Only time will tell
The Lindy Effect and good books
🏷️ Categories: Mental models, Literature, Time
While you are reading this, thousands of people out there are reading bestsellers.
Many of those books that are talked about so much today will be forgotten in a few years. Some will fare better; in a few decades, no one will remember them. A few, hardly any, will survive the passage of time, a force so overwhelming that nothing can stop it.
It's funny, we don't even know which of those hundreds of bestsellers will survive.
With luck, one or two will escape being swallowed up by the sands of time.
An inspiring story
Augusto Monterroso, one of the greatest Latin American writers knew this.
I was recently reading his biography and found an inspiring reflection.
He was born in 1921, in Tegucigalpa, Honduras, although he went to Guatemala. His childhood was hard and at the age of 16 he left school to work and bring money home. For 7 years he worked in a butcher shop and since the laws were not as they are now, he said that he was only allowed to rest on Holy Thursday because on Holy Friday meat was not eaten.
The little free time he had was spent reading in the city library.
"Guatemala was such a poor country that the library only had good books."
That's what Augusto used to say, a phrase that opened my eyes.
The Lindy Effect
Augusto Monterroso was witnessing the Lindy Effect.
This effect states that the longer something has survived—be it an idea, a technology, a work of art, etc.—the greater the likelihood that it will continue to exist in the future (Taleb, 2012). In the library there was only room for books that had stood the test of time, there was only room for good books.
Let's reflect on this for a moment.
While living things have a finite life, where the young are more likely to survive one more day than the old, non-perishable things are the other way around, the longer something has lasted, the more likely it is to last one more day.
They are the other way around.
The Lindy Effect in Books
There is nothing more beautiful than an old book.
Homer's Iliad and Odyssey, Virgil's Aeneid, and Plato's Dialogues are examples of books that have survived millennia and are still being studied. Plato's Dialogues remain indispensable works of philosophy, their ideas are still being discussed and inspiration is still being drawn.. The fact that it has lasted 2,000 years and is still so valuable makes me think that it will continue to be read for another 2,000 years.
This brings us full circle.
While you are reading me, thousands of people out there are reading best sellers.
How many of those books will be valuable in 10 years? And in 100? And 1,000?
We live in the era with the greatest production of information in the history of humanity, but this has a price: noise. There is a deafening noise of banal information that prevents us from hearing what is valuable. You consume about 35 gigabytes of information every day (Bohn & Short, 2012).
I'm sure that, like me, you have an endless list of books to read.
One day, chatting with Lola, a reader, we calculated that completing the list of books I have pending would take me 5 years without stopping reading. It's scary. What to do then, if I'm going to die without reading everything I want?
Use the Lindy Effect.
When I'm not sure what to read next, I use the Lindy Effect and go back to the classics, they're a safe bet. It's much more likely to get inspiration from Plato than from the author of the moment. It doesn't mean that there are no geniuses in the present, it means that time hasn't yet sifted the wheat from the chaff.
I can't stop thinking about Augusto Monterroso.
"Guatemala was such a poor country that the library only had good books."
They had few books, but they knew how to choose.
✍️ Your turn: What classic book has inspired you and do you think will still be read in 100 years? I think one will be 1984 by George Orwell.
💭 Quote of the day: “I feel like the oldest person in the world and with the longest life left.” Pasing, Nella Larsen.
See you soon, take care 😊.
References 📚
Bohn, R. E., y Short, J. E. (2012). Measuring Consumer Information. International Journal Of Communication, 6, 980-1000. https://ijoc.org/index.php/ijoc/article/view/1566/743
Repository of the University of Salamanca. (2000). Augusto Monterroso: La biblioteca que tan pobre era que sólo tenía libros buenos. https://gredos.usal.es/bitstream/handle/10366/118660/EB12_N114_P46-47.pdf?sequence=1. Transcripción de parte del vídeo "Monterroso en su jardín".
Taleb, N. N. (2012). Antifragile: How to Live in a World We Don't Understand
During our trip to a bookstore about an hour from home, we picked up a copy of The Odyssey and one of 100 Years of Solitude. I chose the latter because so many people seemed to be inspired by its spiritual ideas. And is was a few decades old, unlike the Odyssey. In fact, the book was displayed in the bookstore entrance vestibule alongside other "classics" in decorative bindings. Solitude was just a paperback, but now that I'm older and have learned many things over my 75 years, I'm looking forward to reading it and seeing if it livens up my spiritual life. Here's to a lifetime of reading, Alvaro, no matter how many years we have left.
This is an interesting idea re preserving that which has already been preserved. The thoughts from the Guatemalan author are poetic and yet I suspect that there are some older items that get preserved just because they are old.