- New Nouns
- Posts
- No vacancy
No vacancy
No thank you, we're full.
F*ck Carmel Indiana.
For those not from these parts, Carmel is the fancy suburb north of Indianapolis.
I’ve only ever really known one person from there.
He was a douche.
More importantly, Carmel has these two-lane roundabouts all over the place.
And they are a waking nightmare in traffic.
Look at this stupid thing.
The problem is going left.
You have to merge into a roundabout across the outside lane.
So you wait.
And wait.
And wait.
And get annoyed.
And wait.
And punch it.
And almost die.
To get to Wendy’s.
I promise I am saying this for a reason.
Not a good reason.
For a really overindulgent metaphor for how I’ve been feeling about the world lately.
Like I am trying to merge into a roundabout in rush hour traffic.
That’s already full of cars.
You know?
No?
Okay.
No matter where you look, the rate of progress has increased. Not only have we made more stuff, have more ideas, and built on what came before us, but the rate with which we have done this has consistently increased.
Gordon Moore famously coined ‘Moore’s Law’ as the observation that the number of transistors on a microchip doubles every two years, leading to exponential advancement.
While this law has not proven to be true, and microchip advancement has slowed slightly, I think we are all facing an unprecedented world of rapid bloat.
It feels like no matter where you turn, there isn’t already someone there, or even 100 people. It feels like there are already 100,000,000 people there.
Like every new opportunity is an instant traffic jam.
Like there is no white space left.
And of course this isn’t true.
People continue to innovate and break through with completely fresh ideas.
But, to be honest, it’s overwhelming sitting at that roundabout, waiting for a fresh idea.
Waiting for a vacancy.
It seems that as we continue to increase the rate of progress, we inevitably reach a point where things are simply full.
Or at least full to the point where the effort to create more isn’t worth it.
Here are some stats. There are more than:
1.8 billion websites
100 million songs on Spotify
14 billion videos on YouTube
3.7 million new videos posted on YouTube every day (Which pales in comparison to the ~24 million TikToks posted every day)
4 million books published every year
I’m not throwing in the towel.
But how much is too much?
Is there a vacancy to be filled?
Or are we all just driving around in a circle pretending to be going somewhere?
"Well, in our country," said Alice, still panting a little, "you'd generally get to somewhere else—if you run very fast for a long time, as we've been doing."
"A slow sort of country!" said the Queen. "Now, here, you see, it takes all the running you can do, to keep in the same place. If you want to get somewhere else, you must run at least twice as fast as that!"
Told you not to subscribe. It’s a mess over here.
Here’s a link to a cute rug from Schoolhouse I like if that’s the kind of thing you subscribe for.
Oh, and Simone Giertz just dropped an all edge piece puzzle that is quite cute.
be good
z
