Hullo to readers old and new! I have two popups this weekend: Kuih muih at Elmendorf Baking this Saturday, April 6th 1-3pm. There will be dodol. There will be pre-orders. I’ll post a link when one goes live. Hokkien mee and other bits and bobs at Backbar
this reminded me a bit of Chris Arnade’s trust/regulation matrix (see https://open.substack.com/pub/walkingtheworld/p/why-the-us-cant-have-nice-things). your description of the hole made me think of the pervasive low-grade desperation that i associate with living in America: gotta succeed, gotta make rent, gotta hit our numbers, or else… you don’t have to articulate “or else what” because everyone has a sense of what catastrophe looks like.
it’s a lot easier to be generous, to take the time to get things right, to cut others some slack, without that omnipresent catastrophe. i’m not talking about just the social safety net, though that’s a significant part of it. maybe the issue is that contemporary Americans haven’t internalized an idea of what collective catastrophe looks like (a foreign invader, governmental collapse, economic collapse) as opposed to individual catastrophe (eviction/repossession, terminal illness, scandal), and so we’re so much more concerned with individual survival than collective?
I think there's so much here... you can't point just at the politics/institutions/structures, it's partly the atmosphere as well, as you say. The psychic maelstrom, to use another analogy...
this reminded me a bit of Chris Arnade’s trust/regulation matrix (see https://open.substack.com/pub/walkingtheworld/p/why-the-us-cant-have-nice-things). your description of the hole made me think of the pervasive low-grade desperation that i associate with living in America: gotta succeed, gotta make rent, gotta hit our numbers, or else… you don’t have to articulate “or else what” because everyone has a sense of what catastrophe looks like.
it’s a lot easier to be generous, to take the time to get things right, to cut others some slack, without that omnipresent catastrophe. i’m not talking about just the social safety net, though that’s a significant part of it. maybe the issue is that contemporary Americans haven’t internalized an idea of what collective catastrophe looks like (a foreign invader, governmental collapse, economic collapse) as opposed to individual catastrophe (eviction/repossession, terminal illness, scandal), and so we’re so much more concerned with individual survival than collective?
I think there's so much here... you can't point just at the politics/institutions/structures, it's partly the atmosphere as well, as you say. The psychic maelstrom, to use another analogy...