I write in these spaces as a form of yoga practice.
Today, we use the word foundation so often that we forget that it came from the world of architecture, referring to the element of a building structure that transfers loads from the structure to the ground.
If a work is foundational, it has to transfer the load from the structure to the ground.
Sounds about right, no?
My delusions of doing foundational work in food and agriculture were recently challenged by a simple story.
That’s always the case with them. It’s funny when I think about it. How could a story of how English-speaking humans ended up with the QWERTY keyboard make me question what I did for a living?
This moral earthquake happened while revisiting Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s “Fooled By Randomness”
As Taleb writes,
“The arrangement of the letters on a typewriter is an example of the success of the least deserving method. For our typewriters have the order of the letters on their keyboard arranged in a nonoptimal manner, as a matter of fact in such a nonoptimal manner as to slow down the typing rather than make the job easy, in order to avoid jamming the ribbons as they were designed for less electronic days. Therefore, as we started building better typewriters and computerized word processors, several attempts were made to rationalize the computer keyboard, to no avail. People were trained on a QWERTY keyboard and their habits were too sticky for change.”
What if we end up with the least deserving design of food and agriculture systems simply because humans and their habits are too sticky for change?
There is no way to answer this question. Today, whatever I think is foundational might become inconsequential fifty years from now. Whatever I think is inconsequential might end up becoming foundational fifty years from now.
"To the extent that people separate themselves from the nature, they spin out further and further from the center. At the same time, a centripetal force asserts itself and the desire to return to nature arises"- Masanobu Fukuoka, One Straw Revolution.
It’s only when we taste this uncertainty, we start to enjoy the journey over the reward.
To live a life of idealism is to strive for the journey over the reward.