Deepak Jois · Daily Notes

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2025-12-22

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation #media

Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.)

The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest exploration of how some counterintuitive thing is actually the opposite of what you'd expect, a David Brooks meditation on character and virtue, something by Michael Lewis about how one weird guy in an office somewhere figured out a thing that nobody else noticed. And you might find yourself thinking: these are the same books. Spiritually, structurally, thematically identical to the books these same men were writing in 2008. In 2003. In some cases, in 1997.

The Gladwell formula, if you haven't encountered it, goes something like this: take a subject that seems simple, complicate it with research that seems to undermine common sense, then resolve the tension with a tidy insight that flatters the reader's intelligence while confirming something they sort of already believed. The ten thousand hours rule. The tipping point. The power of snap judgments, except actually you should think more carefully, except actually your gut is right. It's intellectual comfort food, and there's nothing inherently wrong with comfort food, but we've been eating the same meal for two decades now and the chef keeps insisting he's serving something new.

This isn't about Malcolm Gladwell specifically, though he'll appear as a recurring character.

It’s a broader problem.

Our collective intellectual culture seems to have calcified around a cohort of thinkers who achieved prominence roughly ten+ years ago and have been coasting ever since.

But I am uncomfortable with Substack as the default standard-bearer for independent thought.

The platform is funded by Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most powerful and connected venture capital firms in Silicon Valley. A16z's partners are as establishment as establishment gets: they sit on the boards of major tech companies, they socialize with senators and moguls and Donald Trump and his clan, they're regularly cited as visionary thinkers in the same airports bookstores where you find the Gladwell and Brooks titles. The idea that a platform funded by these people represents some kind of intellectual insurgency is, at minimum, in tension with the actual power dynamics at play.

I'm not suggesting there's some conspiracy here, that a16z is using Substack to promote certain viewpoints or suppress others. I don't think that's how it works, or at least it’s not how it works yet. The influence is more structural and subtle. Substack's investors want the platform to succeed, and success in the current media environment means attracting the kind of writers who can build large audiences. Large audiences, in the current environment, tend to come from a certain kind of content: culture war commentary, contrarianism that flatters particular demographics, lifestyle content for the professional class, and yes, the occasional original thinker who happens to be accessible enough to go viral.

The result is that Substack's version of independent thought looks suspiciously like the establishment thought it's supposed to be replacing, just with different political valences. Where the old establishment was center-left liberal, the Substack counter-establishment leans toward heterodox centrism that's critical of progressive excesses while being very careful not to threaten the tech industry or the investor class. Bari Weiss, one of Substack's highest-profile writers, is a perfect example. She positions herself as a brave truth-teller taking on the illiberal left, but her actual analysis rarely if ever questions the structural arrangements that benefit people in her social position. She's David Brooks in different packaging: iconoclasm that poses no threat to power, courage that risks nothing.

Indian coffee shops

India’s coffee shops are leveraging craft pastries - Coffee Intelligence #india #cafe

It's a bit nostalgic to read about Indian coffee shops where I spent a significant portion of my time before moving to Berlin.

India’s coffee market is forecast to double by 2030, with revenues from coffee shops rising at nearly twice the pace of their American counterparts – a sign of both growing affluence and an evolving urban palate. If coffee is the reason customers walk in, pastries are now the reason they stay and spend.

In wealthy economies, cafés once relied on their core product, anything ranging from a great cappuccino to an ethical supply chain or even a knack for latte art. Like in other emerging coffee markets – China for example – India skipped that era. As specialty – or at least premium – coffee leapfrogged from novelty to mainstream in major cities and even in small north Indian towns and cities, standing out required more than fresh-roasted beans and a V60 bar.

Chains like Blue Tokai helped build consumer literacy. But once a critical mass of urban Indians knew what a flat white was, the category became crowded and price-sensitive. Recent rising coffee prices also meant the premium and specialty coffee segment ran the risk of becoming too inaccessible. If everyone could serve decent coffee, differentiation had to come from elsewhere.

Enter the pastry revolution.

In a country that has leapt from instant coffee to specialty culture in a single generational stride, it is perhaps fitting that its cafés are no longer just places to drink coffee – but third spaces built to impress, taste and post.

It makes me a bit sad reading this, because it implies a cafe that exclusively focuses on providing top class coffee is not gonna make it in India. This also explains why it is extremely rare to find Indian coffee shops that serve international coffees, i.e. coffee brewed from beans across the world.

Performative Reading

The Curious Notoriety of “Performative Reading” | The New Yorker

Such an absolutist vision of individualism, however, undermines the systemic conditions that inform our relationship with the world, and ourselves. If we are to believe that the purpose of our lives is to unearth and express an authentic version of our true natures, we risk ignoring the myriad associations and forces that determine how we conceive of these premises in the first place. The philosopher Michel Foucault questioned this abiding belief that self-expression leads to liberation, advocating instead for an end to “all these forms of individuality, of subjectivity, of consciousness, of the ego, on which we have built and from which we have tried to build and to constitute knowledge.” Foucault argued that such idealism distracts the individual from grappling with, and critiquing, the power structures that lay claim to their actual freedoms—health care, reproductive rights, education, gender identity, and economic equality among them—which remain under the direction of a “biopower,” a term Foucault used to denote state and social institutions that organize and control a population.

In this view, the performative-reading phenomenon appears less like a newfangled way of calling people pretentious and more like an odious reflection of society’s increasing deprioritization of the written word. Reading a book is antithetical to scrolling; online platforms cannot replicate the slow, patient, and complex experience of reading a weighty novel. This is especially revealing because social media can replicate other art-consuming experiences for users: one could exclusively listen to music, look at visual art, or watch film clips via TikTok or Instagram and reasonably (if not depressingly) claim to have a relationship with these mediums—authentic relationships, fostered with the help of an app. The only way that an internet mind can understand a person reading a certain kind of book in public is through the prism of how it would appear on a feed: as a grotesquely performative posture, a false and self-flattering manipulation, or a desperate attempt to attract a romantic partner.

“Reading requires sitting alone, by yourself, in a quiet room,” he said in a 2003 interview. “I have friends, intelligent friends, who don’t like to read because they get—it’s not just bored. There’s an almost dread that comes up.” If our screens are adept at anything, it’s allaying this dread, convincing us to scroll until the loneliness goes away. Perhaps the performative reader is doing just that—performing, wielding a book for a perpetual, undying audience. Or maybe they’re leaning into the dread that Wallace spoke of, hoping to discover who they really are once the curtains close.

2025-12-18

The performative male

When did everything (and everyone) become so ‘performative’? | Dazed

This article is about "performativity" in general, but imo the best parts of it are a slick breakdown of the performative male.

The word “performative” has been thrown around in 2025, mostly to describe the “performative male”. The archetype of a performative male is a tote-bag-carrying, matcha-drinking, All About Love-reading man who curates his behaviours to attract women, using more “feminine” interests to lure them into a false sense of security. Appearing to look “not like other guys” while simultaneously acting exactly like other guys is an unfortunately common occurrence in heterosexual dating. Online, the idea of performative men took on a life of its own – there are performative male final boss starter packs, videos of men “performatively” reading and even performative male lookalike contests.

…

To understand how everything and everyone became “performative”, let us first track the emergence of the performative man. Dr Rauchberg says the performative male trend was a splintering of last year’s celebrity look-alike contests. Most of these look-alike contests centred around male celebrities, like Timothee Chalamet. As these contests grew in popularity and were replicated, they sparked a larger conversation around how masculinity is enacted. She calls performative men the “Gen Z hipsters”, sipping matcha lattes and reading dog-eared feminist paperbacks instead of falling into the violent confines of the manosphere. “When the only media representations you see either fault you (men are bad!) or push you into warped misogyny, the performative male is an ironic, playful response that pushes back at weaponised misogyny in media,” she says.

Thin and Thick Desires

Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life

The business model of most consumer technology is to identify some thick desire, find the part of it that produces a neurological reward, and then deliver that reward without the rest of the package.

Social media gives you the feeling of social connection without the obligations of actual friendship.

Pornography gives you sexual satisfaction without the vulnerability of partnership.

Productivity apps give you the feeling of accomplishment without anything being accomplished.

In each case, the thin version is easier to deliver at scale, easier to monetize, and easier to make addictive.

The result is a diet of pure sensation.

And none of it seems to be making anyone happier.

The thick life doesn't scale.

That's the whole point.

So: bake bread.

The yeast doesn't care about your schedule.

The dough will rise when it rises, indifferent to your optimization.

You'll spend an afternoon doing something that cannot be made faster, producing something that you could have bought for four dollars, and in the process you'll recover some capacity for patience that the attention economy has been methodically stripping away.

Write a letter, by hand, on paper.

Send it through the mail.

The letter will take days to arrive and you won't be able to unsend it or edit it or track whether it was opened.

You're creating a communication that exists outside the logic of engagement metrics, a small artifact that refuses to be optimized.

Code a tool for exactly one person.

Solve your friend's specific problem with their specific workflow.

Build something that will never scale, never be monetized, never attract users.

The entire economy of software assumes that code should serve millions to justify its existence.

Making something for an audience of one is a beautiful heresy.

None of this will reverse the great thinning.

But I've started to suspect that the thick life might be worth pursuing anyway, on its own terms, without needing to become a movement.

2025-12-15

M.F. Husain Museum in Qatar

India’s best-known artist gets his own museum—in Qatar

Although he died 14 years ago, aged 95, M.F. Husain is India’s best-known modern artist. He recently became its most expensive, too: earlier this year one of his works sold at auction for $13.8m, a new record for an Indian painter. The opening of Lawh wa Qalam (The Canvas and the Pen) in Qatar adds one more item to Husain’s list of achievements, for it is the first museum outside India dedicated to a single Indian artist.

Why is the museum in Doha and not, say, Pandharpur, the town of Husain’s birth? The artist, who was Muslim, fell foul of Hindu nationalists, who claimed to be offended by his frequent depiction of Hindu goddesses in the nude. By the mid-2000s the harassment had become intolerable: death threats, vandalism of his artwork, an attack on his home by Hindu militants and an estimated 900 legal cases registered against him. He left India in 2006 and never returned, living between Dubai, Doha and London. “It is a sad day for India,” the editor of the Hindu, a newspaper, wrote at the time.

Mubi Podcast with creator of Jiro Dreams of Sushi

JIRO DREAMS OF SUSHI... and David Gelb changes how people eat it

David Gelb changed how the world looked at food documentaries. I watched Jiro Dreams of Sushi not too long after it first came out. Over the years, I have also followed the numerous food documentaries (including Gelb's Chef's Table and it's various spinoffs and knockoffs) define an entire genre of documentary film-making.

This podcast was a nostalgic trip down memory lane and had some interesting insights on how the whole phenomenon began.

2025-12-12

Gyms in airports

The first study quoted in this post had 12 participants. They were all in their 20s.

Enough said! 🤷🏽‍♂️

#gym #airport

2025-12-11

Berluti Knot

Recently switched to this knot from the Parisian knot, and I am super happy with it 😊!

2025-12-10

MCP donated to Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF under the Linux Foundation

Donating the Model Context Protocol and establishing the Agentic AI Foundation \ Anthropic

The comments on the HN Post are brutal, and I suspect accurate.

Anthropic wants to ditch MCP and not be on the hook for it in the future -- but lots of enterprises haven't realized its a dumb, vibe coded standard that is missing so much. They need to hand the hot potato off to someone else.

MCP is overly complicated. I'd rather use something like https://utcp.io/

This sounds more like anthropic giving up on mcp than it does a good faith donation to open source.

Anthropic will move onto bigger projects and other teams/companies will be stuck with sunk cost fallacy to try and get mcp to work for them.

Good luck to everyone.

tbf I do believe MCP has its uses. It just hasnt lived up to its hype yet and it's complicated to implement in a remote scenario. Moreover, for local MCPs using stdio, you might as well use regular tool calls instead

The Best Philosophy Lectures

The Best Philosophy Lectures on YouTube

Great to see Ellie Anderson on there. She is one of my favorite philosophy YouTubers.

On Brainrot

On Brainrot #europe #twitter #misinformation

The conservative commentator Erick-Woods Erickson observed on his Substack this week that Twitter has now convinced large swaths of the American right that Europe has been completely overrun by Muslims, that the United Kingdom is on the verge of becoming an Islamic nation, and that Sweden has fallen.

But reality tells an entirely different story. Muslims make up less than eight percent of Sweden's population. Non-natives account for less than thirteen percent of Germany. There are problems, certainly, real ones that deserve serious attention, but the online discourse had inflated them into an existential civilizational collapse that simply isn't happening at the imagined (and much tweeted about) scale.

Erickson's broader point is about what - precisely - has happened to our discourse and our decision-making. The Trump administration, he argues, has been captured by people whose entire education, whose entire worldview, whose entire paradigm of reality itself has been gleaned from Twitter.

Erickson and I would likely disagree on 90% of the issues that come up on his podcast. But I think he's 100% on the money when it comes to this - our current epistemic disaster. He is quite accurately describing a phenomenon that has metastasized across the entire information ecosystem, across all political orientations, across geographic boundaries and cultural contexts.

We've entered the era of "brainrot" - though the term itself feels almost too glib // flippant for the scale of our cognitive and cultural crash out. Somewhere in the last decade and a half, something fundamental broke in how human beings process information, form beliefs, and engage with reality. We became a global fragmentation of doom scrolling, context-lacking, uncurious, blindly accepting, regurgitating masses.

2025-12-04

The 2025 archetype gift guide

Dazed has a very interesting set of gift guides - broken down by archetypes. Here are my personal favorites

The 2025 archetype gift guide: The Performative Male | Dazed (their Matcha starter kit and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stickers make this my top pick! 🙃)
The 2025 archetype gift guide: The Offline Luddite | Dazed
The 2025 archetype gift guide: The Protein Guerilla | Dazed

2025-12-02

The Cost of Living

I was sitting in a Copenhagen cafe (Original Coffee Istegade to be exact) and they had a stack of Kinfolk magazines. I wanted to stay off any screens so I just started reading all the back issues one by one and stayed for the entire day.

This article especially caught my attention: The Cost of Living - Kinfolk

It's paywalled online and not availble in full. But here is a lovely quote from it.

The essential problem is much the same now as it was then: What we think we want, and what actually makes us happy are, in the end, not the same things. Thoreau’s solution is surprisingly practical and has the tone of an economics lecture rather than the pulpit. “The cost of a thing,” he writes, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.”

When we devote ourselves to our jobs and push ourselves to acquire the outward signs of success, we often vastly under-estimate the amount of “life-cost” we will pay to attain our goals. Once awoken to this cost, Thoreau saw it everywhere: the effort made to dress elegantly, curry favor among neighbors and business associates, the fear of insolvency. At one point he notes that most of his neighbors would rather appear in public with a broken leg than with patched trousers (“distressed” garments had yet to come into fashion).

"life-cost" is such an amazing concept.

The Philosophical Stance Against Having Children

The Growing Anti-Natalist Movement in Japan – SAPIENS

Many critics paint anti-natalism as a movement rejecting generational continuity and its followers as selfish, short-sighted, and nihilistic. Critiques of childlessness in general have only grown in tandem with rising pronatalist policies across the globe. Current U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, in a 2019 speech at a The American Conservative gala, implied the childless are “sociopaths” unmoored from the well-being of their “communities,” “families,” and “country.” Others have described them as “hedonists” chasing a life of pleasure. Philosopher Ben Ware compared anti-natalism to the folly of techno-utopianism for believing that it has found the solution to worldly suffering.

These critiques are unfair and either wholly inaccurate or overly simplified. Anti-natalists have a wide range of motivations, often related to the broader social, political, and economic circumstances that shape their understandings of reproductive choice, parenthood, and the future. Anti-natalist movements around the globe do not always agree with one another or share the same concerns.

2025-11-30

Career Minimalism

Career Minimalism: The Gen-Z Trend Rewriting Work-Life Balance | The Everygirl

“Career minimalism” is a growing workplace phenomenon that many Gen Z professionals are embracing in favor of sustainability, characterized by stable day jobs that offer healthy boundaries and a sense of stability, rather than a nonstop hustle.

Those who practice “career minimalism” don’t center their identities around their work, meaning they pursue passions, hobbies, and other interests outside of their day job for a more well-rounded identity. Essentially, their careers are a minor part of their lives and who they are, so they have more time and space to pursue other things that matter to them.

Some Gen Zers are leaning into another recent trend, “conscious unbossing”—the intentional decision to reject traditional leadership roles. While jobs in middle management may have previously been necessary stepping stones for forward career trajectories, Gen Z workers have had a front-row seat in witnessing their parents and their own direct managers burn out. Additionally, they’re considering whether they have the desire and skills to step into a management role, while weighing these factors against the level of anticipated stress.

These observations and shifts are leading to a collective feeling that what lies beyond working yourself to the bone (more money, more pressure) isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. For many, the rewards aren’t worth the chase, and practicing “career minimalism” helps them set these boundaries.

2025-11-29

Train Dreams

This was a visually stunning movie, with occasional thought-provoking dialogue from its wide cast of interesting character.

Some interesting dialogue (from the transcript):

Ain’t there any place in this world a man can get some peace?

[narrator] Those were the only words Grainier ever heard the man say. They remained with him always.

The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.

This valley is special. Used to all be under a glacier, you know? Three thousand feet of ice. When it broke, it just flooded the whole region. Carved out all these valleys. That’s where all those lakes come from. Can you imagine if you were back here then? This big block of ice, thousands of feet tall, and just the cracks and the freezing-cold water. It must have felt like the world was coming to an end. [Robert] Hmm. That’s where all those myths come from, you know? All those flood stories. All those different religions all over the world. It’s just the same story, different slants. Hey, I didn’t mean to be disrespectful to anything you believe or anything like that. I just, you know… No, no, no. I just find it fascinating. Can’t help it when I’m in a place like this. It’s just… [tender music playing] The world’s an old place. Yeah. Probably nothing it hasn’t seen by now.

Yeah. I lost my husband too, a little over a year ago. It took him a long time. And when it was over, it was like there was a… a hole in the world. I had more questions than answers, like no human had ever died before. [scoffs] When you go through something like that, nothing you do is crazy. You just go through what you go through.

In the forest, every least thing’s important. It’s all threaded together, so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins if you really look at it. The little insects you can’t even see, they play a role as vital as the river. [exhales sharply] The dead tree is as important as the living one. There must be something for us to learn from that. What if you got nothing left to give? Hmm? What then? Mmm… The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit. [Robert chuckles] [breathing shakily] [voice breaking] Yeah. Yeah. Is that what I am? A hermit? Well, I mean, I believe we both are, in our own ways. Just waiting to see what we’ve been left here for.

"no shoes" startups

I feel like I should put this as one of the criteria for companies I would love to work for, Might even turn out to be a good filter otherwise 🤷🏽‍♂️

2025-11-28

Breaking the long hiatus brought about by work travel, illness etc.

Oliver Burkeman on Interestingness

The Imperfectionist: Interest is everything

Perhaps the reason the idea of an “interesting” life feels like a cop-out – compared to, say, a wildly successful or influential or joyful one – is that it lacks any sense of domination or conquest. We want to feel as though we were handed the challenge of a human lifetime and that we nailed it, that we grappled with the problem and solved it. Whereas to follow the lead of interestingness is to accept that life isn’t a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had. And that engaging with it as fully as possible, connecting to the aliveness, is its ultimate point.

…“There’s a specific exhaustion,” observes the artist Dipa Halder, “that comes from constantly shape-shifting to fit what you think people want. I call it type 2 burnout. You’re not overworked, you’re just working against your own grain.”…

This is a very insightful point about AI

And by the way: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that interestingness is the very thing I feel falling away whenever I discover, or begin to suspect, that something I’m reading or watching was generated by artificial intelligence. It might continue to be impressive, or informative, but the flame that kept me fascinated sputters and dies. Which speaks to my point about the pursuit of your interests sparking the interest of others: once I realize the person who created the work wasn’t sufficiently interested to engage with it every step of the way, I can’t summon interest in the result, either. (And the AI certainly wasn’t interested in what it was producing; if there’s one human quality definitively lacking in an LLM, it’s the capacity to be interested in anything at all.)

2025-11-17

Summary of Four Thousand Weeks

Four Thousand Weeks #burkeman #books

Oliver Burkeman's Four Thousand Weeks is one of the most influential books I have read in the last few months. This is a good summary that will hopefully encourage more folks to read the book.

Productivity is a trap: total control and work-life balance are illusions.
Embrace your finite life instead of fighting it: accept missing out and find meaning in choices.
Learn to be a good procrastinator: consciously delay distractions and focus on top priorities.
The efficiency trap and convenience culture: increased efficiency leads to more demands; choose what matters.
Attention is your real life: treat attention as sacred and resist distraction.
Radical incrementalism and “stay on the bus”: make meaningful work a small, sustainable daily habit.
Cosmic insignificance therapy: accept you won’t change the universe and find meaning in ordinary acts.
Do the next most necessary thing: focus on the immediate next step without a perfect plan.

2025-11-14

Corporate Nihilism

What will bring ambition back from the dead? - Two by Two by The Ken #workplace

“Nothing about work fazes me anymore. Absolutely nothing,” said a senior executive at a consumer-tech company who’s in his early forties. His financial comfort means: “Anything can happen and I don’t bat an eyelid. And I can’t remember ever feeling this way.”

He didn’t say that to me, though.

That quote is from Arundhati Ramanathan’s workplace vibe-shift story from just over two weeks ago, “Indian tech companies are spawning an ‘ambitionless’ generation.”

Arundhati called the prevailing mood “corporate nihilism.”

LinkedIn Meme

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Manifesting this in life.

Found via: Beast Land and Christiancore - After School by Casey Lewis

2025-11-13

Harsh realities of getting older

8 harsh realities about getting older that no one warns you about until it’s too late | Scandinavia Standard #aging #wisdom

Time starts moving faster… and it never slows back down
Friends drift away, even the ones you thought were permanent
Your body ages faster internally than externally
You become more selective with your energy — sometimes to the point of loneliness
You realize your parents are aging too — and much faster than you expected
Your priorities change, often without your permission
You become painfully aware of how few things are truly in your control
You realize you don’t get a “second draft” of your life

This is the heaviest reality of all — and the most motivating.

There comes a point where you recognize that life is not a rehearsal. The choices you’ve made are real. The seasons you’ve lived through won’t return. The opportunities you missed don’t come back around.

But this realization isn’t meant to be depressing. It’s clarifying.

It pushes you to stop waiting for “later.” It forces you to stop living on autopilot. It encourages you to make decisions you’ve been avoiding.

Because once you accept that there’s no reset button, you start living more intentionally.

2025-11-11

Psychology of Craft

One of the imperatives in contemporary, professional work culture is to “grow.” There is often a sense of height or largeness with that imperative, as if growth must be measured in your distance up the ladder, your territory across the way. In The Soul’s Code, James Hillman implores us to think rather of growing down, of growth not of branch but root, of becoming more grounded, sturdier, less able to be pushed around by the whims of others.

The question I hear is, what does it mean to see our work as craft rather than as growth? What are we shaping, handling, or doing something with? The metaphor of growth is one of hunger, consumption, acquisition—to acquire more pips on your collar, more titles after your name, more people under your domain. But craft asks instead, what are you doing? What reality comes into being with your shaping and working? What is in your hands and in your heart?

2025-11-10

Don't take the bait

Don't Take The Bait - by Jasmine Sun - @jasmi.news #ai #hype

What we’re seeing is the Donald Trump school of tech marketing: Be as provocative as possible, then let others’ moral outrage propel you into prominence. It’s an iron law of social climbing—irrelevant people desperately want to be relevant and will say crazy shit to make it happen. There are copious financial rewards for whoever excels. As performance art, I can even respect it.

Or if you must, go test these people’s most outlandish claims. If someone says they work on agents, ask if they personally let AI book their flights. (I’ve never gotten a yes.)

Touching grass is the other antidote to taking the bait. Go connect with real living people and real life experiences. When you’re deep in conversation you won’t even notice the dumb subway ads. I had drinks with my friend nikhil last week at a cozy East Village sake bar, where he told me about reading all this online fear-mongering about the death of partying and literacy and democratic trust, then looking up and seeing New Yorkers booking out the Metrograph and knocking doors for Zohran and turning the NYC marathon into an ecstatic 26-mile block party. And when you see everyone outside, talking and laughing and falling in love, the world no longer looks so grim.

Notes From an Unemployed New Grad Watching the Job Market Break

Work, After Work: Notes From an Unemployed New Grad Watching the Job Market Break #ai #jobs

On the official dashboards unemployment is still low, which is what older people tend to quote back at you. From the ground the thing feels different. The postings are there, the interview loops still exist, recruiters still send polite rejections. It is the density of opportunity that has changed. There are more people stacked against fewer real openings, and the default advice of “just apply to more places” lands differently when you know you are running through the same funnel as thousands of other people who also did everything right.

I do not know how many jobs will exist in twenty years, or whether my own work will sit far enough into the tail of the distribution to matter. I will certainly try to become an out of distribution human by doing a lot of different things, and by refusing to live entirely in the centre of the curve but if your entire life plan rests on being a respectable, central case worker, doing a standard job in a standard company, I think you should at least stare straight at how much effort is going into eroding that category. If your politics rest on the idea that everyone will work full time and find dignity there, you should stare at it too. The twentieth century spent a lot of intellectual and moral effort glorifying labour because economies needed people to show up every day. The twenty-first century is starting to build machines and systems that do not need quite as many of us.

2025-11-08

The rise of singlehood is reshaping the world

The rise of singlehood is reshaping the world #relationships

For most of human history, coupling up was not merely a norm; it was a necessity. Before reliable contraception, women could not control their fertility, and most were far too poor to raise children alone. Hence the centuries-old convention that, whereas a tragic play or saga ends in death, a happy one ends in marriage.

So the speed with which the norm of marriage—indeed, of relationships of any sort—is being abandoned is startling. Throughout the rich world, singlehood is on the rise. Among Americans aged 25-34, the proportion living without a spouse or partner has doubled in five decades, to 50% for men and 41% for women. Since 2010, the share of people living alone has risen in 26 out of 30 rich countries. By The Economist’s calculation, the world has at least 100m more single people today than if coupling rates were still as high as in 2017. A great relationship recession is under way.

The Economist has some great articles about the relationship recession this week.

2025-11-07

AI as leverage

What’s really going on with AI and jobs? #jobs #ai

As readers of BITM will know, much of the job loss from AI has thus far seems to have unfolded in cases like this, where “AI” is deployed not so much as a technology functionally capable of replacing human labor in toto, but as a logic and an ideological justification for management’s ulterior goals. Where management wants to cut labor costs a la Amazon, shift to cheaper contract labor a la Klarna, or execute layoffs for ideological reasons, a la DOGE, “AI” is an extremely potent justification. Some business professors and analysts have taken to calling this practice “AI-washing.” If Amazon is firing 30,000 workers because its technology is so cutting edge that its AI systems can ably replace them, investors will be a lot happier than if Amazon is cutting costs because, say, it’s over-leveraging itself on data center expansion or its worried about earnings.

In short, it’s still pretty hard to say whether these kinds of job losses will be permanent, whether firms will have to rehire the workers it shed if and when the AI tools management is touting don’t pan out, and so on. After all, it’s only been a couple months since a major MIT report found that 95% of companies that invested in generative AI did not profit at all from the investment. (The paper found that enterprise grade AI systems “fail due to brittle workflows, lack of contextual learning, and misalignment with day-to-day operations.”) What is clear is that AI is regardless a powerful way for bosses to exert leverage over workers, depress wages, and effect layoffs.

This, as BITM readers might notice, generally aligns with my read of what’s happening as well. As the MIT study and Chiu’s work both highlight, generative AI is not reliable enough when it comes executing complex tasks to enable most organizations to displace jobs at scale, and it certainly can’t do jobs that require empathy or hands-on problem-solving. What it can do is automate the production of work that need not be “reliable” or “accurate,” but that employers might find “good enough.” Precisely the way many corporate executives already conceive of creative work, in other words. And it can inspire overzealous executives, or managers who wanted to induce layoffs or cost-cutting anyway, to pull the trigger.

In sum, and not to just end here having confirmed my priors, the answer to the lead-off question “what the hell is happening with AI and jobs?” is the deeply unsatisfactory “management is using it in various ways, both as a buzzy ideological framework and an actual automation technology, to achieve various ends, including but far from limited to job replacement.”

Shanghai's Coffee Culture

Why Shanghai Is the World’s Most Compelling Coffee City Right Now - Bloomberg #china

But on a recent trip to Shanghai, I experienced an even greater surprise: a world class coffee scene. My jet lag never stood a chance in the face of the caffeine tsunami I stepped into. As of 2024 the city had a whopping 9,115 coffee shops—including more Starbucks locations than any other city—as reported by Dao Insights, a publication by the China-focused digital creative agency Qumin.

But Shanghai’s coffee scene isn’t just defined by quantity; it courses with style, creativity and quality. Coffee here is presented both seriously—George Jinyang Peng, owner of the Captain George Flavor Museum coffee shop, just won the World Brewers Cup championship—and as a vehicle for eccentric but photogenic flights of fancy.

Inside Cursor

Inside Cursor - Colossus

At Cursor, even the chef is high-agency.

Linguistic meme alert

When I asked co-founder Sualeh Asif what he’s most concerned about when it comes to company-building, he responded, “People start talking about the weather at meals.” I haven’t seen any evidence he has much to worry about.

Cursor interviews are known to be very difficult for candidates, particularly the coding challenges. When I asked the team about this, they insisted that “it’s hard to show off how good you are on something too easy,” and that they were “willing to accept false negatives to avoid false positives.”

This trope about accepting false negatives exists since the dawn of tech interviewing, so I feel a bit sad to see it here again.

All in all, I love the energy in the article but it reads a bit like a propaganda piece tbh.

2025-11-06

GenZ loneliness and Mamdani's Rise

A Little-Noted Element Propelled Mamdani’s Rise: Gen Z Loneliness

Oh boy!

Members of Gen Z found something unexpected in the mayoral race: a chance to hang out. Their enthusiasm turned into real votes.

The future of work is still human powered

From the latest issue of the Working It newsletter from FT

Marcus Collins, however, takes a different view. “I think we have overemphasised the importance of technology in the future of work,” the Michigan Ross School of Business professor and marketing expert told me on the sidelines of a conference in London this week. “I liken it to [the media theorist] Marshall McLuhan’s argument that technology is merely the extension of human behaviour.” 📺 (It’s been a long time since I’ve heard anyone bring up McLuhan — I welcome his return!)

And Marcus went on: “If we are to explore and understand the future of work, we have first to explore and understand the future of humanity. I would argue that the future of work is actually cultural, not technological. The technology is merely an extension of how we operate, who we are.”

He is the author of For The Culture, a marketing-focused book about understanding culture and its impacts. When it comes to our workplaces, Marcus said, we now have to decide if we value people for our shared humanity 🫶🏾 — or as a means to an end, when “our cultural perspective is that people are cogs in a machine to get some economic output that we are looking for”. The mass lay-offs we are seeing now, for example, are a sign, he suggested, that “these people do not matter”.

During this time of transformation, “the technology can be used to aid our humanity, or it can be used to, unfortunately, underscore the worst parts of our humanity. The technology doesn’t have an opinion. It is what it is and it’s value neutral. It’s really about the meaning we imbue it with, and ultimately how it extends our perception of what reality is.”

Socrate on the barrenness of a busy life

Socrates on the barrenness of a busy life - Postanly Weekly

Busyness goes way back in time. Two millennia ago, the ancient philosopher Socrates warned us to question the purpose of our constant activity. He thought the potential hollowness it might conceal was too significant to ignore. “Beware the barrenness of a busy life,” he said. It still makes sense even now. He also said, “It is possible that a man could live twice as long if he didn’t spend the first half of his life acquiring habits that shortens the other half.” But to understand Socrates’ perspective, let’s look back to the bustling marketplace of ancient Athens.

It was a vibrant hub of commerce, politics, and philosophy. It thrived on social gatherings, debates, and public events. Socrates saw many citizens consumed by the pursuit of wealth, power, and pleasure, neglecting the true purpose of life — the pursuit of wisdom and self-knowledge to live well. He thought they were cultivating a barren orchard in their relentless busyness.

Now, fast forward to our 21st-century world. Socrates’ wisdom resonates louder than ever. Task and responsibility fatigue are growing concerns. We juggle careers, families, social obligations, and personal pursuits, often feeling overwhelmed and exhausted. The “always on” mindset is draining us.

Work expands into every part of our lives, turning nights into extensions of the day. We check emails during dinner and work late into the night. Every day is full of activity, but are we truly living? Just as Socrates cautioned the Athenians against mistaking mere movement for meaningful action, we must pause and examine the “fruits” of our frantic pace.

Found a great Medium article linked to the post above: If You Subtract Work From Your Life, Would You Still Know What to Do With Yourself? | by Thomas Oppong | Personal Growth | Oct, 2025 | Medium

Before you go, remember this. You don’t need to quit your job to find yourself. You just need to stop confusing “busy” with “alive.” Work can be part of your life, but it’s not your whole life. You’re allowed to do things that don’t involve deliverables or deadlines.

Existentialist Sartre was right.

“Existence precedes essence.”

You existed before the hustle. If you subtract work and find yourself restless, take that as a signal. It means your life’s muscle for wonder is being neglected. You just need to use it again. One day, the work will stop, by choice or by force. And when it does, I hope you’ve built a life you can face. Ask yourself now, while you still can. If you weren’t working, who would you be? And then, start becoming that person, before you run out of time pretending to be someone else.

Literary Angst

‘It’s not just a book, it’s a window to my soul’: why we’re in love with literary angst | Books | The Guardian

The stories, ripe with what Harrison calls “existential dread” and – no spoilers – with little prospect of a happy ending, are not obvious bestseller material. So what has happened? One answer is that our reading reflects our times, and we live in turbulent times. Madonna in a Fur Coat is a tale of passion set against the economic turmoil of the 1920s: why would it not appeal to readers living through the economic turmoil of the 2020s?

These books were, says Harrison, “written in times of change or moments of flux. They’re about, how do you live your life when the world around you is changing, and the things you thought you knew are no longer true?” In White Nights, each of the near-lovers is dealing with the loss of someone they loved – or thought they did.

There are of course other authors with similar qualities, so what drew these particular books to such a wide readership? The answer lies in the medium as well as the message. Dostoevsky and Ali have both enjoyed a frenzy of attention on social media, and TikTok in particular.

According to TikTok users, White Nights is “the most relatable love story I’ve ever read”, a book that “will follow you for the rest of your life”. Madonna is “devastating”, it’s “not just a book … it’s a window to my soul”.

The fact that these books are, in some senses, pretty bleak does not diminish their appeal. It may even enhance it. “I think of that James Baldwin quote,” Edwards adds: “‘You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.’ That’s how it feels to find yourself in these pages. Ultimately, it makes us feel less alone.”

Books Challenging Jared Diamond's Gun, Germs and Steel

BRIEFLY NOTED: Further Arguments Against Jared Diamond #anthropology

This article reviews three books that challenge or complicate Jared Diamond’s explanations for human societal development, focusing on infectious disease, human evolution, and cultural-linguistic diversity.

Here are the three books mentioned in the article along with their links:

Plagues Upon the Earth: Disease and the Course of Human History by Kyle Harper: Amazon link
The 10,000 Year Explosion: How Civilization Accelerated Human Evolution by Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending Amazon link
Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes: Life and Language in the Amazonian Jungle by Daniel Everett Amazon link

2025-11-05

From: Derek Thompson on the Anti-Social Century

Themewise breakdown:

The Antisocial Century: Decline in Face-to-Face Interaction

Derek Thompson introduces his concept of the "antisocial century," based on data from the American Time Use Survey showing a 20% decline in face-to-face socializing among all Americans and a 40-50% decline among young people over 25 years. This decline parallels Robert Putnam’s "Bowling Alone" thesis about decreasing social capital since 2000. The reduction in physical social activities, particularly partying (down 70% for young people), correlates with rising anxiety, depression, and pessimism among youth. Thompson stresses the importance of physical social interaction for mental well-being.

Internet Communication vs. In-Person Interaction

Thompson discusses how online communication differs from face-to-face interaction. Psychologist Jay Van Beville’s research shows online communication tends to be more negative, tribal (in-group/out-group dynamics), and outrage-driven. Online interactions are often broadcast rather than one-to-one, leading to more self-focused, narcissistic communication. The internet encourages multiple personas, reducing accountability and increasing toxic behavior. This contrasts with the richer, more empathetic signals available in physical presence.

AI as Therapist and Friend: Benefits and Risks

AI’s ability to deliver structured cognitive behavioral therapy and provide validation makes it a surprisingly good therapist or friend for many. However, AI tends to validate users without challenging delusions or disordered thoughts, which can worsen mental health for some. Thompson warns of a growing "narcissism engine," where AI reinforces self-centeredness by always affirming users’ perspectives. This dynamic may undermine the complexity of human relationships, which require mutual validation and occasional self-criticism.

The Social and Psychological Impact of AI Relationships

People increasingly form intimate relationships with AI, sometimes preferring AI companionship to human interaction. Thompson compares AI to a "silicon-based God," a singular personality scaled to millions of users, which is unprecedented and deeply strange. He expresses concern that AI relationships, while comforting, cannot replace the benefits of human, carbon-based social interaction evolved over millennia.

Literacy Crisis and Deep Thinking in the Age of AI

Thompson links the antisocial century to a decline in reading and writing, especially among students who increasingly rely on AI to write essays. He worries this undermines deep thinking, which depends on the practice of reading and writing. The polarization of intelligence may worsen, with some using AI to enhance thinking and others to outsource it, leading to a divide in cognitive skills.

The Changing Nature of Being Alone and Media Consumption

The quality of solitude is shifting as more time is spent consuming television-like content via social media and streaming platforms. Thompson references David Foster Wallace’s observation of people’s inability to sit quietly with their own thoughts. He notes that modern media allows mood selection but risks turning consciousness into a constant search for external stimulation, reducing inner contemplation and self-understanding.

Historical Perspective and Optimism

Thompson draws parallels to early 20th-century anxieties about technological change, such as the rise of automobiles and airplanes, which also caused social and mental health disruptions. He highlights how past societies found solutions to information overload and social change, suggesting humanity can invent social adaptations to current challenges. The period 1900-1914, covered in Philip Blom’s The Vertigo Years, exemplifies how innovation can provoke societal upheaval but also cultural and intellectual flourishing.

Final Thoughts and Book Recommendation

Thompson concludes by acknowledging his personal tension between optimism about technological progress and pessimism about its social consequences. He emphasizes the need for ongoing negotiation between human nature and technological change. He recommends The Vertigo Years 1900 to 1914 by Philip Blom as a revealing and inspiring historical study of a transformative era, drawing lessons relevant to today’s challenges.

2025-11-04

Stoicism and the manosphere

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My Shitty Life - The Drift

Critics have paid special attention to Holiday’s fans in Silicon Valley and in various online communities devoted to misogyny or racism or — usually — both. The classicist Donna Zuckerberg drew attention to this convergence in her 2018 book Not All Dead White Men, in which she argued that “the men of the manosphere have a deep fascination with Stoic philosophy.” Evidence of Stoicism’s popularity among right-wing extremists has only mounted since. The far-right influencer and alleged human trafficker Andrew Tate fashions himself a Stoic apostle; as he says in one video shared by the Instagram account @kngstoic, “you’re born to suffer, which ties back into my whole crypto project.” Holiday, for his part, has called Tate “repulsive” and suggested followers turn to Marcus Aurelius instead. Yet, as the classicist and Meditations translator Gregory Hays has noted, Stoicism thrived among elite Roman men, staunch believers in the necessity of social hierarchy, and when Holiday says things like “obeisance is the way forward,” it is not hard to imagine the dark places to which such maxims might lead.

Edible Insects

Exploring Insects as the Future of Food — GOYA

It was 2013 when the Food and Agriculture Organisation of the United Nations published a report titled ‘Edible Insects: Future Prospects of Insects as Food and Feed’. The report predicted that by 2050, the planet would be home to nine billion people. To address the food and nutrition challenges of today — nearly 1 billion people are chronically hungry worldwide — it is clear that what we eat and how we produce it must be re-evaluated.

A few months ago, popular internet personality and author, Krish Ashok (who goes by @_masalalab on Instagram and X) shared a detailed video on the concept of eating insects. In his video, he explained how the process of cooking eliminates all potential germs and parasites inside insects. Last December, at Goa’s Serendipity Arts Festival, Tansha Vohra of the Boochi Project explored the idea of insect eating by serving up weaver ants, crickets and mealworms at a food lab (below), during her session ‘Imagining Insects—Rethinking Taste, Disgust and Delight’.

A Sommelier’s Field Notes to the World of Matcha

A Sommelier’s Field Notes to the World of Matcha — GOYA

The Japanese tea tradition resists simplistic classification systems. Terms like ceremonial, imperial and culinary provide accessible entry points for consumers. Here’s a handy guide to distinguish between the three.

These classification systems are largely marketing, and to an extent simplified education for ordinary matcha consumers. For influencer obsessed matcha consumers out there who are more interested in mixing their matcha with other trendy interesting flavors, and having it with for e.g. like a milk base - it doesnt really matter if your matcha is "ceremonial" grade. So please stop obsessing over it.

Is Having a Boyfriend Embarrassing Now?

So, what gives? Are people embarrassed by their boyfriends now? Or is something more complicated going on? To me, it feels like the result of women wanting to straddle two worlds: one where they can receive the social benefits of having a partner, but also not appear so boyfriend-obsessed that they come across as quite culturally loser-ish. “They want the prize and celebration of partnership, but understand the norminess of it,” says Zoé Samudzi, writer and activist. In other words, in an era of widespread heterofatalism, women don’t want to be seen as being all about their man, but they also want the clout that comes with being partnered.

Books and Loneliness

Chapter 2: prioritize your favorite people - by Ava #friendship #loneliness #connection

This paragraph from Ava's latest was very relatable. The rest of the post is pretty awesome as well.

I read compulsively because I was so lonely. My primary experience of connection my entire childhood was through consuming fiction. I have never wavered from the habit—I’ve always believed helplessly in life on the page. It was only through digesting consciousness this way that I was able to learn how to connect with other people. Because books convinced me that there were many people out there who had very rich and interesting interior lives, even currently if I wasn’t able to access them. It wasn’t inherently a hopeless situation: I was sure that connection was out there, even if I hadn’t found it yet. So the question became: how could I find it?

Oh, and this is actually a great list

For the record, here are some things I personally really like in people:

reads a lot, ideally reads fiction. But being interested in art or movies or even talking honestly can substitute for this

curious

self-aware, or at least trying to be self-aware

astute and observant about other people

deeply moved by who and what they love

hardworking, loves what they do

interested in emotional intelligence and social dynamics

cheerful, enthusiastic disposition

dedicated friend; has at least one friendship that’s lasted 10 years

friendly and talkative, cares about your comfort over the course of the conversation

makes an effort to modulate their affect so as to not hurt those around them

appreciates nature

and most importantly:

I could easily talk to them for six hours at a time. And then do it again the next day.

2025-10-31

YouTube a bigger podcast platform than Spotify

A Billion People Are Watching Podcasts on YouTube Every Month - Bloomberg #podcasts

More than 1 billion people a month are viewing podcast content on YouTube, the result of an investment push that has made the Alphabet Inc. platform the most popular service for podcasts in the US.

Those endeavors vaulted YouTube past Spotify Technology SA, which helped define the podcasting boom when it invested more than $1 billion on acquisitions and licensing deals for popular shows. But in 2022 after investors grew weary of Spotify’s profligate spending, the music streaming company shuttered its in-house podcasting studio, reduced headcount and significantly paired back its podcasting efforts. Around the same time, YouTube began offering as much as $300,000 to podcasters to entice them to create video versions of their shows.

Last year, viewers watched more than 400 million hours of podcasts monthly on living room devices, according to YouTube. In October, Edison Research pronounced YouTube the most popular podcast platform in the US, superseding Spotify and Apple Inc.’s Podcasts app.

Spotify is also doubling down on video podcasts. It rolled out a new partner program in January that pays video creators based on consumption rather than ad revenue and has courted popular podcasters in an effort to convince them to put their shows on the service.

Kopi Luwak

The chemistry behind that pricey cup of civet coffee - Ars Technica

Technically, kopi luwak is a method of processing, not a specific coffee bean variety. Asian palm civets hang around coffee plantations because they love to feast on ripened coffee berries; the berries constitute most of their diet, along with various seeds. The consumed berries undergo fermentation as they pass through the animal’s intestines, and the civets digest the pulp and excrete the beans. Coffee farmers then collect the scat to recover the excreted beans and process and roast them to produce kopi luwak.

There have been numerous scientific studies over the last 15–20 years aimed at identifying any key differences between civet coffee and regular varieties, with mixed results. Some have noted differences in volatile compounds, protein, sugar, mineral concentrations, and caffeine levels, as well as lower acidity and bitterness, and higher levels of acetic acid and lipids.

An interesting bit about India trying to replicate this in Kodagu, a coffee growing region.

Kopi luwak is quite popular, with well-established markets in several South and East Asian countries. Its popularity has risen in Europe and the US as well, and India has recently become an emerging new market. Since there haven’t been similar studies of the chemical properties of kopi luwak from the Indian subcontinent, the authors of this latest study decided to fill that scientific gap. They focused on civet coffee produced in Kodagu, which produces nearly 36 percent of India’s total coffee production.

The authors collected 68 fresh civet scat samples from five different sites in Kodagu during peak fruit harvesting in January of this year. Collectors wore gloves to avoid contamination of the samples. For comparative analysis, they also harvested several bunches of ripened Robusta coffee berries. They washed the scat samples to remove the feces and also removed any palm seeds or other elements to ensure only Robusta beans remained.

2025-10-30

Never Ending Catchups

Are we caught in a culture of never-ending catch-ups? | Dazed #friendship #life

So relatable

‘Catch-up culture’ encapsulates the modern hamster wheel of recapping your life to friends, instead of living and growing alongside them

Michelle Elman, author of Bad Friend, uses the term catch-up culture to describe the hamster wheel of recapping your life to loved ones. “You go on these dinner dates, where you catch up with friends, but you are not experiencing life together,” she says. This may leave our friendships feeling stuck in time. “You only really pick up the meal where you left off last time, which could be months, and it almost feels stunted,” says Elman. “Your life is only ever since your last catch-up, and you aren’t talking about the bigger things in life, like your future, or the menial day-to-day.”

The shift from hangouts to scheduled check-ins is something that has always been part of transitioning into adulthood. Still, Elman believes the dissolving of group hangs, the loss of neighbourhoods and the rise of social media have all contributed to the culture of never-ending catch-ups today. “I think technology gives us the illusion that we are caught up on each other’s lives,” says Elman. And it’s true: it’s easy to use Instagram stories as conversation starters. Instead of the simple “How are you?” we’ve begun to engage in conversations with a level of presumed familiarity. By assuming that people will post updates or share them at the next catch-up session, we can lose small details that actually make many feel cared for, like how a meeting went and who you saw on a walk (or if you saw a bird).

There’s an element of catch-up culture that feeds into heteronormative ideas around the nuclear family: the idea that we should be living lives with partners, and then reporting back to our friends about it. We’re encouraged to express when we feel lonely and disconnected in a romantic setting, but platonic relationships don’t always have the same in-built expectations. Meanwhile, many of the traditional measures of being “successful” – like living alone or with a partner – tear you further and further away from living in community with friends. There’s also a pressure that comes with living within a culture of “life updates”, especially for those who are in different stages and circumstances than their peers. “My friendships were slowly turning into transactional instances of scheduling morning coffees, similar to the corporate world,” says Nicole So, a content creator in London. “It feels like I’m not growing alongside them as a person, and every time we catch up, I’m supposed to bring something new to the table.” Instead, So says she has started asking friends for a high, a low and something interesting they’ve done or learned recently. “I feel like it’s made my friendships more real and deeper,” she says.

Fighting against catch-up culture isn’t easy because it involves challenging every element of what’s considered “productive” adulthood, where work, personal development and romantic relationships often take priority, while “unproductive” hours lounging around with friends fall by the wayside. It also may involve confronting our addiction to instant, Instagrammable gratification: a quick photo of dinner and the most outrageous story we can leave with. “If you have only a shorter period of time, you find quicker information more interesting,” says Mae. “In our day-to-day lives, it’s how fast-paced culture sneaks up on us.” It’s only after the big catch-up, once the major updates have settled, that we get into the minutia of actually intimate conversations.

Technology just makes our life faster, not easier or happier

An open letter to all those building AI in 2025 #ai #technology #happiness #benefits

Furthermore, our technology doesn’t fundamentally make our lives easier from an economic standpoint. Rather, it mostly just makes our lives faster. Technology is an accelerant, not a relaxant. That’s because, whenever a new affordance is unlocked, we are pushed into weaponising it within the competitive landscape of capitalism. The new tool doesn’t bring new leisure. Rather, it simply becomes a new thing that each of us must now have to continue surviving in a - now intensified - market struggle against others.

Long gone are the days when the Internet was a fun novelty that we could choose to use or not. We don’t experience childlike joy each morning when we see it up and running, but we certainly panic if it’s down. That’s because the Internet has sunk into the foundations of our life as infrastructure, without which we are now disabled. It doesn’t guarantee security, or - in itself - make any of us joyful or empowered. Having the Internet, or electricity, or a smartphone, simply means each of us gets to fight another day, and to not be left behind by all the others trying to claw their way to illusory security in an ever-changing market.

All our technology doesn’t make us collectively thrive, relax, or live in abundance. If that were the case, we’d be the most peaceful and chilled out generation in history, without poverty or stress. But we all know that’s not the case.

You have to do the living yourself

The Imperfectionist: You have to do the living yourself

From Oliver Burkeman's latest:

building a meaningful life is much less about discovering the right set of practices or habits than it is about cultivating the willingness to step up moment after moment and just do more of the things that matter, for the projects and people and causes you care about most.

And yet… No matter how many guardrails for good behaviour you erect, however much you stack things in your favour, in each moment, it’s still you showing up for your life. And there seems to be something crucial about owning that fact – about actively committing and recommitting, again and again, to going in the direction you want to travel, instead of acting as a spectator to your life, watching to see whether the systems you’ve put in place perform as you’d hoped they would or not.

Hope is a discipline

“Hope doesn’t preclude feeling sadness or frustration or anger or any other emotion that makes total sense. Hope isn’t an emotion, you know? Hope is not optimism. Hope is a discipline… we have to practice it every single day.” — Mariame Kaba

2025-10-28

AI in perf reviews

From Matt Levine's latest newsletter.

On the other hand:

JPMorgan Chase has given employees the option to use its in-house artificial intelligence system to help write year-end performance reviews, underscoring how AI-generated text is proliferating in corporate America.

The tool allows employees to use the US bank’s large language model to generate a review based on prompts they give it, according to people familiar with the matter.

It is a shortcut to the often painstaking process of writing multiple reviews that are typically required by large companies.

Ahahaha. Obviously, yes, writing year-end performance reviews is perhaps the best-known example of intellectual drudgery in white-collar employment. Letting an AI do it is a strict improvement for the people writing the reviews. Then one assumes that the reviews are also read by AIs, and increasingly people’s salaries and job security will be set by AIs talking to AIs rather than by human beings. Still that’s a tradeoff a lot of people would take if it means not writing performance reviews.

Forerunner to modern manga

Ehon Mizu Ya Sora: A Forerunner of Modern Manga, 1780 - Flashbak #manga #japanese #illustrations

These illustrations appear in Ehon mizu ya sora (“Picture Book of Water and Sky”). Published in 1780 and illustrated by the Osaka artist known as Nichōsai (c. 1751-1803), the Japanese book caricatures famous kabuki actors (yakusha-e) from Osaka, Kyoto and Edo (Tokyo). The images are in a minimalist and humorous manner exemplary of the ‘toba-e’ style, a forerunner of modern manga.

Porcelain Handbags

Freshly Unlocked: Porcelain Handbags? A Tale of Two Cultures and One Bold Career Leap

Unemployment gave Loquineau the push she needed to retrain. She enrolled at a lycée professionnel (vocational high school) for two years of ceramics studies.

“People in France often look down on practical [crafts] courses,” she says, “but it’s the best teaching I’ve ever experienced.”

Loquineau nailed her vision with her first design project: a porcelain handbag. Bringing it to life took much longer, with many china bags shattered to smithereens along the way. The next iteration involved stitching the seams in leather to make the bags sturdier. Then, during a creative residency this past spring in Jingdezhen, China—the world’s porcelain capital—she began to make bags from 100-percent porcelain.

Although many of the imperial factories in Jingdezhen closed in the 1900s, particularly under Mao (1949–54), craftspeople still have workshops all over town. For Loquineau, the Chinese designs of her bags are a way of fusing her two heritages, and finding a sense of belonging. And at last, her parents are proud, too, she says.

Inspiration for the day

quit brainrot. unfollow trolls. read essays. go down rabbit holes. have a calendar. maintain a todo list. read old books. watch old movies. turn on dnd. walk with intent. eat without youtube. chew more. train without music. plan for 15 mins. execute. organise your desk. take something seriously. read ancient scripts. act fast. find bread. eat clean. journal. save a life. learn to code. read poetry. create art. stay composed. refine your speech. optimise for efficiency. act sincere. help people. be kind. stop doing things that waste your time. follow your intuition. craft reputation. learn persuasion. systemise your day (or don’t). write. write. write. write more. iterate violently. leave your phone at home. walk to the grocery store. talk to strangers. feed the dogs. visit bookstores. look for 1800s novels. experience art. then love. sit with a monk and offer them lunch. don't talk shit about people. embody virtue. sit alone. do something with your life. what do you want to create? turn off your mind. play. play a sport. combat sports. notice fonts in trees. fall in love. notice patterns on a table. visualise it. talk to people with respect. don't hate. be loving. be real. become yourself. cherrypick your qualities. discard the useless. rejections aren't permanent. invite what aligns. accept what does not. read great people. be different. choose different. do great work. let it consume you. lose your mind. value your time. experience life.

From:

Why does hand-holding now feel more intimate than sex?

Why does hand-holding now feel more intimate than sex? | Dazed #relationships zz

This chimes with Dr Natasha McKeever, a lecturer in applied ethics at the University of Leeds and co-director of the university’s Centre for Love, Sex, and Relationships. She explains that “holding hands [now] seems to express or symbolise a higher degree of intimacy than sex does [...] I would guess that some people in monogamous relationships would find it more hurtful if they saw their partner holding hands with someone else than if they saw them having sex with someone else.” She ascribes this attitude to the rise in ‘situationship culture’: “Young people are now more reluctant to commit to another person, and holding hands tends to symbolise commitment.”

It’s unsurprising that young people are increasingly afraid of commitment, given that the explosion of social media has robbed us of the ability to keep things private, leaving many of us with the nagging sense that we’re being constantly “perceived” – and consequently unwilling to take potentially humiliating risks. “Expressing genuine interest or desire for connection is frequently seen as risky or embarrassing, while appearing detached or indifferent is a way to maintain control,” Dr Jenny van Hooff, a sociologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, told Dazed earlier this year. “Emotions become bargaining chips: whoever shows less feeling holds more power.”

Pure and Impure Programming

Pure and impure software engineering #programming #craft

There are two very different kinds of programming work. The first kind - pure engineering - is interested in solving a technical problem as perfectly as possible. Open-source work is often like this: some engineer wants to write the best HTTP requests library, or their ideal game engine. The second kind - impure engineering - is interested in solving a real-world problem as efficiently as possible. Paid tech company work is often like this: engineers are asked to deliver some project or feature as well as they can do it by the deadline.

In pure software engineering, what you’re doing is close to art or research. It’s close to art because the engineer is driven by an aesthetic sense (e.g. of what makes a good library or game engine). It’s close to research because it’s open-ended: once the engineer arrives at a solution, they can continue testing and tinkering forever, trying (and usually discarding) new approaches.

Impure software engineering is more like plumbing or construction. The engineer’s aesthetic sense is subordinated to someone else’s (usually their employer’s) needs. They’re building a solution to someone else’s problem. And since it’s someone else’s problem, it has to actually be finished to schedule, which means compromising.

A report on Gen Alphas

Tweenfluence: Meet Gen Alpha - After School by Casey Lewis

It’s Gen Alpha week here at After School.

Through Friday, I’m bringing you a deep dive into the minds (and piggy banks) of the youngest consumers after months of conversations with a group of charming, thoughtful kids who — from all of my additional research — reflect the generation at large.

Books on longevity research

The quest to live longer and defeat death

The FT has a good review of a bunch of books on longevity.

Super Agers: An Evidence-Based Approach to Longevity by Eric Topol Simon & Schuster £22/$32.50, 464 pages

Seven Decades: How We Evolved to Live Longer by Michael D Gurven Princeton University Press £30/$35, 536 pages

The Immortalists: The Death of Death and the Race for Eternal Life by Aleks Krotoski Bodley Head £22, 320 pages

2025-10-21

AI Coding Claims

Where's the Shovelware? Why AI Coding Claims Don't Add Up

The section on counterarguments to rebuttals that are commonly brought up by the AI-pilled folks is nice.

2025-10-20

Old and Young

Everyone under 30 is prematurely old (worried about savings, career, FIRE).

Everyone over 50 is desperately young (Burning Man, psychedelics).

My theory: Information abundance aged the young by showing them all future problems all at once.

Information abundance also made the old young by showing them all missed experiences all at once.

So now Gen Z talks like retirement planners and boomers act like teenagers.

It's so over.