Pebbling #1

Frisson, Hell Yes or Hell No, and mister David Foster Wallace.

A gentoo penguin will pick up a pebble and carry it to its partner. It works as a gift. Like the little penguin saying "Hey, I saw this thing and thought about you". This is called pebbling.

We also pebble, but we do it digitally. We send memes, reels, TikToks, articles, and news to friends and family.

So, I bring you some interesting pebbles I've stumbled upon during this week.

🪨 Frisson

Frisson are skin orgasms. Not everybody experiences them, only between 55% and 86% of people do.

Goosebumps (or piloerections) are the physical part of the frisson. I get them all the time. With music, deep conversations, or just beautiful things.

Have you ever wondered why we have goosebumps? A thin layer of warm air is trapped between your skin and the hairs. The same way there is a layer of air between your skin and your t-shirt.

Erecting the hair on your skin releases the air. Goose bumps can also be a response to anger or fear. The erect hairs can make an animal look bigger to intimidate others.

The mechanism of erecting the hair reminded me of wing flaps on planes.

How do I know about wing flaps? LAPA Flight 3142. A major air tragedy in Argentina happened because the pilots forgot to activate the flaps. The plane never took off and it crashed into a highway.

The reason for the tragedy is quintessential to Argentina's infrastructure: There was a faulty warning light that pilots always ignored, but this time the alarm was right: Flaps were not open.

Working as an engineer you learn that if your alarms are too noisy, you start ignoring them. Like the tale of The Boy Who Cried Wolf, or “Juanito y el Lobo” as we call it in Spanish.

🪨 Hell Yes or Hell No

I always quoted Mark Manson on this idea. Reading the article again I saw it actually belongs to Derek Sivers. Do ideas have an owner?

If you’re not saying “HELL YEAH!” about something, say no.

I haven't read any book from Derek Sivers yet, but he seems such an interesting guy. I listened to a few interviews and read some of his blog posts.

His ideas are so unique and refreshing. I also love his writing style. Short and to the point.

This is the Hell Yeah blogpost, but my favorite from him is about leadership and being the First Follower. Absolute gem of the internet.

Mark interviewed Derek on his podcast.

🪨 David Foster Wallace

I keep bumping into quotes from authors I've never read. Last time it was C. S. Lewis, this time it was David Foster Wallace (DFW).

I’m reading The Second Mountain: The Quest for a Moral Life. It’s not an easy read but every time I pick it up I say daaaamn. I’m loving it. It talks about so many different topics like marriage, finding a calling, philosophy.

This quote from DFW was inside a chapter about Intellectual Commitments:

In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of god or spiritual-type thing to worship—be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles—is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.

If you worship money and things—if they are where you tap real meaning in life—then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth.

Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you ….

Worship power—you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay.

Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.

More facts about DFW:

• There is a movie about him named "The End of the Tour".

• He killed himself in 2008. My first reaction was to assign a deeper meaning to everything he wrote or said. Like, he knew a deeper truth about life. I want to separate the person from his art, but I don't think that's possible or even desirable.

• The internet recommended reading _A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again_ as starting point for his work.

• His magnum opus is Infinite Jest. Featured inside Time magazine's list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 and 2005.

The list of books I want to read keeps growing and growing. I came to the sad realization that I'll never have enough time to read all the books I want. This made me way pickier when I start a book, and way faster to quit them.

If you are picking up your phone instead of reading, you are not reading something interesting enough.

If you are not reading as much as you would like, you are not reading something interesting enough. This happened to me with Gatsby.

Find interesting stuff and drop it when it stops being fun: Hell yes or hell no. That’s how I want to feel about books. And life.

Thanks for reading and see you soon.