What If Beautiful Spaces Draw Us Back Together?
A brief exploration of our opportunity to invest in place
These days most of us embrace our devices.
We cradle them in our hands. We carry them in our bags. We gaze into their blue lights lovingly.
As one artist points out, we are “absorbed by [their] light.”
Movies even predict we’ll fall in love with our devices–things like our smart assistants — soon. Even though most of us aren’t in love with Alexa, Siri, or our smartphones yet, we do spend a lot of our time with them. A 2018, The New York Times opinion piece pointed out that “253 million Americans spent [] 1,460 hours on their smartphone and other mobile devices. That’s 91 waking days; cumulatively, [and] that adds up to 370 billion waking American hours [].”
Wow.
The thing is that while we spend a lot of time with our devices now, in the future we might spend even more time with them.
This is because they are getting better and better at enticing us to be with them.
Consider Snap’s acquisition of NextMind, featured in David Mattin’s New World Same Humans column on Substack. He reports that the “makers of a headband that reads brain signals [aspire] to allow the user to communicate with devices using only thought.”
The leaders of this company imagine “a world in which you can think forest and a forest will magically grow around you, seamlessly woven around the physical environment.”
So, what happens when we’re able to create a digital world with our minds and sprout a forest with a mere thought?
Will we even want to be here with each other anymore?
This is the thing. While our technologies afford us conveniences, like, information at our fingertips and next day packages on our doorsteps or live-feeds of what is happening with our friends — we still miss each other.
So, our leadership opportunity is to imagine how to create places in our world we want to be together in again.
The Absence We Feel
The Portuguese term — saudade — means (roughly-speaking because there is no direct English equivalent for this word) “a feeling of longing, melancholy, or nostalgia.” It seems to represent a particular kind of loss that is otherwise difficult for humans to communicate.
Imagine the families of sailors who experienced saudade for their loved ones at sea. Saudade seems to be that feeling of not knowing if someone (or something) will ever return.
That feeling of really missing them.
It may be hard to translate exactly, but it might be explained by that big empty space we feel in our hearts when we’ve lost something that mattered to us.
A space that is invisible to the eye– but still real, because we can feel it.
Most of us might not send loved ones out to sea like the Portuguese did, but we know when we miss something.
Some of that saudade seems to linger in much of our lives these days.
In spite of all the hours we spend with our devices, that longing shows up every time we pick up our smartphone to scroll social media. And when we pick up a lonely package on our doorstep. And as we scan our email.
Even though we spend all of that time on our devices, and we delight in the speed and the access to all of the information they provide us, we still miss each other.
It’s not like our social media feeds or the emails we receive are like notes from our friends or care packages from our mom. We don’t see the particular loops and swirls or lines of the handwriting we know is theirs because of the particular way they happen to cross their ‘ts,’ or notice the stamp they picked out for ‘just us,’ on a package anymore.
The emojis we use in our texts to convey feelings are silly — but they’re not beautiful, really.
There isn’t much that is human about the time we spend on our devices, or the experience of the convenience they afford us — the deliveries that land on our porch–next day– because of them.
We live efficient, lives in this way, but they’re not connected in a loving human way.
We miss our sailors at sea every single day.
The ‘saudade,’ stays with us — as a persistent longing for something human again.
What if We Turn To Beauty To Draw Us Together?
So, perhaps, while the technologists double-down on their strategies to entice us, our opportunity is to remember the longing we still have to be with each other and to consider that to be our niche market to invest in.
We may not deliver all that speed, and volume, information and convenience, but we can deliver on beauty in our physical spaces.
We naturally seek “the pleasures of beauty (Plontius).”
We love to encounter it.
We know when we experience it.
That feeling we get when we see “a perfect rose,” or “a dramatic sunset,” or experience the “wonderment and a delicious trouble, longing and love, and a trembling that is all delight Plotinus 23, [Ennead I, 3.]”
So, while other leaders imagine how to assemble bits in a virtual world, we might begin to imagine how to beautify the spaces in our own world.
This means we might have to contradict some of our tendencies to be thrifty, convenient or practical.
We might need to invest in flourishes that make our spaces feel special to inhabit together.
We might need to advocate for public spaces that become the “the pulse of the city.”
And if we’re a small business owner, create spaces carved out just perfectly and that are detailed to inspire the intimacy we desire.
If we have the leadership power and influence, we should build spaces that awe us. Spaces that awe as they also maintain a “flourishing relationship with our environment.”
Consider temples, churches, mosques and synagogues built to last generations. The spaces that mean one generation and the next will set foot in the same place. (The Louvre, Neuschwanstein Castle, the Casa Mila, or the Dancing House, Sagrada Familia.)
Our Opportunity
So let’s acknowledge that we miss something.
Let’s recognize the absence we feel.
And before the next generation AR goggles hypnotize us with fabricated worlds and digital butterflies, let’s engage thinkers and creators and those who wonder, to create beautiful spaces we want to be together in. (Spaces where we might extend our hand and brush up against another human’s skin. Or, at least from a safe distance, meet their eyes with our own.)
These are the spaces that our grandchildren might remember us for.
The spaces that might draw us together again.
The packages that make it to our doorsteps overnight, won’t ever deliver on that.
The Museum of Ideas — Curios — Ideas To Inspire Our Better Future
A lover of wisdom, I’m dedicated to imagining what we can build and achieve together.
Connect with me at: https://www.linkedin.com/in/shannonmullenokeefe/
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