progress and chaos and rizz
"We decided to make the buses free" he said and it basically blew my mind. I've just been all over Denmark. It was great. Stunningly beautiful. Clean air. The lifestyle seems so good. Across the country the quality and variety of the playgrounds made me think about how much in the UK we ransack the future for the sake of saving pennies now; if you want kids to be bored and boring you strip them of safe places to go in the afternoon. In the capital, the rush hour is 3pm. Every street had at least one couple walking with great skin and high ponytails (both genders). The woman's hand rested on her baby bump. If countries are groups of people deciding how to be together, Denmark leans to safety and order. When you hear that bus quote, that in Jutland all public transport is free now, it's hard not to consider how much everything is a choice. And yet.... as I opened up another cupboard in the perfect summerhouse to find a neat pile of candles wrapped in a ribbon, I realised I found some of the order oppressive. I'm not arguing for messy homes; more that there are cultural conditions in each place that seep into how you show up. Where you stand depends upon where you sit. And what we call "the West" depends upon where you are in the world. The friends I saw in Copenhagen, who work at many brilliant Danish companies from Lego to Novo to Ganni, universally said that they had to rework their pace when they moved from NY or London to settle in. If progress is the impulse to improve things or build something new and exponentially different, how does it affect that impulse when where you live already has a distinct and set order that feels so good? To create the conditions for real progress do we need a little chaos? Chaos doesn't necessarily have to mean disorder; think times of incredible change when it's clear stuff is happening and you want to be part of it. Curiousity. Velocity. Positive paranoia. Opinionated peer groups. If there's too much chaos it can make you distracted or apathetic (but it amazed me when I lived in San Francisco how there was such chaos and progress at once; one time I saw a woman loudly querying her medical bill while breastfeeding her baby in the car she clearly lived in). I think it's the same if there's too little chaos and too much comfort. I just started reading Dan Wang's Breakneck, a compelling deep dive into how China has engineered so much growth for better and for worse. The book's central argument is that China and America are much alike; both avid consumerists and restless populations aware of their sheer mass and power in the world. Messy places. The difference is timing and timelines; early immigrants to America desperately needed to build infrastructure. A few generations later, as Americans became alarmed by the byproducts of growth from environmental destruction to the rise of big business, we see the rise of the lawyer. Five out of the last ten American presidents went to law school; the government is dominated by lawyers. There are 3x more lawyers per capita in the US than in any European country. In China, Xi Jinping studied chemical engineering and about two-thirds of his government have engineering or technical backgrounds. As Wang coins it, it's the lawyerly society versus the engineering state. The best founders I meet tend to be cultural outliers of a sort; maybe they're loud Brits, workaholic Frenchies, or highly ambitious Scandis. Perhaps entrepreneurs are born, not made, whatever their place of birth. No answers, just open questions. What do you think? Final thing on Denmark: I spent a few years in my twenties as a clothes buyer in vintage + secondhand designer clothes and still cannot resist the hunt. This week I tried to work out why certain cities have such density of killer secondhand shops. This is what I came up with; 1) cities that are great to shop in need to be comparatively well off; they can afford and have access to well made clothes, whether well-known labels or made from great quality fabric 2) there's some culture of maintenance 3) the city needs to have small living spaces where people are routinely forced to downsize (between 2 + 3, you can see why the US is no good) This is why Copenhagen and Tokyo are top tier. Reply for my map of Copenhagen inspiration from museums to sources of old YSL to where to get the best BMO. Things I liked recently that you might too:
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