Until What Remains
Why the rooms we admire aren't always the ones we want to live in, and how taste becomes less about acquiring than understanding.
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This week, I listened to an interesting podcast about an emotionally unstable fabulist who became an unlikely spy, and read an excellent essay arguing that as AI becomes increasingly capable, the real advantage may belong not to those who outsource their thinking most efficiently, but to those who continue embracing the difficult work of thinking for themselves, using these new tools to deepen rather than diminish curiosity, originality, and mental effort. My favourite passage, however, wasn't really about the bots at all. It was about us:
AI can’t hunger, in the first place, because it doesn’t have biological needs—the needs that push living things to grow and explore. More important, AI doesn’t have a self. A bot doesn’t have a past person that it used to be or a future person that it wishes to become. A bot does not have a structure of cares and an order of loves, as a person does. A bot doesn’t have a personal history, a particular set of wounds, joys, and exhilarations experienced in regions deeper than rational calculation, and it doesn’t have a succession of dreams and hopes…
Perhaps that's why I've found myself thinking less about novelty and more about the things that make up a life. This week, I've been reflecting on something more personal: what years of looking at beautiful interiors have taught me about my own. It's ostensibly about décor, but really it's about taste, and the way it evolves over time. We tend to imagine taste as something we acquire, through references, aspiration, and experience. But I wonder whether it is just as much about subtraction, the slow shedding of identities that never really belonged to us, until what remains is something less performative and more instinctive, less concerned with being seen, and more concerned with how a life actually feels.
I’ve been collecting plenty of fascinating articles this week, and may send an extra Sunday edition with everything that didn’t make it into today’s letter. But for now, since it’s cuore dell’estate, as the Italians say, I’m keeping things a little lighter.
LAST TIME /at hyperreality
A Life You Can Touch
Why we’re returning to craftsmanship, conversation, everyday pleasures, and everything that still feels real. Also inside: seven ways to create a more beautiful life.
For years the internet rewarded whatever could scale. Platforms grew larger, cities became more alike, careers moved behind screens, and culture bent itself towards algorithms. This week, though, a different pattern emerges: people are choosing trades over degrees, restaurants are prized for being particular rather than interchangeable, and writers are wondering whether an audience curated by algorithm can ever be called their own. Even luxury brands are creating experiences that cannot be downloaded or generated. It feels as though we're reaching the limits of optimisation, and beginning to rediscover the value of what remains stubbornly, reassuringly real.
Inside for paid subscribers: a personal essay on taste, restraint, and the surprising difference between what we admire and what we want to live with.
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