Holding the Bag

I ended the last letter on a moment I haven't stopped thinking about: standing in a factory, holding a bag made in China against bags I'd held in Italy and Spain, and not being able to rank them. Indistinguishable. The hierarchy I'd carried my whole adult life just dissolved in my hands.

That was kind of a lie... I could tell them apart… because I thought the Chinese one was better. (HINT: it's the burgundy one upfront).

I want to stay on that, because the lesson wasn't really about China, or Italy, or bags. It was about how we decide what's good — and how badly we usually do it.

The label does the looking for us

Here's what I'd been doing for years without noticing: I let the label look for me.

Made in Italy meant good. Made in China meant lesser. I didn't arrive at those judgments by holding anything. I inherited them. And once you've inherited a verdict, you stop actually examining the thing in front of you — the label already told you the answer, so why bother looking? You hold the bag, but you're not really feeling it. You've decided.

That's the part that should bother you. Not that the verdict was wrong. That I wasn't even looking.

What care looks like

Think about a well-made lamp. Not the brand. The lamp itself.

You can see it. The weight of the base when you pick it up. The way the seam sits. Whether the joins were rushed or considered. Whether someone cared, or someone clocked out. A well-made object tells you it was made with care — it broadcasts it, if you're paying attention. You don't need to know where it was made or who made it or what it cost. The care is in the thing. It's visible to anyone willing to actually look.

This is what people mean, I think, when they say proof is in the pudding. You don't argue about whether the pudding is good. You taste it. The thing itself settles the question. Everything else whether it's the recipe's pedigree, the chef's nationality, the price on the menu, is noise you bring to the table before you've even picked up the spoon.  Trust me, I know - I own a couple Michelin restaurants.  The chefs aren't always what you think. 

Prejudice is just deciding before looking

I've come to think of prejudice in the plainest possible terms. It's not a political word to me. It's a thinking error.

Prejudice is deciding what something is before you've actually examined it — applying some general label to the specific thing in front of you. The label can be anything. A country. A price. A name. A neighborhood. A school someone went to, a car they drive, how they're dressed. You take a category you've already got an opinion about, and you staple it onto the individual without checking whether it fits.

And it almost never fits, because individuals aren't their categories. This lamp isn't "lamps." This bag isn't "Chinese manufacturing." This person isn't wherever you've decided people like them end up. The general rule, even one with truth, tells you nothing reliable about the particular case standing in front of you. That's not soft moralizing. It's just how specifics work.

I'd love to say I figured this out from principle. I didn't. I figured it out because I lost half a year and a lot of money carrying a verdict I'd never tested, and then tested it, and watched it fall apart in an afternoon.

How I want KIMIAS judged

So here's the standard I actually believe in, and the one I'd ask you to hold KIMIAS to.

Don't take my word for any of it. Don't take the label's word either. Hold the bag. Feel the weight, the edge, the way it sits against you. Look at whether someone cared. If it doesn't show, I've failed, and no story I tell you should save it. If it does show, then it shows — and where it was made becomes exactly as interesting as where your favorite meal was cooked. Which is to say: interesting, but not the thing that makes it good.

The whole reason I'm writing these letters is that the industry has spent a long time training us to read the label instead of the object. To buy the story instead of the thing. I'd rather build for people who do it the other way around — who pick up the spoon first.

Taste it. Then decide.

— KIMIAS