Japan’s “Evaporated People”:

A shadow economy has emerged to service those who want never to be found — who want to make their disappearances look like abductions, their homes look like they’ve been robbed, no paper trail or financial transactions to track them down.

Just for interest.

We’re not death phobic, we’re death complacent:

Our culture is routinely diagnosed with an excessive fear of mortality. A calm look at the evidence tells a different story
…
Take the ready acceptance of the ubiquitous story of ‘billionaires who want to become immortal’ and how it reflects our collective fear of death. In reality, of the approximately 3,000 billionaires in the world, only about 30 invest in anti-ageing science

It would be a blow to the terror management theory people, if true. Though their research is often enough of a blow.

Innovation Bends Towards Decadence. You won’t have to read far before you get it, but it’s a fun alternative to, as the author puts it:

Justin Fox is the latest pundit to ring the innovation-ain’t-what-it-used-to-be alarm. “Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20th century,” he writes, summing up the by now familiar argument, “the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live.” … Neal Stephenson, who worries that the Internet, far from spurring a great burst of creativity, may have actually put innovation “on hold for a generation.” … Tyler Cowen, who has argued that, recent techno-enthusiasm aside, we’re living in a time of innovation stagnation … Peter Thiel, who believes that large-scale innovation has gone dormant and that we’ve entered a technological “desert.”

He then uses Maslow’s hierarchy to make the point:

In short: The more comfortable you are, the more time you spend thinking about yourself.

Similarly, he reckons tech goes: survival tech, social organisation tech, prosperity tech, leisure tech, and self tech. But even if we squeeze Maslow until his hierarchy worked that way, I reckon that’s a bit of a long bow to draw. Feels a bit like we’re abandoning leisure for productivity, which is not obviously ‘self’ motivated. Or, newer generations are going the other way, resisting the kinds of self-tech the author describes, which means we’re going back down for some reason? And, is social media an innovation in self-expression? Or just rent-seeking on our impulses there?

This and many other questions about his specific crack at this. But bending toward decadence is an interesting idea.

The Power Of Kitsch.

we all recognize kitsch when we come across it. The Barbie doll, Walt Disney’s Bambi, Santa Claus in the supermarket, Bing Crosby singing White Christmas, pictures of poodles with ribbons in their hair. At Christmas we are surrounded by kitsch - worn out cliches, which have lost their innocence without achieving wisdom. Children who believe in Santa Claus invest real emotions in a fiction. We who have ceased to believe have only fake emotions to offer. But the faking is pleasant. It feels good to pretend, and when we all join in, it is almost as though we were not pretending at all.

The kitsch object encourages you to think, “Look at me feeling this - how nice I am and how lovable.” That is why Oscar Wilde, referring to one of Dickens’s most sickly death-scenes, said that “a man must have a heart of stone not to laugh at the death of Little Nell”.

And that, briefly, is why the modernists had such a horror of kitsch. Art, they believed, had, during the course of the 19th Century, lost the ability to distinguish precise and real emotion from its vague and self-satisfied substitute.

Something in this article sparked me to think about my other marginalia on the idea that ‘Innovation Bends Towards Decadence’. The artist pushes against it, but we work ever harder to embrace it? Something like that.