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Is there something like “history of footsteps in the sand”? Sounds paradoxical but… a sense of the transitory parts of the lives of people who’ve lived and died. Stuff that even they probably knew wouldn’t matter after they were gone.
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I get a weirdly poignant pleasure reading about how people cared deeply about stuff that was sorta anti-posterity. Negative space of history 🤔
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Responses so far have helped me sharpen thus thought a bit. Not ephemera in the sense of say old versions of things we still have, like receipts, or clothing styles. Those are things where the class is enduring though the instances are transient.
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Examples I’m thinking of: — scientific concepts like the “personal equation” which have been superseded rather than disproved — religious ideas like transubstantiation that once caused wars but are sideshows now — artifacts like snuff boxes associated with vanished traditions
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The book I’m reading now, Jimena Canales’ Tenth of a Second, is about such a thing. A scientific problem that basically kinda went away after people figured it out, but was a very big deal absorbing the best minds for a century, and framed in terms that seem really strange today.
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The “personal equation” was imprecision in astronomical and other observations caused by idiosyncratic human observer errors on the order of 0.1s. People were literally trying to build entire theories of human psychology based on reaction times.
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Reading it, I got the uncanny sense: “people died thinking these ideas were important.” To the extent all that thinking is obsolete, the people who obsessed over them seem deader than dead. Their living obsessions haven’t left a mark on posterity.
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Ah yes, dead ends of history are at least a good special case. Strands that went nowhere.
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Replying to @vgr
I feel like there has got to be a podcast (or at least several episodes of various history podcasts) that hit on this. One that is in the broad ballpark is Dead Ends though some of the episodes are really more about failed tech. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dea
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Now think about the proportion of our own live concerns that will almost certainly turn into forgotten dead ends and anti-posterity things. Delicious feeling of transitoriness…. Much buddhist
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Jokes aside, it’s definitely a sentiment adjacent to meditating on samsara etc So much of our “lived experience” is just deeply ephemeral. Nothing endures forever of course, but that’s a tautology. This is more stuff that won’t endure longer than a hundred years or so.
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Reminded of Douglas Adams joke that infinity itself is flat and uninteresting, but very very big spaces convey a better idea of the horror of infinity than infinity itself. This is the same vibe but for transitoriness/ephemerality.
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There’s a temptation to conflate ephemeral and shallow. They are not the same. Shallow things are usually transient instances of enduring things. So people know to care about the enduring thing. People into fashion care about passing fads in the context of the enduring thing.
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I’m thinking of “deep” ephemerality. Stuff you don’t think is transient instances of a deeper more enduring thing. Stuff you care about without conceptual indirection and could turn out entirely illusory within a century. Unreal things that are real to you. Your matrix/Maya.
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Ironically, the most alive people are ones who grab the deep ephemerality of their times. They live the most/die the most. They don’t search for “enduring truths” in search of meaning but just greedily (in a good, life-greed sense) grasp the most “live truths” even if transitory.
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Those who sense and shy away from the unreality are the ones most afraid to live. To the extent they don’t live at all, dying is moot. You can’t get the enduring without the transitory. Buying into the 100-year illusion is necessary for participating in the 10,000-year story.
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I feel like this deserves its own word. You can say somebody is fervently-dead-ending or that a topic is a fervent-dead-end