March '24

Greek history, legacy thinking, and some self reflection

Untitled (Boxer) by Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1982

The Homeric Question

I was doing some research the other night, trying to find a good book that discusses Greek history from a cultural perspective. What I mean by that, is that I’m not all that interested in reading Greek myths, but rather something more akin to Greek society and their way of life since so much of Western culture is rooted in Greco-Roman tradition. Ultimately I stumbled upon a Quora thread that had this really interesting tidbit:

Homer is pretty essential, since so much later Greek literature involves quotations from or arguments with Homer. It can however be tough going off the bat, since it is literally pre-literary: our versions are essentially a 'recording' of an oral performance of works that may be as much as 400 years older than the text.

And this fascinates me.

Basically, the argument for reading Homer is that prior to what we now consider “literature” — things like Shakespearean plays and Fitzgerald novels — there was only verbal story telling. We didn’t write things down, we told each other stories by candlelight and across dinner tables. That’s what makes this so particularly interesting. Homerian stories are the stories that lasted. They were the stories we told for centuries. They were the first stories we felt obligated to write down.

To truly grasp how important Homer and his works are, consider this:

Fragments of Homer account for nearly half of all identifiable Greek papyrus finds.

The Greeks were the foremost Western society. You could even argue much of Roman tradition stems from the Greeks. And meanwhile NEARLY HALF of all Greek writings make reference to Homer.

What does this tell us? That stories like The Odyssey and The Iliad form the bedrock of Western society. That these tales of Achilles and Ulysses and wandering and love and angry Greek gods were important. That these were the words spoken from steps of the Acropolis.

And here we are thousands of years later, grandchildren to this enormous tradition.

Legacy Thinking

Years ago, when tech companies were first developing touchscreens, they assumed a ‘stylus’ would be our natural interaction with said devices (and you can probably understand why). We’d been using pencils and paper for thousands of years. If we’re gonna touch, write, drag, and drop then it makes sense to do so with a pseudo-pen right??

As it actually turns out, that’s not how we’re naturally inclined to interact with touchscreens. Instead, we use our thumbs.

Now consider a different use case:

Places like Boston Dynamics are building the next generation of robotics and what do they look like? Humans.

I was reading one of Benedict Evan’s recent essays about LLMs and their use cases and he made a very good point about “legacy thinking”:

Whenever we get a new tool, we start by forcing it to fit our existing ways of working, and then over time we change the work to fit the new tool.

We stand on the brink of a technological revolution and its industry is filled with smart people pitching the same ideas. This is exactly why engineers at Intel used to kick LSD :p

Reflections on Solitude

I spend a lot of time alone. I mean, I’ve been living alone for nearly four years (closer to five if you count the six months I spent alone in a London apartment during my junior year of college). Yet, you might think there is something wrong with that. That I must be lonely, and depressed. That I struggle to be around others. And while that may have been true of a younger self, I’d hardly accept such a label at this point in my life.

It can be hard to describe, explaining what its like being alone for days, weeks, months on end. The days meld together, as I’m sure they do for everyone else, yet there is something very specifically ‘solitary’ about it. It’s almost like meditating? And I don’t mean five minutes of sitting on the couch deep in thought. I mean, laying on your carpeted apartment floor and watching clouds crawl across the sky for hours. Then realizing the time and thinking back to that deep state of mind you had arrested only a moment ago, yet you’ve lost something in translation. Like trying to pull back the curtain on last night’s dream, only to find you can’t remember a damned thing.

I’ll also be the first one to admit that there are definitely those periods of intense loneliness. That’s inevitable. It’s how you choose to spend the rest of your time though — amongst others or alone — that really defines your self awareness. How can you have a deep understanding of yourself when you spend your life’s entirety caught up in everyone else?

I’ll probably catch a lot of flack for that last point for being “selfish” — but that’s not what it is. It would be selfish to choose oneself over another if done so from a standpoint of pleasure. Skip church and play video games for example. You don’t have a reason to skip, other than the desire to play video games. It’s compromising of your moral character. But if I choose to stay in on a Friday and forgo happy hour with friends, it’s not because I’m copping out out of pleasure — it’s because I recognize the need for alone time. To make dinner and listen to my favorite playlist. Read obscure philosophy and sip rye whisky before an early bedtime.

To me, solitude is about recharging.

Some Literature

Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns... 
driven time and again off course, once he had plundered 
the hallowed heights of Troy. 

- Homer (The Odyssey)

Thanks for reading my Substack! Feel free to share if you’d like. And don’t pledge me any money. Seriously. I just appreciate your time :p