't know what is it about them, but they just look so different, are so beautiful, and feel so nostalgic. The colors, the grain, the imperfections, the process. It's just magic.

Andy Warhol and his polaroid instant camera

The generalized idea is true for relationships too. We appreciate our pictures more when we have to wait and work and make an effort for them (e.g. film photography) rather than when we passively take them out of habit and don’t care too much about them (e.g. casually getting our phone out of our pocket and shooting a random picture of a moment). Similarly, we think we want a partner who will make us happy, but we really want is someone who's capable of making us suffer in pleasurable ways that feel somehow familiar to us.7

I'm never gonna look at a digital picture with the same eyes again, and I do not care about digital filters to achieve the film look on digital pictures too. Fuck it. I want to get my hands dirty. I want all the memories I care about the most to be shot on film, I want the instants of my life to be expensive to capture and require weeks to develop.

Let's go through the time and effort it takes to enjoy things and find meaning in our lives again.

Scientists agree: Coffee naps are better than coffee or naps alone (link to my Second Brain)

21 one-time decisions that will 10x your productivity (link to my Second Brain)

Deep Work (link to my Second brain)

Fight Club (link to my Second Brain)

How to find your purpose (link to my Second Brain)

The School of Life: An Emotional Education (link to my Second Brain)