💡🧐 Curiosities | Round 10
On new cities, transformational processes, creative studios, modern typewriters, and more
Welcome back to The Comma Project - a place for leaders and seekers, where I share the stories and insights that guide me along the way, in hopes that they might matter to you, too.
I’m back with round 10 of Curiosities - where I unearth and round up digestible gems of insight on the art of seeking, becoming, and building a life of significance.
I hope you enjoy - and if you do, I’d be grateful if you pressed the little ❤️ button at the top left corner of this piece, and shared it with a few people you think would also enjoy it.
Reply to this email and let me know what you think.
Cheers,
Devin
[Essay]
On the East Solano Plan: an attempt to build a brand new, human-centric city from scratch
So imagine you had a place that looked like Noe Valley, or the Marina, or many of the beloved neighborhoods in the Bay. Now imagine we make it better by building superblocks, for example like they’ve done in Barcelona, where they have internal streets where cars can only go 10 miles an hour — so you can actually hang out on the streets with your friends, and your kids can walk to school on a road that’s safe.
Then imagine that it’s 25 minutes to Napa and two hours to Tahoe — much closer to those places than Palo Alto.
And then imagine that you can buy — hopefully you can buy — an apartment in the $400,000 range, or a nice house for $600,000. Those figures are a little bit up in the air, but it will definitely be more affordable. Then hopefully we do a good job on schools and culture and art.
I’m absolutely fascinated by attempts at building new spaces for people to live intentionally. This is a big one - $900 million raised and spent on land alone.
The question in my mind is whether these complex systems can be done intentionally, or whether anything notable has to emerge, bottom-up, organically over time.
I’ll be following this with deep interest.
[Podcast]
Boyd Varty on the Align Podcast
My idea of modern-day activism is to become someone who lives on the track of your own life. So you really work out what it would mean to go inward and find your way to your gift, your purpose, your essence.
The first movement of any transformational process is “I don’t know, and that’s okay.”
The natural world is a scape of relationality.
Modern urban life is the opposite. In an environment where the individual self is disconnected from the greater whole, the search for meaning is reduced to a constant state of comparison. ‘How am I doing in comparison to everyone else?’ My idea of how successful I am is about how I fit into this hierarchy of comparison. The feeling inside of that is that you’re never quite there.”
Another set of gems from my favorite source of gems - Boyd Varty.
This is a phenomenal conversation that I can see myself returning to again and again.
[Tweet]
A beautifully designed office & creative studio
I want it.
[Website]
A typewriter for the 21st century
I’m a nerd for thoughtfully designed products like this.
I’m continually surprised by how distracted I find myself, even as someone who identifies as a pretty good focuser.
I have a perfectly good typing device, but I must say I’m tempted…
[Podcast]
Phil Stutz on Rich Roll
A grounded and deeply human conversation with the subject of the documentary Stutz (which I highly recommend).
The collective perspective on the human experience, and the challenges and triumphs along the way, felt like a guiding hand.
This is another one I can see myself revisiting from time to time.
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