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There was a great article in the New York Times a few weeks ago about the closeness-communication bias: “The closer we feel toward someone, the less likely we are to listen carefully to them.”

It’s the auditory equivalent of tuning out your surroundings:

Once you know people well enough to feel close, there’s an unconscious tendency to tune them out because you think you already know what they are going to say. It’s kind of like when you’ve traveled a certain route several times and no longer notice signposts and scenery.

Which means that you miss major clues that your friends and family are giving you, while noticing more during a random interaction with a stranger in the elevator.

The studies, of course, found that we believe the opposite: that we better understand the people we love. But all proof is to the contrary.

Excuse me, I need to go listen to Josh.

Coronavirus. I spend a lot of time thinking about Coronavirus. Partially because it is in the news every second of the day, and partially because it is an easy thing to obsess about. When I’m out of the house, I am paying attention to every surface I’m touching and reminding myself not to absentmindedly rub my eyes. When I’m home, I’m thinking about never leaving the house.

Except that everyone else in the house often leaves the house. So not leaving the house doesn’t actually protect me. Or them.

It’s hard to gauge how much to worry. I don’t worry about the flu, and the flu is much more widespread. (Though I do get a flu shot yearly, so that may explain why I don’t worry about the flu.)

Many years ago, right after 9-11, there was a day that anyone living in certain cities–D.C. and NY, for example–were encouraged to make an emergency kit. What if you couldn’t leave your house for several days? What if water and electricity were shut off? What would you need? We got canned food and a manual opener. Peanut butter. Candles. Matches. Hand sanitizer. Jugs of water.

We didn’t keep up the box over the years, though the candles and matches are still in there. But maybe we should. Maybe we should do an inventory of what we would need if we couldn’t go outside for a week or two and gather those items. We can use them and replace them until we feel like this is over. Or maybe that’s just unreasonable panic looking at this through the media lens, which regurgitates the story again and again. It’s hard to know what to do.

Though I guess purchasing a case of black beans can’t hurt.

I read a quote this weekend that I keep turning around in my head:

“The cost of a thing is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” –Henry David Thoreau

So the cost of dollars and cents translates into… life. The things we’ve given up in order to make the money to buy the thing. The time we’ve given up, the things we couldn’t do because we were busy with work, the energy expended.

So, to that end, if you need a car, you can purchase a high-end car, but that high-end car translates into life: education hours, career path hours, time spent at a job. Or you can buy a lower-end car and that translates to life, too. Or it’s also about upkeep: the more you own, the more life you spend maintaining those things. The less you own, the less life you spend taking care of limited items.

I am a huge fan of libraries, though I am also a compulsive book buyer. And it’s interesting to see that push and pull through the lens of life spent when there are a multitude of options at every bend. You can buy the book or borrow it. You can buy the big house or the small house. The high-end car or the low-end car. And it all ties back to life.

Yap is a disappearing chat room, a product of Postlight Labs.

Yap is an ephemeral, real-time chat room with up to six participants. Your messages appear and disappear as quickly as you type them, which means unless you pay attention to what everyone says (for once), you’ll miss it.

Words appear on the screen. Words disappear off the screen. Just like spoken conversation, which is heard once and then goes away.

Maybe it’s a generational thing, but I don’t get the desire for the ephemera coupled with social media. Snapchat. Instagram Stories. For me, the whole point to writing something down–creation–is to have a record after it’s done.

I once saw a blog where the person had one post, and they erased and re-wrote that post each day. So if you missed a day, the post was gone. The person had no record of their thoughts over the years. And these weren’t tiny, Twitter-sized thoughts. They spent all this time writing out their heart and then erased it 24 hours later.

Which is to say that, clearly, Yap works for someone. It may even work for the aforementioned blogger. But it wouldn’t work for me.

Would you want to jump into a chat like this?

I read about the term “grievability” this week in The New Yorker. It’s part of a larger piece, but this is the part that caught my attention. Mostly because it feels familiar: that idea that “some lives were considered to be more worthy of grieving publicly than others, depending on the status and recognizability of those persons and their relations.”

It’s discussed in both the collective sense and the individual sense. Some losses are more acknowledged than others; some types of losses are more acknowledged. It’s not just the famous who get publicly acknowledged while lesser known people are a footnote when part of the same event. It’s that some people aren’t really given the space to grieve at all when other people don’t acknowledge they lost something.

The loss was not recognized, and it was not marked, which means that it was treated as if it were no loss. Of course, that follows from the fact that the love they lived was also treated as if it were no love.

It’s thought-provoking, mostly because the term is the exact opposite: it’s an acknowledgement that all loss needs to be grieved.