Author of Modern Lives / Columnist - @mich_enjoyer, @theblaze / Style Advising - @NecktieSalvage / Steering - @foxandroot / Growing - @trunkville
~fotpun-hocful
Joined July 2019
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Everything and everyone is saturated to the gills with political commentary, hot takes, discourse, and pissed-off snark. People and the internet are so filled with all of this they don’t really have time or space for anything else.
Longtime followers know that I think this whole culture and drift is toxic and erodes the human spirit and the possibility of culture and life. You also know I am most interested in writing about, talking photos of, and exploring life in our modern world. Trying to make, and document, (honest) life as art in our age of clickbait-algo spectator reactive discourse.
For the past six months I have been working on compiling a collection of short essays and vignettes I have written over the years into a single print volume and I am thrilled to share it with you.
In curating this collection for print I was adamant about a few things.
I wanted a classic, simple, beautiful design inside and out.
I wanted a book that you could carry around, toss on your bed, put in your pocket, shove in your bag, manhandle on the beach, write in, write on, and everything else in-between.
For me, the point of this collection isn’t to produce an epic hardcover tome. It’s something more informal and approachable. Something simpler and relatable.
I’ve always loved those little paperbacks. You know, the ones they say they aren’t going to make anymore. Well, I want to still make them or something similar to them. I wanted this collection to be as close as possible to that rugged, personal, carefree spirit.
The book itself is about 5 in. X 7.75 in.. About as small as you can get these days. The design is simple and (hopefully) timeless, the font is warm, the margins are ample, and the pieces honest.
There’s a link in my linktree / bio to Amazon where you can Buy Modern Lives. Or of course, just search Amazon as we all so often do and that will work just as well.
No politics, no hot-takes, no reaction, no discourse; just life.
When you are a child you rarely think of your mortality, all those accidents happen to other people, you are invincible and will be fine, and it’s naive and clueless and it’s beautiful.
The stuff that makes the real money is the slop. The higher brow or intellectual stuff is never the money maker. It’s true all across the board. Companies or people have portfolios and it’s the mass appeal stuff that brings in the money and then the legacy brands - the high touch high culture brands - barely break even etc…
This is just the nature of how the world is.
I think that is absolutely true. There is something about the overly restricting nature of everything in that middle space. I also think the entire world basically revolving around purchasing plays an interesting role. For example “the mall” as a place. It’s based on spending money. The only space to be “free” (after being dropped off) is commercial.
Yes. “Fun” that can only be purchased and activities which can only be organized. I believe it was @Empty_America who said that for life as a kid in the suburbs you live kind of as a prince always being carted around but adult life trying to recreate it is much worse which explains a certain amount of the malaise on here.
I definitely think that suburbs and other in-between areas are not a natural environment and are, ultimately, very bad environments to raise kids in with weird downstream effects (many of which we see here on X).
We live in the hinterland.
Raising kids in the city like he describes sounds interesting, and I'm not being facetious, but my kids are so used to spending so much time on grass and in woods and on and and in the water and in nature that it would take a real mindset shift to even entertain something else.
Last week, friends with young kids came to visit us from the suburbs in California.
As we ran around Manhattan together, they looked at us and asked, “How do you do this all the time? How do you raise young kids in New York City? Do you have to get in the car every time you go somewhere? This seems crazy.”
I smiled and told them that, for us, raising kids in the city is actually easier than raising them in the suburbs.
We never think about getting in the car.
The grocery store is two blocks away. The kids’ doctor is two blocks away. There’s a Barnes & Noble six minutes away on foot.
We walk to the Met, the Natural History Museum, and Central Park.
We walk to get coffee. There are playgrounds and playdates everywhere. Our building is full of kids their age, and so is our block.
Once you get past the idea that raising kids in the city must be complicated, the day-to-day reality is pretty simple.
We just walk out the door.
And honestly, raising kids in the city is actually a whole lot easier than raising them in the suburbs.
Echoing the sentiments of others - this site does honestly kind of suck today. The slop is truly horrendous, the idiocracy is awful, the algorithm is basically just geared to pushing the lowest common denominator as long as it pisses you off or gets you jacked on delusion.
It's honestly not good.
But - but! - I will never leave, we've got to try to put out a positive idea or create something meaningful across the board.
But, it's okay, we can admit - it's real bad currently.
Good advice and true.
There is also no way to have your cake and eat it too. You can't actually have it all. You always exchange something for something else. Life is also a series of exchanges.
Do your best and do what you believe in - that's the best most honorable way.
