Finite things are something I’ve become obsessed with recently, and I think it’s because almost nothing around me “ends” anymore. My iPhone is infinite, the feed is infinite, and most of the apps I open are infinite. Each of these “things” has a beginning, which is the moment I open them, but there is no point where they are fully finished with me, no matter how much time I spend on them. There are very few things I touch in a day that are built to do a single thing and then be done. Almost everything is designed to make sure there is always more.
I’ve spent many years of my life lost in these infinite things. It mostly happened when I entered high school because all I wanted was to belong, and you needed to be on these to belong, and do many things you don’t necessarily want to do, and, well, I got caught in the game. But my perspective on things and life has changed a lot since then, and I no longer care about these things that much, if at all.
What I’ve realized, growing up, is that something that gave me everything gave me nothing I was able to keep. The things I remember most from those high-school years have nothing to do with the places I thought I had to be in order to “belong.”
A feed, for example, is and always was something that handed me a thousand feelings in a few minutes, and every time I walked away, I couldn’t even name one of them. On most days, I cannot remember what I felt, and on some, I’m not even sure I felt anything at all.
But a finite thing does the opposite, because it gives me one thing, and since it’s only one, I actually get to keep it. The Tamagotchi is a gadget I always love giving as an example. I didn’t have a real Tamagotchi as a kid because where I grew up, few people had them, but we had plenty of similar “gadgets.” I had some of these when I was a child. Some didn’t even have pixels, but on each one, you could do only one thing, and whenever you finished doing that, you were done.
I don’t think I’ve ever loved a device more than those since. I think this happened because I was always using them intentionally, on purpose, and I felt that I received that attention back.
Today, I’m not sure how many of us are truly intentional with the time we give to infinite things. We keep telling ourselves that the amount of time we spend on them is intentional, but I think we just found a new definition for dependence. The more a thing can do, the less I seem to value it, and today I care about my phone more than almost any object I own, and yet I know that I am not attached to it at all. By dependency, I don’t mean the dependence that scrolling itself gives you, because that’s the one we talk about the most, but the dependency on the thing itself. I am dependent on what I can do with and through it. The scrolling dependency is secondary to this one. (I have fortunately almost cured myself of it. not entirely though, because it’s not an easy process, but I am getting there.)
Whenever we talk about being replaced these days, we think about AI, and we say that these new systems and robots, or however you call them, are going to replace our humanity.
I agree that it’s going to take our jobs, as a lot of people have already been replaced, and more will be as this technology gets better. But it also creates new opportunities, so I don’t think that’s the thing to worry about the most. What we should be concerned about is something else, like losing ourselves, but that’s a topic for another essay, because there’s so much to say about it.
I think that before AI became so popular, most of what made us human had already been replaced, and we didn’t even realize it because there was no big movement behind it.
For example, one thing that I think has been replaced, deeply influenced by social media, is the nature of our relationships. When social media was still social, the predominant nature of our relationships was relational. But once it became something totally different from social, the relational nature took a back seat to the transactional one. All this happened before AI was even “a thing.”
The replacement we are focused on is the one in the headline, but I think the most impactful ones are happening inside the news.
“What remains human when everything is being replaced?” is the question my work has been in conversation with for some time now. The more I explore it, the more I realize that I might never have an exact answer to it. I think it’s a question that gets you closer to things that feel like the answer, only to reveal another one, and another, and another, and another. Finite things are one of those, and I believe they may be one of the answers to this question.
By finite, I’m not referring just to the object itself, but also to the experience that forms around it and the one it gives you. One of these experiences, for example, is holding something in your hands for the first time. That’s a feeling you only get once with that thing.
So I made one.
For the past few months, I have been working on a zine. It’s a small printed object that I was always curious about making, but I think I needed a push to finally do it. The tiredness of living inside something that constantly asks for more, but always for less presence, may have been the push I needed.
I wanted to make something that responded to it, and I was keen on making it physical. It would have been much easier to make it digital, and I did think about it, since it would have cost me almost nothing and, in theory, reached more people. But I still wanted to follow the “harder” way and start with something physical. The more I thought about making it digital, the more I could feel the whole point of it draining away. Turning it into another infinite thing would have betrayed what it was for.
My work with The Hidden I is to make you feel something again. It has always been this, though I never knew how to package it in a way that resonated with me. Until now. It's a protest against not feeling anything, something I do because I want people to feel something again. Whether it's me giving that feeling or them finding it themselves, I want it to start taking shape while they're inside it, and by the end to exist clearly in their souls. And zine #0 is the physical, finite embodiment of that.
The zine was made in the first place for myself. I needed to make something like this. I had to. And then I made it for the people who still remember how to spend time with things, and for the people who used to but unconsciously forgot, and for those who feel the absence of it without having a name for what exactly went missing. I think there are far more of us than it may seem from inside the feed.
I want the way you come to holding the zine to carry a little of the same intention as the thing itself. You can find it on thehiddeni.com, sent to you wherever you are, with the delivery free and worldwide (everything is so expensive these days that this "worldwide" gave me the most headaches, but thank God I found a way to do it). If you already live on Farcaster or Orb, and would rather pay me directly in crypto, you can collect it there instead.
If you have any questions about it, feel free to message me anytime here, or in the comments, or on any other social platform (@eduardmsmr on Twitter, Instagram, Telegram, Farcaster, Orb).
Thank you for all your support. I’m really excited about this stage of my journey.
This is the first finite thing I have made, and I look at it as a protest. And if there’s one thing I hope this small finite thing reminds you of, it’s this: don’t be afraid to feel again.🌹