New New Thing
Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled books yearning to breathe free
Someone recently asked me how I discover new books to read given that I read hundreds every year.
I told him something that sounded absurd:
“I already know what the next 1,000 books I will read are.In fact they are on my kindle ordered in the sequence in which I will read them.”
I do not suffer from the paradox of choice.
In fact, after calculating books read per day and average life expectancy, I probably know the last line and the exact word I will read with the last breath of my life.
Discoverability is overrated.
It’s the same reason I never buy IPOs.
Most people spend their time hunting for the next book. I spend mine reading books that have already survived.
The older the book, the more likely it is to contain something worth reading. The newer the book, the more likely it is to be forgotten, or worse, proven wrong.
Fat is bad for you.
Fat is good for you.
Fat is bad for you again.
Every few years the experts reverse themselves and the crowd dutifully follows.
The human body has not fundamentally changed for hundreds of thousands of years. Neither have the great challenges of mastering it: desire, fear, greed, anger, envy, distraction, status, meaning, mortality.
And neither have the means to conquer them.
Discipline. Reflection. Restraint. Purpose. Wisdom.
The gold is not hidden in this week’s bestseller list, the latest podcast, or the newest intellectual fashion.
The gold lies in ideas that have survived generations because they correspond to something permanent in human nature.
Most novelty is marketing.
Most wisdom is old.
I trust the judgment of centuries more than I trust this week’s New York Times bestseller list.
Time is the harshest critic and the most reliable curator.