Wonder
Humans! They lived in a world where the grass continued to be green and the sun rose every day and flowers regularly turned into fruit, and what impressed them? Weeping statues. And wine made out of water! A mere quantum-mechanistic tunnel effect, that’d happen anyway if you were prepared to wait zillions of years. As if the turning of sunlight into wine, by means of vines and grapes and time and enzymes, wasn’t a thousand times more impressive and happened all the time…
Terry Pratchett, Small Gods
Wonder is a nice way to deal with input overload. I should probably try that more, because input overload gets me at the weirdest opportunities. If I’m looking at some perfectly normal thing, for instance a fork, there’s a small but constant chance that I’ll be completely swept away by thoughts of what factors had to combine to get this fork into my hands. The material that had to be sourced and shipped and perfected. The design that somebody had to figure out, drawing a curve just so. Figuring out the strength of different versions, the width the tines have to have. Building a factory, and all the things required for a factory in turn. Finding a place, finding workers, organising work. Paying them in a way that minimises expenses but still keeps them at least barely alive. Having a global and local economy supporting these practices. Management (strategies, finding managers and employees, metrics, reports, chains of command). Shipping (vehicles and containers, safe containment, international logistics). Storage (warehouses, sorting, retrieval, international order management). Distribution. Advertising. Slack in all of these parts because humans will fuck up the most carefully laid plans.
I call it supply chain overload, and an important part of it is that I start to wonder about each fractally complex part, when I could just as well look at the wonder.