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2026-04-22
Ginsberg and Gen Z
moloch and the machines - by Adam Aleksic
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by brainrot, gooning doomscrolling bedrotting,
dissociating themselves through the enshittified ragebait clickbait looking for a dopamine fix,
nonchalant doomers repressing the AI overview of the starry dynamo in the machinery of night,
who Kalshi and Rainbet and OnlyFans and Doordash sat up vaping in the ambient glow of slot-machine phones drowning in the depths of 4chan contemplating memes…
I’m not going to rewrite any more of Allen Ginsberg’s Howl because it’s already perfect. It’s impossible to read the poem without extending it to yourself and your cultural moment. We’ve all been crushed by the oppressive machinations of conformity and consumerism. What can we do but lash out in creative fury, impaling ourselves on the palisades of modernity?
Banoffee Pie
Why we’re all going bananas for banoffee pie
It's been surprisingly hard to find Banoffee pie, since I moved to Berlin. Even in Bengaluru, they were not that easy to find. The one place where I found it a lot was New Delhi.
Banoffee pie has long been a staple of home cooks, bakeries and diners. The version at Bubby’s in New York, for instance, is legendary. But with a return to comfort and familiarity in modern dining, it fits perfectly on upscale restaurant menus too. “It’s playful, nostalgic and a bit messy in the best way,” says Hawksmoor co-founder Huw Gott. “A cheeky dessert you can be sure will sell,” says Booton.
The banoffee pie was invented in 1971 by Ian Dowding, chef at The Hungry Monk restaurant in Jevington, East Sussex. It was inspired by a San Franciscan recipe known as Blum’s coffee toffee pie but using a soft toffee made from dulce de leche, condensed milk that has been boiled in the can for several hours. “Apple was quite good, mandarin was downright disgusting,” wrote Dowding of his experiments with fruit. “But the day we made it with a layer of banana, I knew I had cracked it.” He finished the pie with coffee-flavoured whipped cream made ’70s-style with instant coffee granules.
As baker Philip Khoury puts it, banoffee pie is a “juvenile pleasure” – he means that approvingly – based on the understanding that banana and caramel just work. But how you choose to make yours depends on your tolerance for sugar. Though whipped cream and fresh bananas are meant to ease the sweetness, Dowding considered his recipe “far too rich”. In his new book Elevate, MasterChef champion Brin Pirathapan proposes an even sweeter banoffee meringue pie made with caramelised bananas and Italian meringue that “is not for the fainthearted”.
2026-04-21
Boredom
Britons are less bored than they used to be. This is bad
Boredom, says Michael Pollan, author of a book on consciousness, is “endangered”. Though precisely quantifying its decline is hard: it is not well measured. More obviously appealing emotions like happiness have international indices. More damaging ones like depression have WHO programmes. But boredom—unloved, uncharismatic—is, says Erin Westgate, an assistant professor of psychology at the University of Florida and co-author of the electric-shock paper, “very understudied”.
That is changing. Like other endangered species, boredom is starting to inspire a more appreciative, even elegiac, tone among researchers. “Boredom sucks and we hate it,” says Christopher Mlynski, a researcher at the University of Vienna, but it forces us to find more “challenging things…to do”. The pain is the point. Scrolling on a smartphone, says Professor Westgate, “staves off boredom”—just enough to suppress the entrail-gnawing—but prevents “lasting, meaningful” activity.
2026-04-20
A life that doesn't ask me to explain myself
Be obsessed with your own life
Be obsessed with your own life - by hasif 💌
This isn’t just about choosing to focus on your own happiness or goals in a selfish way. No, being obsessed with your life is a radical act of self-respect and personal ownership. It’s a choice to break free from the constant noise, to turn off the distractions, and to commit to the deep work of understanding and shaping the life that only you can live. It’s about returning home to yourself in a world that’s constantly trying to take you elsewhere.
But what does it mean to be obsessed with your own life? Is it vanity? Is it narcissism? No. It’s the opposite; it’s a recognition that your time, your energy, your thoughts, and your decisions are valuable. It’s a commitment to yourself, to your personal growth, to your values, and to living intentionally, no matter what the world around you says.
2026-04-18
Is Los Angeles the Status Anxiety Capital of the World?
Is Los Angeles the Status Anxiety Capital of the World?
For some strange reason this reminded me of living in Bengaluru. I guess that's because I haven't lived in LA 🙃. I guess FOMO and status anxiety is a fact of life wherever you go nowadays 🤷🏽♂️.
For your average status-conscious Angeleno, anxiety begins and ends with sleep. Sure, there are Oura rings—sleep trackers hidden in obtrusive pieces of jewelry. But Angelenos will spend hundreds of dollars more on Loftie sound machines, sleep masks from Violet Grey, and magnesium supplements -recommended by their most RFK Jr.–coded friends. Completely sober - 20- and 30-somethings are excusing themselves from dinner at Chateau Marmont at 9 p.m. so they can get to bed early. The status dinner is no longer about what you’re eating, but when. In Los Angeles, it’s perfectly acceptable to eat dinner out of a tin before the sun sets, standing alone in your high-contrast Calacatta kitchen.
The next jolt of panic comes with coffee. It’s wonderful to be greeted by name by one of the high-cheekboned baristas at Maru Coffee, on Hillhurst. But if you are truly somebody in Hollywood, you will be too important to waste 20 minutes driving to a coffee shop—not to mention the time it takes to find parking. Your house will be too high in the hills, and nobody wants to sit in bumper-to-bumper canyon traffic behind a Harvard-Westlake student who’s eating breakfast, texting, and shaving while driving to school. On the rare days you wake up feeling European and think, Let’s go to a coffee shop, you’ll remember that you might run into someone in line who needs something from you—a friend from USC film school who wants notes on their spec, or an ex-girlfriend who’s on her ninth step and is hoping to make amends. It’s much safer to invest thousands of dollars in a Jura coffee maker and source beans from the Gorigesha Forest. If you’re truly somebody, your personal chef will top the coffee with raw milk before your assistant—who was up hours before you—hands it to you as you get into your Escalade mobile office, complete with first-class seats, Wi-Fi, and a 43-inch flat-screen TV.
2026-04-17
Mostpeopleslop
In 2006, Joe Sugarman published a book called The Adweek Copywriting Handbook - and an axiom stuck...
"The sole purpose of the first sentence in an advertisement is to get you to read the second sentence."
That line, more or less, explains how social media turned into a pile of shit.
Sugarman's advice became the core system prompt for 300,000 tech assholes on Twitter. They've run it through algorithm after algorithm and produced the most soul destroying rhetorical tic of the 2020s. I'm talking about "Mostpeopleslop."
I'll give the format its due: it works // performs. And the reason why is simple. "Most people" is a tribal signal - when you read "most people don't know about this," your brain does a quick calculation: Am I most people? Do I want to be most people? No? Then I better keep reading, so I can be the Holy Exception. But you're not actually learning fucking anything. You're being told you're special for having stopped to read, and the poster is offering you membership in an in-group, and the price of admission is a like, a retweet, any scrap of engagement. It's a scarcity play - people pay more attention to shit that feels exclusive.
"Most people don't know this" is exactly that.
Mostpeopleslop has metastasized because Twitter started rewarding engagement bait at the same time the creator economy started demanding you post all day // every day. If you're a tech influencer in 2026, you probably post 10 to 20 times a day, maybe more - this is what the gurus tell you to do. You need formats you can crank out fast that reliably get impressions, and "most people" threads do exactly that. There's no research required, and no original data - you barely need an opinion. You could generate these in your sleep, and thanks to OpenClaw some of these guys clearly do...
And it trains audiences to value framing over substance - if you read enough "most people" posts, you start evaluating ideas based on how they're packaged rather than whether they're true. A well-formatted "most people" thread with a mediocre idea will outperform a useful post that doesn't use the formula, and so yes the medium becomes the message, but the message is: style points matter more than being right or even being valuable in the first place.
2026-04-16
“Beef,” “The Drama,” and the New Marriage Plot | The New Yorker
Transcript: Critics at Large | The New Yorker - “Beef,” “The Drama,” and the New Marriage Plot
This is a wide-ranging podcast covering a lot of pop culture themes around relationships. But some quotes about marriage really stuck with me.
We're gonna be talking about several other texts, and we're gonna be talking in general about modern attitudes towards this very old institution. As we've said, it's kind of at an inflection point right now. Statistically, marriage rates are hovering around an all time low. And at the same time, people are trying to find new approaches to make marriage work. I mean, open marriages, polyamory, all of these things are feeling increasingly mainstream.
And my question for us is, at a time when relationships are more flexible than ever, what do we as a culture want marriage to mean?
Shout out to the long nineteenth century for this idea that marriage is not just a pact between 2 families and mutually advantageous decision made to further the line, but also that people are supposed to find love and romance and sexual fulfillment all wrapped up into this economic bundle with marriage. And as my support, I have on my lap 2 of my favorite friends, Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert and Parallel Lives, Phyllis Rose's wonderful study of 5 Victorian marriages.
The argument that Phyllis Rose is making is that marriage is a political experience, and it's the primary political experience that most people will have. It is about balancing of power. It is, of course, about power between genders, but it's about the the family and the marriage as a body politic in which two people are jockeying and negotiating. And things are frankly set up to not work more than they're set up to work.
I think we have this kind of fantasy idea of marriage as a time where everyone knew their place.The man was the center, and the woman's job was to just help the man fulfill whatever had to be done. And 1 thing that I love about the book Parallel Lives is that it shows us that that was really never satisfying for anyone. And I think that a lot of these ideas that we have now about freedom, personal freedom, sexual freedom, we're trying to reconcile them with marriage. And I think we're in a place where we're trying to make marriage seem more like a positive choice, rather than an obvious obligation. That we're doing this because the love is so great, because we can, envision the rest of our lives together, because it's this great mark of affirmation and faith in another person and also in yourself that you're gonna be the kind of person to hold this down.
And so in a way, it's a fascinating fiction that those who get married subscribe to hoping that the fiction becomes true. Phyllis Rose has a great line about reading marriage like you can read a novel. And I think that's true in a lot of these cases too, that life is a kind of fiction writing. Yeah. You are making it up as you go along, and who you are at the start of a marriage is not gonna be who you are at the middle and who you are at the end, and yet that keeps coming like such a rude shock to us. It's such a rude shock Yeah. That we get great literature, movies, TV shows, albums Yeah. From the shock of discovering that the other person is not who you thought they were and that you're not who you thought you were either.
I mean, for me, the great passage, the great moment in Madame Bovary is the opera, where, you know, Emma goes to the opera and she's like reawakened by the opera, sees Leon, the the sort of romantic rival of her husband, is like, you know what? I have to have an affair. You know? That romance is like art in that it has moments of cathartic learning. And if we're supposed to do that at the same time as we're in a contract, that's a lot of weight for any one institution, personal, privately, publicly, aesthetically, to bear.
2026-04-15
Shitty Flow and Zombie Flow
Wu says it's a mistake to attribute the regretted hours of scrolling to addiction or a failure of self-control. Rather, the user is falling into "passive flow," a condition arising from three factors:
I. Engagement without a clear goal;
II. A loss of self-awareness – of your body and your mental state;
III. Losing track of time.
I instantly recognize II. and III. – they're the hallmarks of the flow states that abstract me away from my own pain when I'm working. The big difference here is I. – I go to work with the clearest of goals, while "passive flow" is undirected (Thompson also cites psychologist Paul Bloom, who calls the scroll-trance "shitty flow." In shitty flow, you lose track of the world and its sensations – but in a way that you later regret.)
Thompson has his own name for this phenomenon of algorithmically induced, regret-inducing flow: he calls it "zombie flow." It's flow that "recapitulates the goal of flow while evacuating the purpose."
Zombie flow is "progress without pleasure" – it's frictionless, and so it gives us nothing except that sense of the world going away, and when it stops, the world is still there. The trick is to find a way of compartmentalizing that rewards attention with some kind of productive residue that you can look back on with pride and pleasure.
Books on Loneliness
Why loneliness, a recurring theme in literature, is difficult to comprehend
Books covered:
- The Lonely City by Olivia Laing
- The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
- Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
The philosophical and personal narrative by British author Olivia Laing in The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone draws from the time she lived in New York. She writes, “Loneliness is difficult to confess; difficult too to categorise. Like depression, a state with which it often intersects, it can run deep in the fabric of a person.” We immediately get a sense of what to expect — an analysis of where loneliness stems from and its consequences, which linger in one’s mental health and very existence.
Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny explores the many layers of loneliness through fictional characters. The Booker-shortlisted novel traces the journeys of two individuals, Sonia and Sunny, negotiating distance, displacement, and belonging. Yet, this is not an entirely bleak story. Desai, who won the Man Booker Prize for The Inheritance of Loss, weaves in moments of hope as her character Sonia embarks on a path of self-reflection and discovery.
While some narratives trace loneliness with philosophical distance, others plunge into its most unsettling depths, as Gail Honeyman does in Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine.
Loneliness is not always contemplative — sometimes it is isolating, corrosive, and dangerously silent. The novel begins on a bleak note. Eleanor Oliphant, a socially awkward and isolated woman living in Glasgow and working a routine office job, insists she is “completely fine.”
Yet beneath the rigid routines and solitary weekends lies a deep, unaddressed loneliness. Over time, she slowly finds her footing. As the author reminds us, “It is never too late, for any of us.” It is a poignant and joyful message.
The Other Bennett Sister
The Other Bennet Sister TV review — a sweet-hearted sideways take on Pride and Prejudice
The Other Bennet Sister offers up the legendary romance of Pride and Prejudice through the eyes of a peripheral character. Indeed, it largely dispenses with the events of Austen’s most famous novel by the end of the second episode, when it catapults off into Mary’s new life in London, away from the domineering and casually cruel and narcissistic Mrs Bennet (a very good Ruth Jones). She is frequently nudged in the direction of suitors, through the not-so-subtle machinations of her mother and the more heartfelt guidance of her aunt, Mrs Gardiner (Indira Varma), but, in this very contemporary tale, Mary must discover her true value for herself.
It all works remarkably well. The half-hour episodes are neat and pithy, suggesting a confidence with both sets of source material. It is light and fun, with a lot of heart, basking in the warmth of its own candlelit glow.
I bingewatched this show in a couple of sitting and absolutely loved it!
2026-04-13
Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
Why do people resist the boring read? Melvin Lerner had a theory. He published a book in 1980 called The Belief in a Just World, and his argument was that most of us walk around with a bone-deep need to believe that people Get What They Deserve. If someone is rich, they must be smart. If they’re smart, their decisions must make sense. And if their decisions look dumb, well, you must be the one who’s missing something. It’s a warm blanket of a worldview. It just doesn’t survive contact with reality.
There’s something else going on, too, and it’s less intellectual // more animal. We see patterns everywhere. We see them when they’re not there. Kahneman built half his career on this - we are so desperate to find signal in the noise that we’ll construct entire narratives out of nothing, and a narrative where the powerful guy is playing 12 moves ahead is just a better story than one where he fucked up because that’s what people do.
Ube is the next matcha
The next matcha: coffee chains bet on ube’s viral appeal
Fun fact, I had ube ice cream at an NYC outlet in Chinatown like several years ago. Then, I found it in a late-night beverage truck in Bengaluru's HSR neighborhood a year ago.
UK café chains are betting on ube, the vibrant purple yam native to the Philippines, to replicate the viral success of matcha among younger, higher-spending consumers.
The ingredient’s purple hue has been critical to its adoption by mainstream brands seeking social media success, according to Kiti Soininen, a food and drink analyst at Mintel. “The unusual and vibrant colour is at the heart of it, just as it was in helping matcha and Dubai chocolate go viral,” she said.
The push into ube comes as brands are “constantly looking for the next matcha,” said Lisa Harris, co-founder of food consultancy Harris and Hayes. The Japanese green-tea-based drink has grown in popularity globally over the past decade but rapid increases in consumption and a bad harvest last year are putting pressure on supply and driving up prices.
The contradictions of wokeness
Full transcript: https://www.debugjois.dev/apps/transcript-reader#t=9696b6681f98cbd9
The tweet length answer is that these periods of awokening happen when there's a big crisis for elites, where they are expecting a certain life and it seems like they won't be able to live that life. one thread that cuts across all four awokenings is that they tend to occur during these periods of elite overproduction. So elite overproduction is a term that's taken from sociologist Jack Goldstone and historian Peter Turchin. And it refers to a condition where society is producing more people that have a reasonable expectation to be elites, then we have the capacity to actually give them the elite lifestyles and positions that they're expecting. So you have growing numbers of people who did everything right.
They got good grades, they went to college, they went to the right colleges, they studied the right majors. And they're expecting six figure salaries and to be able to have a house and to get married and settle down and have kids and a standard of living that's close to or better than what their parents experienced. And all of a sudden they're not able to do any of that. When you have growing numbers of people in that kind of a condition, what they tend to do is indict the social order that they think failed them and try to tear down some of the existing elites to make space for people like themselves. So that's at their core, what I argue is happening in awokenings.
The 2 factors that cut across all Awokenings are the elite overproduction and this other factor, popular immiseration. So elite overproduction, one reason why that's not enough to predict awokenings, why it's not sufficient, is because often when elites are having a tough time, it's hard to get anyone to care. And that's because there's this phenomenon where the fortunes of elites and non elites tend to operate countercyclically. When elites are having a tough time, it's hard to get anyone to care. No one's breaking out a tiny violin and going, Oh, poor elite guy.
He has to live a normal life and get a normal job like everyone else. Oh, let me play you a Sam song, right? So if times are pretty good for everyone else but bad for elites, no one cares. But there are these moments when the trajectories get collapsed, when things have been kind of bad and growing worse for ordinary people for a while, and all of a sudden they're bad for a lot of elites too, those are the moments when awoken things happen. Because the frustrated elite aspirants not only have a motive, but they also have a means to really mess with the system because there's this huge base of other people in society who are also really frustrated with the way things are going, who also have a bone to pick with the people who are kind of running the show.
And so they have more leverage. These frustrated elite aspirants have more leverage over the system than they otherwise might.
Host
Do you think the New York Times doesn't give a shit about George Floyd until he's been killed by the state? Or is it that the audience won't pay attention until that's the case?
Guest
I think it's kind of both. And part of the reason it's both, actually, I talk about this a bit in the book is that the people who produce and consume these narratives are increasingly the same people. It's the same slice of society that's producing almost all of this work in the symbolic professions. And they're almost the exact same as the audience that's consuming them in terms of where they live, the professions they work in, what their values are, the kinds of educational background they have, and so on. It's this really incestuous relationship increasingly between writers and audiences where they're virtually identical.
So I think it's the case that a lot of the writers don't really, and editors and stuff, don't really have their finger on the pulse of normies. But I think it's also true that the audience of The New York Times doesn't particularly care about normies and their problems either.
But that said, I also tried I think a lot of the anti woke kind of culture warriors are going to have a tough time really mobilizing the book the way they might hope, both because it has a lot of very critical things to say about the anti woke kind of people and the game that they're playing as well. I apply a very symmetrical lens to understanding them and their behaviors and actions. And the book also, the reality is a lot of work like in queer theory or critical race theory or feminist standpoint epistemology or postcolonial theory, these modes of scholarship deeply inform my own thinking, including on these questions about power and ideology and how they relate to each other. In a deep sense, what the book is doing is taking the arguments from these literatures to what I perceive to be their logical conclusions, which should lead us to ask of our own ostensibly emancipatory ideologies whether or not they might also reflect our class interests, whether or not they actually represent the values and interests of the people that we're trying to help. And whether or not, like like there's no reason to think that our own belief systems are exempt in a lot of these other related literatures and not to villainize them or mock them or demean them, but in fact, to show how they can be valuable.
And so in this and a lot of other ways, I think the book is not easily digestible into the culture wars and the ways that people might hope.
2026-04-12
The Art of Pooping
Podcast #1,112: You’ve Been Pooping Wrong — Here’s How to Do It Better | The Art of Manliness #bowel
Full transcript: The Art of Manliness - You’ve Been Pooping Wrong — Here’s How to Do It Better
Harvard gastroenterologist Dr. Trisha Pasricha is the author of You've Been Pooping All Wrong: How to Make Your Bowel Movements a Joy. Today on the show, Trisha and I have a fun and frank conversation about the art and science of bowel movements, including the color of healthy stools, how often you should be pooping, if laxatives are safe to use, the food to eat that's even better than prunes for getting things going, why you feel the urge to go poop at Barnes and Noble, the wonders of the bidet, the danger of using your smartphone on the toilet, how to get more comfortable pooping in a public restroom, and more.
I had not realised kiwis (which are a part of my daily diet here) have some great benefits to pooping.
But I will say there are a lot of ways that you can improve your bowel habits, become less constipated just by changing things about what you're eating and what you're doing, and even the position of how you're sitting on the toilet. I mean, it's very common that people don't wanna take medicines, but you can take things as natural as, like, kiwis. Right? Like in our grandparents' times, people were taking prunes, and prunes are incredibly effective.
But I have never successfully convinced a college student to take prunes. It's like 1 of those things that people just don't reach for anymore these days. But kiwis have been shown in multiple randomized controlled trials, 2 kiwis a day, that they are as effective as prunes, but they also don't cause bloating. Like a lot of these, like, fiber supplements and prunes can cause, kiwis don't seem to do that. So it's a pretty simple fix that's relatively effective, all things considered.
And and it's not really a laxative. It's actually just something that's high fiber, got a lot of nutrients, and is good for you in other ways.
Some of the explanations are really good and clear
Host
Gotcha. So what what happens to our stool whenever we get diarrheas? Why does the body decide this stuff needs to be liquid and get out fast? Like, what's happening there?
Guest
Yeah. There's lots of different causes. But in terms of your anatomy, your small bowel, which is that first part of the tube after your stomach, the main point of your small bowel is to absorb all the nutrients. And it's sucking out everything that it wants and breaking it down. And then the stuff that it can't break down, which is usually like the fiber, which we actually don't possess the enzymes to break down.
It makes its way to our microbiome in our colon. Well, the colon has several jobs. 1 of them is to suck water out of the stool as it passes through. And stool passes a little bit more slowly through the colon, so your colon has a lot of time to get that water up. But if something happens that triggers that poop to move forward, and sometimes it's stress, stress can cause our colon to suddenly start to contract.
That means we haven't had time to remove and absorb all the water out of it yet, so it's gonna gush out like diarrhea when we're stressed. Spicy food does that. Spicy food sends this signal down to say, okay. Evacuate everything we have. That too will make whatever comes out to be a little bit fiery, a little uncomfortable, and it'll also be pretty liquidy.
And then there's other things like infections or just depending on how things are going with with other aspects of your life, travel and exercise, those things can also help speed things up. But before, you've really had a chance to absorb all the water.
and this one about constipation
Host
Gotcha. And constipation is just the reverse. It's been in the colon too long, so all that water's been sucked out.
Guest
Yeah. Exactly. And there's a ton of different reasons why we things slow down and why we can get constipated. And and and you're right. The longer we sit there, the longer that stool is just your colon is gonna keep doing its job, and it's gonna keep making it harder and harder, which is why I sometimes think the most important thing people can do who are constipated is just as soon as they hear that call, feel that urge, respond because it's not gonna be the same poop later on.
Host
What causes constipation? You said there's lots of potential sources.
Guest
Yeah. Well, when someone comes into my clinic and they have constipation, I I try to explain the way the colon works in terms of trying to get toothpaste out of a toothpaste tube. So sometimes the issue is that we're not squeezing that toothpaste tube. And that means that maybe there's something that's stopping the colon from contracting so much. We need to do that.
We need to generate pressure in order to push the stool outwards. And maybe the problem is actually not that we're not squeezing the tube, but that the toothpaste itself is rock solid. And sometimes that happens because maybe we're not getting enough fiber. Maybe we're not drinking enough. Maybe there's something else that's making that stool really, really hard.
But then the third and I think most underappreciated part of the problem is that, yeah, we're squeezing hard enough. The toothpaste is super soft, but we forget to take the cap off the toothpaste tube. And then we're just pressing up against this pelvic floor that is not cooperating. And that is very common. That happens to about 1 in 3 people who have constipation and who have tried different laxatives and different things and they failed.
And basically what that means is that our pelvic floor, which is this set of more than a dozen muscles sitting there at the bottom of our rectums, and they need to coordinate in this really highly orchestrated dance. Some need to contract at the right time, some need to relax. And for a lot of people, the sphincters that are supposed to be relaxing actually contract when we bear down. If you think about it, we're like generating all this pressure to try to push our poop out, and people's sphincters contract. And and that's very paradoxical.
It's not supposed to do that. So sometimes when you've tried everything, the most obvious answer is actually something that doesn't involve anything related to your colon, but actually it's all the muscles in your pelvis that's the problem.
2026-04-10
Barista Judgemental Glare
Brooklyn Coffee Shop Episode 55: Kumail Nanjiani, Barista Training Expert 🪪☕️ - YouTube
I was at a coffee shop in Berlin today and the barista messed up my order by pouring somebody else's order into my reusable cup and handing it to them. When I pointed it out to the barista, he had this look about him as if it was my fault, which reminded me of this episode of Brooklyn Coffee Shop.
The transcript is reproduced in full below.
Hey guys, it's that time of the year again. I'm here for your hipster barista assessment.
No one says hipster anymore.
You've passed the first test. Nobody says the h word anymore.
I'm sorry. Who are you?
How do you not remember me? I'm Kumail Nanjiani, h word barista expert.
Wow, your aura is like completely different this year. I didn't even recognize you.
Yeah, something seems off. You seem very emotionally regulated.
Oh yeah, I've been on a healing journey. I started therapy.
Therapy? I thought it was a requirement for all Brooklyn baristas to be chaotic and unhinged.
I've been avoiding therapy for years for my craft.
Yeah, that's a big update we're doing to 2026. Now, we want all baristas to go through therapy so that your rudeness comes from a place of creativity rather than trauma. As you know, you need a high score to keep operating a coffee shop in Brooklyn. First, let's see your judgmental glare.
Okay, it's a little dead behind the eyes. I need a bit more boredom, a little more disdain. Like, you looked at me and you already know I'm the problem. More like Mhm. Mhm. Judgmental glare 8 out of 10.
Not. Seriously,we're known in Brooklyn for our judgmental glare.
You were there for a moment.
We have at least 10,000 negative Google reviews about it.
You think 10,000's a lot? All right, let's talk about reading. What are we perusing these days?
Only books on Marxism and existential thought.
Marxism is so played out. It's so old. I mean, look at your mayor. My mom is into Marxism. She's got a little Marx bumper sticker on her Subaru. Now all the cool baristas have circled back around to loving capitalism.
But I spent my entire adult life blaming all my problems on capitalism.
I would shift that blame right over to taxes.
As a fourth generation Gatsby, I can do that.
That's right. Rich is cool again, guys.
All right, let's hear your self-sabotage initiatives to keep customers away.
We've been playing with insults. Usually three to four per customer.
Sometimes we post to our Instagram story that we're suddenly closing and then we stay here just so that we can turn people away.
We never have what people order even though it's on the menu.
Oh god.
When we're in a bad mood, we triple our prices and that is often.
You guys are nailing it right there. All right, let's talk about what are your milk options right now.
Oh, so today we have cacti, water, buffalo, avocado seed, and potato milk.
Trick question. We're all post milk now. You haven't heard of milk fatigue?
The milk is getting fatigued?
We are tired of milk.
No milk made in the house.
How can milk get tired? Milk don't be alive. We're now in our post milk era. I always knew this day would come.
Okay, I have tallied up your scores. You're a B+. Dang it.
I promise next year we'll be even more unapproachable.
Yeah, we'll go to therapy so we can weaponize wellness even more.
B+ is actually the highest score you can get.
I knew it.
We do that just to keep people grounded.
All right, you guys can attend my new workshop. It's called Healing for Baristas. How to calm yourself while flustering others. I will save you two spots
2026-04-09
Did Wokeness Leave Us Worse Off?
Opinion | Did Wokeness Leave Us Worse Off? #linguistics
Spiegelman: “Woke” obviously has had a lot of different transitions as a word, and who uses it and how, and to mean what. And I would say that it seemed like a positive thing to be woke five years ago. And now it doesn’t feel that way anymore. Have you noticed a shift, and where are you noticing it?
Colyar: Yeah, when I’m trying to describe my politics to people, I often say that I have some “anti-woke” sensibilities. And by saying that, I think what I’m often trying to do is distance myself from the woke of five years ago — this way too earnest, super p.c. kind of cringe, resistance-y culture, whose politics I mostly support, but the way that it’s carried out is cringe to me. Yeah, I think “cringe” is the best word.
Spiegelman: What about you, Amina?
Sow: Yeah, “cringe” is a really good word. Thank you to the young people for that one. I do think that language moves very fast. And I think that sometimes, too, when I hear people use certain words, all it does is carbon-date them for me.
So, if somebody says “p.c.,” I’m like, got it. Like, you’re a 1990 and before person. We love that last century, you know? And if you’re a different kind of person and you say “woke,” I’m like, great. You’re a new century person. But do the words mean the same things to us? And that’s not always apparent.
What you were saying about the Biden years, I think the reason it feels like we’re having this kind of backlash to this culture right now is because of the institutionalization of it in our workplaces and on campuses. And I don’t think even good liberal people feel like the antiracist training that they’re doing in their office is helping anyone. Even people who respect people’s pronouns and believe in nonbinary identity or whatever, I don’t think that they think that putting it in their signature is helping anyone, and I think they’re rolling their eyes and laughing about it in private.
And so, when I find this wanton cruelty being the driving force — because, again, everything exists in a context — I think that what I find particularly grating about the “I want to be able to use the R-word, I want to call women [expletive], and I want to call people the N-word,” you know, whatever it is, I’m like, why do you want to do that? Why is it so important to you? What is so important about being able to say that to someone who is telling you they don’t want to hear that?
…
Colyar: But I will say, I do think that most people are willing to be polite, but so much of this has gotten so fraught, on the example of pronouns, because people do not allow people to learn. People do not give them the grace to try and figure out how to get these things right. I mean, people are militant about this stuff and will bite your head off, bite their professor’s head off over a misgendering situation, and that makes it really hard to move forward.
This one made me LOL, iykyk 😂
Sow: I want to ban straight people using “partner” when they mean husband or wife. I’m just like, I don’t like this signaling of your politics. I really hate it, because it’s very sinister, actually.
Colyar: They’re hiding. It’s like they’re doing some queer for clout ——
Sow: I’m like, you’re literally participating in the most heteronormative institution a person could participate in. And you don’t get to rebrand it.
I do wanna say though, participation is not necessarily an endorsement.
The Women Who Love the Manosphere
The Women Who Love the Manosphere - WSJ
Love the phrase manosphere-adjacent to describe Huberman (accurate imo)
Then there are others she loves that are better described as manosphere-adjacent: Andrew Huberman, the brawny neuroscientist and podcaster with a cult following, is a source Craig turns to for wellness advice. Following Huberman’s self-described “protocols,” Craig adheres to a rigid sleep schedule and workout routine, and never skips her morning dose of cryotherapy, collagen supplementation and sunlight exposure. She cites his guidance on her TikTok page, where she promotes a disciplinarian approach to physical fitness.
2026-04-08
Friendship Breakups
Why do friendship breakups hurt so much? | Dazed
Friendship breakups are incredibly common – studies show that around 70 per cent of close friendships end after seven years – and yet there is little guidance available on how to navigate them. It’s a stark contrast to the way breakdowns of romantic relationships are treated in culture; there are innumerable books, films, and TV shows dedicated to unpacking the pain of heartbreak (there’s probably a Sex and the City episode for every flavour of dating turmoil imaginable).
“Romantic relationships have long been a central focus of psychological research, popular culture, counselling, and self-help literature; they are widely recognised as a life transition with established language, rituals – such as break-up conversations – and social norms around grieving and recovery,” Dr Jenny van Hooff, a sociologist at Manchester Metropolitan University, tells Dazed. “By contrast, friendship breakups are often minimised or dismissed in both academic and everyday discourse, which means there is less culturally sanctioned language and fewer models for grieving them. As a result, people may struggle to validate their own pain.”
new word unlocked - amatonormative
Despite our culture being amatonormative – that is, romantic-relationship-centric – our friendships are central to our lives. “Close friends often provide ongoing support, shared history, mutual trust, identity affirmation and a sense of belonging,” says Dr van Hooff. “When a friendship ends, it is not only the loss of contact with another person that hurts, but also the loss of routines, companionship and emotional scaffolding that the relationship provided.”
Capitalism is Obsessed With Death
Is Employment Making You Ugly?
It's a quote of a quote that I found in one of my favorite newsletters.
RELATED: I wanted to fit this quote from Byung-Chul Han’s Capitalism and the Death Drive in my Guardian article on cadaver fat fillers, but I couldn’t, so I’ll just leave it here:
“Capitalism is obsessed with death … Performance zombies, fitness zombies, and Botox zombies: these are manifestations of undead life. The undead lack any vitality … Capitalism’s striving for life without death creates the necropolis — an antiseptic space of death, cleansed of human sounds and smells. [ED NOTE: I would add textures to this list!] Life processes are transformed into mechanical processes. The total adaptation of human life to mere functionality is already a culture of death. As a consequence of the performance principle, the human being ever more closely approximates a machine, and becomes alienated from itself.”
Great Books in 52 Weeks
How to Read the Great Books in 52 Weeks - by Ted Gioia
The original substack containing the program is behind a paywall. At some point I considered subscribing just to unlock that one post. Maybe some day!
A few weeks ago, reader Cheryl Drury reached out to me. She had been inspired by my 52-week humanities program. Not only had she completed the course, but documented her progress on a podcast.
2026-04-07
The Hacker News Tarpit
I like the formulation of sites like HN being a Schelling point problem. The secret sauce is not in the technology or the software at all.
A link aggregator is only as good as its community, and the community is only as good as the people in it, and the people are only there because the other people are there. This is a Schelling point problem; everybody needs to coordinate on the same place, and which place they coordinate on is partly arbitrary, and once they've coordinated it is very expensive to move.
There's a bar in your city where all the interesting people go on Thursday nights. The bar is not special. The drinks are mediocre, the lighting is bad, the bathrooms are questionable. But interesting people go there, which makes it interesting, which makes more interesting people go there. If you open an identical bar across the street with better drinks and better bathrooms, nobody is going to switch, because the interesting people are at the other bar. They all know they're at the other bar. There is no mechanism for coordinated switching.
I think the vibe coding discourse has a hole in it, and the hole is shaped like the question: "what is software for?"
If software is a thing you build, then vibe coding changes everything. Anyone can build. We have democratized building. Congratulations to building.
But software is mostly a thing people use, and getting people to use things is not a building problem. It never was. The reason most software fails is not that it was too hard to code. The reason most software fails is that nobody wanted it, or everybody wanted it but was already using something else, or the right people wanted it but couldn't find it, or they found it but didn't trust it, or they trusted it but couldn't get their team to switch.
Hacker News works because Paul Graham had an audience before he had a product, Y Combinator had a network that seeded the community, and dang has been doing the same moderating job every single day for over a decade with what I can only describe as an unreasonable level of dedication. The whole thing has been accumulating social capital for almost twenty years...
I built a Hacker News clone in six hours. To me, it's perfect and for everyone else it's empty and those two facts are going to remain true forever. If that doesn't tell you something about what software is and isn't, I don't know what will.
The Ten Commandments of Mental Health
10 Commandments of Mental Health - by Josh Zlatkus
with a sidenote that this was published on April 1st.
- Give me structure, or give me death!
- Rather than diagnosis, accommodation, or medication, give me sleep, movement, and sunlight.
- The not-so-curious paradox is that I only seem to change when I must.
- Man shall not grow by insight alone.
- Everything you experience happens for a reason—usually an evolutionary one.
- If at first you don’t succeed, try giving up.
- Thou shalt not acquire meaning from comfort.
- Know thy self’s insignificance.
- I regret that I have but myself and my happiness to live for.
- Forgive them, Father: they know not how to live with abundance.
Why Gen Z is taking up boomer hobbies
Why Gen Z is taking up boomer hobbies
Some are taking up knitting or crochet. Others are growing flowers or going fishing. These days, such hobbies are no longer old-fashioned. For Gen Z has decided that the pastimes of pensioners are rather pleasing.
…
“Grannycore”—as youngsters call the trend—is not limited to entertainment. Gen Zers respect their elders’ taste in homeware and fashion (think florals and cardigans).
…
As one fan of the old-timey trend recently put it: “Grandmas were onto something.”
2026-04-06
Bait - TV series
Just bingewatched this, and loved it! The last time I really liked Riz Ahmed was in The Reluctant Fundamentalist (esp the Urdu monologue in the Last Speech scene). Have been a huge fan since then.
2026-04-05
Walter Benjamin Biography
Walter Benjamin — Peter E Gordon’s vivid pearl of a biography
“Just to sit once more on the terrace of a café and twiddle my thumbs,” wrote the great German-Jewish critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin to a friend in 1939, “that’s all I wish for.”
Kyla Scanlon
This prelude from Kyla Scanlon's latest newsletter took me completely by surprise. I have often wondered about (and occasionally been envious) how people like and others that I admire can be so prolific. And then you come across the flip side of it
I have to go on an elimination diet because my gut is eating itself and that apparently is also destroying my thyroid because I am not absorbing any nutrients. In order to address this, I have to stop eating wheat, dairy, corn, egg, tomato, peanuts, coffee, soy, cacao, sugar and manyotherthings (this is not like a juice cleanse or something fun, it’s something I have to do to stop my body from attacking itself). I have to write down what I do eat and how I am feeling and then evaluate from there as to what I can eat in the future.
If there was a quick fix - say an injection - I would try to take it. I don’t KNOW what’s happening to me, I just know that I got lots of vials of blood drawn and the miracle of modern science has informed me that some things are not going very well.
But, funnily enough, part of the problem is that I took shortcuts. I traveled 40 out of the 52 weeks last year (a lot for me) and some days, I would just subsist on granola bars and about 14 cups of coffee. I would also run and work a lot and sleep very little because I was totally and completely invincible. After all, I was an optimization machine.
And for a time, I sure was. But then, I wasn’t. Turns out, I wasn’t really optimizing anything, I just was avoiding what I actually should have been doing like sleeping. What I needed was to stop adding things and start figuring out what was making me sick. That's the opposite of what we've been sold.
From: The Ozempicization of Everything - by kyla scanlon #health #overwork
Anyway back to the focus on the newsletter
Naturally, industries have formed to monetize this nihlism through promising solutions. But the solutions never arrive, because the nihilism, the giving up, must persist in order for these products to survive. It’s a version of Ivan Illich’s Limits to Medicine, where he argues that the medical establishment itself produces illness by making people dependent on professional intervention rather than building health. That effect carries across all these optimization tools, creating dependency on the fix rather than addressing the cause. The optimization economy can't deliver control, because the desperation is the market condition, and the pursuit of control through optimization is itself a loss of control.
The shift from railways to peptides is the shift from “we built this for everyone” to “you can buy this for yourself.”
What we have is the Ozempic optimization of everything - Ozempicization, if you will. We have a suite of magic shots now in the form of peptides and everything else that address effort and discomfort and complexity. Everything can be optimized. Everything can be controlled.
It’s revealing that Silicon Valley’s word of the moment is ‘agency’ as it dresses up that desire for control. Optimization is the process, control is the desite, and agency is the branding. It’s not clear what agency means in startup land (similar to other words often used, like taste) but it does hint at someone who will force the universe to bend to their will, one way or another3.
and the article I logged just over a month ago (2 Mar) makes an appearance again! 😊
Cluely is a company that embraced this wholeheartedly, the final boss of the hustler economy. Their original ethos was cheating (they have since pivoted into AI notetaking) and they have raised millions and millions of dollars4. For them, “scamming” was being “agentic” which is indeed the “hottest commodity in Silicon Valley” as Sam Kriss wrote in his piece Child’s Play:
The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things.
And they are just doing things, driven by (understandable) fears of the permanent underclass and becoming useless in the age of AI. Apparently, the way that you avoid both of those is by “constantly chasing attention online.”
Then there is a whole section on The Manosphere which is too long to quote, but worth reading in full.
and this bit makes me feel called out 😂 (although tbf I am not monitoring the daily news or vibe-coded dashboards.)
We tend to seek control in every facet of our lives, including information consumption. Amanda Mull wrote a brilliant article about “monitoring the situation” - people (clearly, like me) who get glued to their screens trying to piece things together. And there is a lot to sort through: war, a government partially shut down, erratic fiscal policy, weak labor market, high prices, etc. It’s soothing to go to places like Twitter and read the OSINT feeds and to feel like you’re… informed. As Mull searingly writes:
If you can dial in your feeds’ algorithms just right, maybe you can bear a type of witness so complete it feels like participation, or maybe even control. After all, there’s decent evidence that the people launching the bombs are monitoring some of the same feeds you are.
2026-04-04
everything i read in february & march 2026
truer words were never spoken.
In the last few years, I’ve written thousands and thousands of words about the same idea: that reading more (books, magazines, and essays) will change your life for the better. It will satisfy you more than the slop that is, supposedly, more entertaining and fun to consume. It will draw you closer to other people, closer to the world. It will disturb your pre-established understanding of the world and offer a subtler, richer, deeper experience of reality.
Brooklyn Coffee Shop
I stumbled upon this series while bedrotting and recovering from a wisdom tooth surgery this week.
It's kinda hard to locate a sequential playlist of all the episodes in this series (there are like 60+ so far afaict), but this is the official Instagram account: Brooklyn Coffee Shop (@bkcoffeeshop) • Instagram photos and videos
This article I found describes the show very well: Turmeric Lattes & Millennial Marxism: In Conversation With Pooja Tripathi Of Brooklyn Coffee Shop | Homegrown
Your coffee order says everything about who you are. Plain black without sugar screams old-school, efficient, and honestly, "Who hurt you?" The cappuccino with foam art is for the basic bitches (sorry!) and and the iced matcha latte with dairy-free milk and a scientific customisation speaks to a very Gen Z-coded sense of hyper-individualism. Cafés today have evolved into the wild wild West of curated identity — shaped by micro-trends and cultural semiotics, where taste is both aesthetic and ideology. These theatres of self-performance and the weird little niches they are comprised of, become the playground of the beloved Instagram & TikTok series Brooklyn Coffee Shop.
Created by Pooja Tripathi, a New York-based writer, producer, and performer, Brooklyn Coffee Shop is a satirical series that distills the internet’s most peculiar subcultures into tightly composed, hyperreal vignettes set in a fictional café. The series constructs a microcosm of the modern urban life in a digital age where aesthetics, belief systems, and social capital collide. With sharp worldbuilding, deadpan humour, and a precise understanding of internet folklore, it paints an incisive and chaotic picture of the zeitgeist.
The series delivers some heavy critique but through the lighthearted premise of sketches. Its tone comes from absurd comedies that Pooja has always been a huge fan of. She counts 'Portlandia' and Lena Dunham’s 'Girls' as formative influences, both of which combine observational wit with an irreverent lens on urban pretentiousness. Add 'My Favorite Shapes' and 'Fantasmas' by Julio Torres to the mix , and you begin to understand the show’s DNA. “Comedy always has a kernel of truth at the core,” Pooja notes. “Even if it’s exaggerated and heightened for a sketch, I think that core truth is what hooks people.”
Another article: The viral internet coffee shop where every order is a social critique | Vogue India
Forget about your basic black coffees and cappuccinos. Brooklyn Coffee Shop only serves intricate drinks with substitute milks: raw-avocado-pit, barley, flax, melon-seed, acorn and, of course, breast milk. (If their in-house goat Felicia isn’t too emotionally exhausted, goat milk is also an option.) Being a customer here is harrowing, but to be a barista, there is only one requirement: to have mastered “the glare of disgust”.
In 2021, Tripathi created her first skit set in a coffee shop. Shot in front of a green screen, she played both barista and customer. The video recognised something crucial: in cities around the world, coffee is not just a beverage but also a status symbol—each coffee order is a performance. Her friend, cinematographer Eyal Cohen, suggested they turn it into a professionally shot series and the switch was made from a green screen to Larry’s Cà Phê in Williamsburg. Since then, Tripathi confesses, she is always thinking about BCS.
I would love it if somebody already created a list of all the books featured on it.
2026-03-30
How Elon Musk tried to gamify government
What was Doge? How Elon Musk tried to gamify government | Elon Musk | The Guardian
Reading this piece felt like I was up-to-date on all the new terminology surrounding MAGA, livestreaming platforms, gamer culture and the rightwing Silicon Valley tech elite.
The logic of deletion was clearest in zero-based budgeting (ZBB), the method that Musk embraced at both Twitter and Doge. Invented in the 1960s, ZBB forced every department to justify each expense anew rather than carrying budgets forward. Long dismissed as unworkable, by 2024, Silicon Valley firms were claiming that new technology had finally made ZBB feasible. Manually analysing and justifying each budget item was terribly time-intensive. But with large language models (LLMs) and AI accounting tools, this process could be performed automatically. Budgets could be rebuilt by bot. According to Wired, Musk captured the computer systems of the US Treasury’s Bureau of Fiscal Service in Doge’s first month in the hopes of creating “a ‘delete’ button he could wield against any agency by cutting off its funding at the source”. Some agencies, such as USAID, were effectively dissolved, fed into “the wood chipper”, as Musk put it in a tweet.
Treating life like a game had its own ethos and its own philosophers. In a theory often cited by Musk, Nick Bostrom speculates that we may be living in a simulation running on a mainframe in the future. Further, many of the people around us may not be human beings but computer programs: what Bostrom calls “shadow-people”, convincing imitations that lack interiority. The ethical consequences are significant. If we are surrounded by shadow people, then appeals to empathy are not moral imperatives but manipulative code. The rational response is to steel yourself against humanitarian sentiment. The economist Robin Hanson came to this conclusion in 2001 in a famous article called How to Live in a Simulation. “If you might be living in a simulation,” he wrote, “then all else equal it seems that you should care less about others.”
Citizenship
Is Citizenship a ‘Blood Aristocracy’ in Disguise? | The MIT Press Reader
On some level, life can be understood as a series of lotteries: genetic, familial, economic, and so on. These contingencies shape everything from our educational and professional opportunities to our freedom of movement and even life expectancies.
Dimitry Kochenov is the author of “Citizenship.”
But few are as brutally determinative as the country in which we are born, argues Dimitry Kochenov. In his “Essential Knowledge” book, “Citizenship,” the Soviet-born Dutch legal scholar interrogates how the modern citizenship regime operates not merely as a legal framework but as an engine of global inequality that preserves a kind of “blood aristocracy.” International rules governing citizenship, he contends, constrain the potential of billions of people in the Global South by trapping them in their circumstances of birth, all while citizens of Western nations enjoy privileged access to healthcare, jobs, and international mobility. “Citizenship,” the author writes, “is never and has never been neutral.”
In the following interview, edited for length and clarity, Kochenov unpacks the debate around “open borders,” the murky realities of statelessness, and how citizenship has been weaponized in U.S. immigration policy. “If regular people don’t actually see the arbitrariness, the outrageousness, the inhumanity” of immigration enforcement, he says, “then they cannot have an open and informed conversation about the actual values of this society.” Increasingly, Kochenov adds, “Americans are learning about those values the hard way.”
Of course, you could say the E.U. consists merely of the richest countries, etc., and that’s true. But it’s also not true because, for example, Bulgaria’s GDP per capita is more than six times smaller than Ireland’s — it is a bigger discrepancy than that of Mexico and the U.S. So, to pretend that borders are meaningful and that opening them is dangerous, at least in the context of the E.U., is absolutely baseless.
If you suddenly start treating people as human beings based on the data they submit, you might discover that, actually, you can open the border for plenty of people and fine-tune the system along the way. They will not be overstaying. They will not be violating the objectives that states set for themselves. In fact, many states already review personal data beyond passports to determine who should be able to cross their borders, as more and more countries — the U.S., Australia, the U.K., and the Schengen Zone members now require pre-travel authorizations from all foreign travellers. Broader deployment of modern information technology could turn such screening into a much more effective tool than the good old passport color test.
2026-03-29
ADHD and the "Liked Songs" playlist
This is a so relatable, I almost cried 😂. My "Liked Songs" list in YouTube is unmanagably big at this point, and I use Shazam to add songs to it wherever I am, or from whatever I am matching. #music
Every person with ADHD has a favorite playlist. It’s called “Liked Songs”.
Why Fun Tech Jobs Went Extinct
I almost feel like I lived this transition. I have included an AI generated summary of the video below.
Why fun tech jobs went extinct - YouTube
Key Takeaways
• Silicon Valley's tech culture has shifted from relaxed, amenity-filled workplaces to a hardcore, grueling work ethic driven by competition and AI anxiety.
• Elon Musk's takeover of Twitter marked a cultural turning point toward more demanding, 'hardcore' work environments, influencing other companies to follow suit.
• The rise of AI and fears of widespread job loss are pushing young tech workers into extreme work schedules (commonly 996 or worse), often motivated by the hope to escape economic underclass.
Theme Wise Breakdown
Introduction: The Changing Tech Culture
The narrator introduces Silicon Valley's culture as it used to be: whimsical and amenity-rich, with perks like ping pong tables, nap pods, and quirky office designs. However, recently, there's been a noticeable swing toward a much more intense and demanding work ethic. Younger tech workers frequently brag about excessive hours and constant grind online.
The Shift from "OpenOffice" to Hardcore Grind
The video contrasts the past decade’s open, playful office culture epitomized by companies like Facebook and Google, featuring gaming rooms, nap pods, and creative spaces, with today’s push for hard work and extended hours. The shift corresponds with a "get real" attitude from management about focusing on product development and shipping, often requiring 12+ hour days, six to seven days a week.
The Elon Musk Effect
Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter (now X) is described as a key turning point. Musk’s public declarations promoting extreme work dedication have given permission for other companies to adopt harsher, "hardo" cultures. This move away from “kinder, gentler capitalism” signals a competition-driven environment demanding relentless effort.
AI Anxiety and the "Permanent Underclass"
A major driver of this shift is anxiety over artificial intelligence displacing many jobs. Many young tech workers fear AI will create a small elite super-rich class controlling AI, while most others become a permanent economic underclass. This fear fuels a desperate need to "grind" hard now to secure a place among the winners before AI disrupts the job market completely.
The 996 Work Culture Imported from China
The 996 schedule (9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week), popularized by Chinese tech giants like Alibaba, has been adopted by many Silicon Valley startups despite its harshness. Some of the extreme work bragging online is performative—to impress venture capitalists and open doors to funding—though many do actually work these punishing hours.
Venture Capital and the Culture of Grind
Part of the performative grind culture is driven by startup founders and employees showing off on platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter to attract venture capital investment. VCs set the tone by mentoring founders in a hard-driving work ethic rooted in Silicon Valley's early history, particularly the legacy of semiconductor companies in the 60s and 70s, which had a notoriously intense workplace culture.
The Return to Silicon Valley's Hardcore Roots
The video draws historical parallels to the early days of Silicon Valley’s semiconductor industry, where long hours and tough workplace conditions were the norm. Today’s culture is described as a blend of that hard-driving genesis combined with a new techno-punk and hyper-masculine ethos emphasizing physical fitness, intense discipline, and competitive drive.
The New Tech Worker Lifestyle
The lifestyle reflected is austere and serious: no drugs, rigorous work schedules (996), heavy physical exercise, strict diet, early marriage, sleep tracking, and overall high self-discipline. The culture is markedly less about leisure and more about relentless productivity and competition.
Conclusion: The End of an Era and the New Reality
The comfortable, playful office culture of the past decade is deemed over. If startups want to succeed and attract VC funding today, they must embody a serious, hardcore, high-performance culture—even if that means losing perks like slides, beanbags, sushi buffets, and recreational amenities. The new generation of engineers is deeply motivated by fear of AI-driven obsolescence and willing to endure extreme work conditions to become part of the technological elite.
Closing Remarks and Tribute
The video ends with a nostalgic nod to the 2010 Silicon Valley office amenities now largely gone—giant slides, free bikes, arcade games, and even more bizarre perks like office dentists and chiropractors—symbolizing how the culture has dramatically transformed from playfulness to grind.
Website Tweaks
Commits · deepakjois/debugjois.dev · GitHub
In a frenzied bout of Sunday vibe coding (with breaks to grab an amazing Banh Mi sandwich and watch an observational documentary at the Greek Film Festival in Babylon), I managed to overhaul my website to be able to sync cleanly, and edit it from both my Obsidian Vault on the desktop, and a web based UI on my mobile phone.
2026-03-12
The market for marriage
The market for marriage - Works in Progress Magazine
Love the way it begins, and the reference to Pride and Prejudice
It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good agricultural surplus, must be in want of a wife.
One thing became abundantly clear: most people in the world don’t and have never lived like Europeans. Sometimes marriage is sanctified by religion or the state; other times, it is simply what happens when two people begin living together. For some it is chosen, while for others it is coerced. Some societies prize monogamy, others polygamy, yet neither is a clear predictor of fidelity. In some cultures, both sexes can divorce and remarry freely; in others, only men have that right.
For the most fascinating description was of hunter gatherer marraiges, which made me think how the advent of farming and all the cultural evolution that happened after ended up in some ways to a sort of regression
For around 280,000 years, roughly 95 percent of our history as Homo sapiens, we lived as hunter-gatherers. Today, a few such groups still exist, although these final echoes of a life we lived for millennia will soon disappear as well.
The BaYaka, who live deep in the Congolese rainforest, are one of these. Anthropologist Haneul Jang, who has worked with the BaYaka for over a decade, describes how marriages happen: an enamored adolescent couple will simply walk off into the forest and a few days later, they return and build a hut. There is no ceremony, no exchanging of vows, just a mutual understanding that they are now together. ‘There is something very romantic about it’, she says.
The young man may then do ‘bride service’, where he will live with his girlfriend’s family for a year, hunting and collecting honey with his father-in-law. At some point the relationship may dissolve. This can even happen while the couple still have small children. It will end much like it began, with one individual wandering off into the forest and building a hut with someone else.
This fluidity isn’t unique to the BaYaka but a product of hunter-gatherer societies. Groups are highly mobile, society is egalitarian – any meat from hunts is quickly shared – and there is an almost total absence of material wealth. Fathers look after their children, but they are not necessarily a primary carer. A review of over 45 studies, mostly looking at populations without medical fertility control, found that fathers have a surprisingly small effect on child survival. Other helpers, predominantly grandmothers and siblings, provide more substantial support for the mother.
While Murdock’s Ethnographic Atlas classifies most hunter-gatherers as polygynous, this is not accurate. In practice, most men are unable to support more than one wife because there is no stored wealth. Divorce and remarriage happen frequently because helpful extended families give women certainty that they won’t be left raising children alone. The lack of inheritance prevents conflict developing over having children with multiple partners, and the residential mobility means one can literally just walk away from relationships one no longer wants to be in. Consequently, women will frequently have children with two or even three men during their lifetime.
and how in some ways we are back to the old ways again 😊
In contemporary Western settings, things seem to have changed once again. Many people are monogamous and have children with a single partner, much like our agricultural forbearers. But others divorce and remarry, similar to hunter-gatherers. Young couples often live together before deciding whether to commit, like the trial marriages of the Samoans. True polygamy is usually illegal, yet some rich divorced or widowed men can attract young second wives, who can bear them a new set of children. Ethical non-monogamists are a growing and vocal minority. To an outsider, it may seem like we have no marriage system at all.
Traditional controls over marriage have weakened. Couples now choose for themselves, usually for love. The disappearance of bridewealth, dowries, and kin-arranged unions has reduced family involvement. While this might feel like a long steady transition for the West, it’s unfolding rapidly in many parts of the world today.
As states expand schooling, boys and girls mix freely. Mobile phones let them talk privately. Rural-to-urban migration brings people from different ethnic groups together, and when they marry, neither tradition quite applies. Removing the involvement of third parties makes marriages easier to enter and leave.
Changes to website
i have been making a lot of changes to the website, thanks to the productivity benefits unlocked by Claude Code and OpenCode.
I wrote my own little mobile editor that I can log into and make edits to the daily log. In fact, this change is being made on my Android phone using the voice keyword.
The whole thing is a combination of AWS Lambda supported by some GitHub workflow glue. I'm glad I was able to pull this off without incurring any continuous costs on the backend.
2026-03-09
Books You Can Finish In One Sitting
Books You Can Finish In One Sitting – The Painted Porch Bookshop
Found this in Ryan Holiday's latest newsletter (which has nice blurbs for each book, but I can't link to it directly)
The books:
- Montaigne
- The Boy Who Would Be King
- On the Shortness of Life: Life Is Long If You Know How to Use It
- War of Art: Break Through the Blocks and Win Your Inner Creative Battles
- Gift from the Sea: 50th Anniversary Edition
- Book of Five Rings: A Classic Text on the Japanese Way of the Sword
- Address Unknown
- Small Things Like These
- Zen in the Art of Archery
- 84, Charing Cross Road
- Ain't I a Woman?
- The Greatest Sentence Ever Written
America and Public Disorder
America and Public Disorder - Chris Arnade Walks the World
We are the world’s richest country, and yet our buses, parking lots, and city streets are filthy, chaotic, and threatening. Antisocial and abnormal behavior, open addiction, and mentally tortured people are common in almost every community regardless of size.
I’ve written about this many times before, because it is so striking, and it has widespread consequences, beyond the obvious moral judgement that a society should simply not be this way.
It’s a primary reason why we shy away from dense walkable spaces and instead move towards suburban sprawl. People in the U.S. don’t respect, trust, or want to be around other random citizens, out of fear and disgust. Japanese/European style urbanism—density, fantastic public transport, mixed-use zoning, that so many American tourists admire—can't happen here because there is a fine line between vibrant streets and squalid ones, and that line is public trust. The U.S. is on the wrong side of it. Simply put, nobody wants to be accosted by a stranger, no matter how infrequent, and until that risk is close to nil, people will continue edging towards isolated living.
It is why we “can’t have nice things” because we have to construct our infrastructure to be asshole-proof, and so we don’t build anything or build with a fortress mentality, stripping our public spaces down to the austere and utilitarian, emptying them of anything that can be vandalized.
2026-03-07
RSS
Yet another paean for RSS.
Like, there was once a time when an ever-increasing proportion of web users kept tabs on what was going on with RSS. RSS is a simple, powerful way for websites to publish "feeds" of their articles, and for readers to subscribe to those feeds and get notified when something new was posted, and even read that new material right there in your RSS reader tab or app.
RSS is simple and versatile. It's the backbone of podcasts (though Apple and Spotify have done their best to kill it, along with public broadcasters like the BBC, all of whom want you to switch to proprietary apps that spy on you and control you). It's how many automated processes communicate with one another, untouched by human hands. But above all, it's a way to find out when something new has been published on the web.
For more than a decade, RSS has lain dormant. Many, many websites still emit RSS feeds. It's a default behavior for WordPress sites, for Ghost and Substack sites, for Tumblr and Medium, for Bluesky and Mastodon. You can follow edits to Wikipedia pages by RSS, and also updates to parcels that have been shipped to you through major couriers. Web builders like Jason Kottke continue to surface RSS feeds for elaborate, delightful blogrolls:
There are many good RSS readers. I've been paying for Newsblur since 2011, and consider the $36 I send them every year to be a very good investment:
It's almost impossible to overstate how superior RSS is to the median web page. Imagine if the newsletters you followed were rendered with black, clear type on a plain white background (rather than the sadistically infinitesimal, greyed-out type that designers favor thanks to the unkillable urban legend that black type on a white screen causes eye-strain). Imagine reading the web without popups, without ads, without nag screens. Imagine reading the web without interruptors or "keep reading" links.
2026-03-06
Matcha Consumption Mismatch
The mismatch with matcha consumption & Gen Z - Coffee Intelligence
“What’s happening with matcha today is essentially the same playbook we’ve seen in specialty coffee: a culturally rich product gets repackaged for mass consumption, prioritizing visual appeal and customization over the craftsmanship that defines it,” she says.
In Japan, matcha is inseparable from the structure of the tea ceremony. The act of preparation – including whisking, serving and receiving – is not simply functional, but philosophical.
Darleen argues that when matcha becomes primarily a takeaway beverage, the loss is contextual as much as sensory.
“These values are foundational, not ornamental. The Japanese tea ceremony isn’t just a preparation method; it’s a philosophy of presence and intentionality that’s been refined over centuries,” she says. “When matcha becomes a grab-and-go beverage primarily, what’s lost isn’t just the ritual. It’s the entire framework that gave the product its cultural significance.”
The Modern Workplace
This point is very understated:
The modern workplace selects heavily for sustained attention to abstract tasks in static environments. This is evolutionarily unusual. Human cognition evolved for movement, social interaction, novelty, and immediate feedback.
2026-03-04
Brainrot is a radical act
brainrot is a radical act - by Adam Aleksic #language #social-media
I’m sitting in a Buddhist temple, listening to monks chant the Heart Sutra. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. Gate gate pāragate pārasaṃgate bodhi svāhā. The words technically have a meaning, but I find myself carried away by the rhythm instead. The mantra washes over me, connecting me to the present moment.
I’m scrolling on Twitter, seeing the same words show up in every post. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. Clavicular. Jestermaxxing. Framemogging. These terms also have a definition, but in practice they’re only funny because they’re funny.
Incel brainrot might not be the path to enlightenment, but there is an important connection between these examples. Any time we repeat a word too much, we become desensitized to its meaning. This phenomenon, called semantic satiation, causes us to attend to form over content. All that matters is how we experience an utterance.
The Heart Sutra teaches that “form is emptiness, emptiness is form.” There is no fixed interpretation of language, but it is precisely in its unfixedness that language reveals its meaning. The beauty of semantic satiation is that it destroys the “containers” of denotation. Instead of using words to connect to something else, we connect to the words themselves—revealing that it was all form, and none of it.
2026-03-03
LLMs as Index Funds
LLMs as Index Funds - by Venkatesh Rao - Contraptions
Love this analogy. Came across this post via Bhuvan's blog post
Foundation models like GPT and Claude now serve as the index funds of language. Trained on enormous corpora of human text, they do not try to innovate. Instead, they track the center of linguistic gravity: fluent, plausible, average-case language. They provide efficient, scalable access to verbal coherence, just as index funds offer broad exposure to market returns. For most users, most of the time, this is enough. LLMs automate fluency the way passive investing automates exposure. They flatten out risk and elevate reliability.
But they also suppress surprise. Like index funds, LLMs are excellent at covering known territory but incapable of charting new ground. The result is a linguistic landscape dominated by synthetic norms: smooth, predictable, uncontroversial. Writing with an LLM is increasingly like buying the market—safe, standardized, and inherently unoriginal.
2026-03-02
Tech’s new generation and the end of thinking
This article is ostensibly about Cluely's founder Roy Lee, but it does a good job eviscerating some of the Silicon Valley mythmaking.
What I discovered, though, is that behind all these small complaints, there’s something much more serious. Roy Lee is not like other people. He belongs to a new and possibly permanent overclass. One of the pervasive new doctrines of Silicon Valley is that we’re in the early stages of a bifurcation event. Some people will do incredibly well in the new AI era. They will become rich and powerful beyond anything we can currently imagine. But other people—a lot of other people—will become useless. They will be consigned to the same miserable fate as the people currently muttering on the streets of San Francisco, cold and helpless in a world they no longer understand. The skills that could lift you out of the new permanent underclass are not the skills that mattered before. For a long time, the tech industry liked to think of itself as a meritocracy: it rewarded qualities like intelligence, competence, and expertise. But all that barely matters anymore. Even at big firms like Google, a quarter of the code is now written by AI. Individual intelligence will mean nothing once we have superhuman AI, at which point the difference between an obscenely talented giga-nerd and an ordinary six-pack-drinking bozo will be about as meaningful as the difference between any two ants. If what you do involves anything related to the human capacity for reason, reflection, insight, creativity, or thought, you will be meat for the coltan mines.
It's hard to read the paragraph below 👇🏽 and not consider it sarcasm. But I have sufficient anecdotal evidence to believe it's not that far from reality.
The future will belong to people with a very specific combination of personality traits and psychosexual neuroses. An AI might be able to code faster than you, but there is one advantage that humans still have. It’s called agency, or being highly agentic. The highly agentic are people who just do things. They don’t timidly wait for permission or consensus; they drive like bulldozers through whatever’s in their way. When they see something that could be changed in the world, they don’t write a lengthy critique—they change it. AIs are not capable of accessing whatever unpleasant childhood experience it is that gives you this hunger. Agency is now the most valuable commodity in Silicon Valley. In tech interviews, it’s common for candidates to be asked whether they’re “mimetic” or “agentic.” You do not want to say mimetic. Once, San Francisco drew in runaway children, artists, and freaks; today it’s an enormous magnet for highly agentic young men. I set out to meet them.
It did not seem like a good idea to me that some of the richest people in the world were no longer rewarding people for having any particular skills, but simply for having agency, when agency essentially meant whatever it was that was afflicting Roy Lee. Unlike Eric Zhu or Donald Boat, Roy didn’t really seem to have anything in his life except his own sense of agency. Everything was a means to an end, a way of fortifying his ability to do whatever he wanted in the world. But there was a great sucking void where the end ought to be. All he wanted, he’d said, was to hang out with his friends. I believed him. He wanted not to be alone, the way he’d been alone for a year after having his offer of admission rescinded by Harvard. For people to pay attention to him. To exist for other people. But instead of making friends the normal way, he’d walked up to strangers and asked whether they wanted to start a company with him, and then he built the most despised startup in San Francisco.
Historic Cafes in Tangier
The Sprudge Guide To Historic Cafes In Tangier, Morocco | Sprudge Coffee #travel
I am totally loving the Sprudge guides, because they also contain some lesser known cities as well (for e.g. Kigali)
Martin Parr photos Rural Ireland
A Fair Day: Martin Parr's Photos of Rural Ireland In the Early 1980s - Flashbak #photography
One of my favorite photographers. Which reminds of this wonderful documentary of his that I matched a while ago
This might as well be a good time to mention that I am absolutely obsessed with photography museums and documentaries about photographers.
2026-02-24
Nobody's ever ready
The Imperfectionist: Nobody's ever ready #anxiety #ai
Nothing better than a fresh newsletter edition from Oliver Burkeman to restart logging after a few weeks of intermittent logging due to work travel and Berlinale binge movie watching.
And even he has decided to address AI in his latest.
I’m not going to link to any of these contagious anxiety-spreading pieces, for the same reason I don’t go around actively sneezing in people’s faces when I catch a cold. But it’s fair to say I find the topic a little triggering. Because this basic stance toward life – the anxious attempt to scramble to a place of psychological safety, to avoid being condemned to disaster and cast into the void – goes back a long way with me. So it all feels rather personal, and important for me to say that you don’t, actually, have to live like this. It won’t make you happier. It probably won’t even aid your career. You have the option of living with vastly more creativity and calm than the anxiety-merchants would have you believe – provided you can summon the strength of mind to screen them out.
The stomach-clench of anxiety isn’t anything like that. Rather, it emerges from the feeling that reality poses a fundamental threat to your security, so that hypervigilance and constant effort will be required to forestall annihilation. It implies that it’ll be very difficult indeed to make it to safety (with the corollary that if you fail, it’ll be because you didn’t try hard enough).
The reason “you’re not ready for what’s coming next”, in other words, is that we’re never ready for what’s coming next. To quote the splendid title of a book on Jewish spirituality by Alan Lew, This is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared. “This” being, of course, the human condition – not the latest subscription product with which OpenAI or Anthropic hope to justify their wild valuations.
Deming vs Drucker
Objectives and constraints – Surfing Complexity #management #organizations
I am also wholeheartedly in the Deming camp
Deming was vehemently opposed to management by objective. Rather, he saw an organization as a system. If you wanted to improve the output of a system, you had to study it to figure out what the limiting factor was. Only once you understood the constraints that limited your system, could you address them by changing the system.
…
I’m in Deming’s camp, but I can understand why Drucker won. Drucker’s approach is much easier to put into practice than Deming’s. Specifically, Drucker gave managers an explicit process they could follow. On the other hand, Deming…, well, here’s a quote from Deming’s book Out of the Crisis:
Eliminate management by objective. Eliminate management by numbers, numerical goals. Substitute leadership.
I can see why a manager reading this might be frustrated with his exhortation to replace a specific process with “leadership”. But understanding a complex system is hard work, and there’s no process that can substitute for that. If you don’t understand the constraints that limit your system, how will you ever address them?
Ironically, I found this via a followup blog entry by the same author where he admits defeat 🙃: Poor Deming never stood a chance – Surfing Complexity
The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films
The Film Students Who Can No Longer Sit Through Films - The Atlantic #attention #crisis
This article struck me especially because I am just coming off a ~25-movie binge at Berlinale. It helped that I was watching it in a movie theater, but I am still glad I retain the attention span to got me through most movies. If anything, the reason I found it hard and occasionally snoozed off in a movie was more due to fatigue than due to inattention.
Everyone knows it’s hard to get college students to do the reading—remember books? But the attention-span crisis is not limited to the written word. Professors are now finding that they can’t even get film students—film students—to sit through movies. “I used to think, If homework is watching a movie, that is the best homework ever,” Craig Erpelding, a film professor at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, told me. “But students will not do it.”
I heard similar observations from 20 film-studies professors around the country. They told me that over the past decade, and particularly since the pandemic, students have struggled to pay attention to feature-length films. Malcolm Turvey, the founding director of Tufts University’s Film and Media Studies Program, officially bans electronics during film screenings. Enforcing the ban is another matter: About half the class ends up looking furtively at their phones.
The professors I spoke with didn’t blame students for their shortcomings; they focused instead on how media diets have changed. From 1997 to 2014, screen time for children under age 2 doubled. And the screen in question, once a television, is now more likely to be a tablet or a smartphone. Students arriving in college today have no memory of a world before the infinite scroll. As teenagers, they spent nearly five hours a day on social media, with much of that time used for flicking from one short-form video to the next. An analysis of people’s attention while working on a computer found that they now switch between tabs or apps every 47 seconds, down from once every two and a half minutes in 2004. “I can imagine that if your body and your psychology are not trained for the duration of a feature-length film, it will just feel excruciatingly long,” USC’s Lippit said. (He also hypothesized that, because every movie is available on demand, students feel that they can always rewatch should they miss something—even if they rarely take advantage of that option.)
2026-02-15
Boy Kibble
Move Over, Girl Dinner. Boy Kibble Has Arrived. - The New York Times #food
Boy kibble — also known as “human kibble” since women eat it, too — is a ruthlessly efficient, male-coded rejoinder to the extemporaneous charms of “girl dinner.” The latter is a TikTok term for the assemblage of light bites that women sometimes cobble together and eat as a meal, with little care for gastronomic coherence. Boy kibble, in contrast, focuses on some nutritional ideal — here a mix of carbs, protein and fiber — that helps one achieve a specific body type or fitness goal. Pleasure-seeking details like flavor and aesthetics are tossed to the side.
Most nights, my dinner is a form of boy kibble, except I didn't make it myself. It's a Hot and Savoury meal packet from Huel. So I guess I can relate a bit.
“In contrast to girl dinner, which is fun, whimsical and creative,” said Ms. Bitar, boy kibble is not “focused on flavor, it’s not focused on joy. It’s focused on efficiency and results.”
2026-02-13
How Courtship Transformed Masculinity
How Courtship Transformed Masculinity - by Alice Evans #romance #relationships #culture #anthropology
Ask an economist what drives progress towards gender equality, they’ll probably emphasise sustained economic growth, contraceptives, and female employment. Talk to a political scientist, hear that it’s all about feminist activism. All valid, but I want to add a culture of female choice, male competition, and marital companionship.
While romantic love is experienced worldwide, there is enormous variation in the extent to which it is celebrated or suppressed. In regions where marriages are arranged by kin or coerced through brutal violence, her wants and welfare count for little. If divorce is stigmatised, she cannot credibly threaten exit and must then endure any abuse.
…
What follows is a speech I performed at my German friends’ wedding: two thousand years of history through the lens of marriage, starting with Ancient Rome to the Reformation, Wars of Religion and subsequent Romanticism, all the way to 1970s counter-cultural liberalisation.
Situationism - what people do is more often a function of their circumstances
Getting the Crab to the Beach - by Josh Zlatkus #evo-psych #evolution #psychology
A few months ago, I wrapped up a long series on human behavior arguing for situationism—the idea that what people do is more often a function of their circumstances than their character. I was pleased to discover afterwards that Angela Duckworth agrees.
In my musings on mental health, I frequently return to images of animals radically out of place: crabs in the canopy, otters in the desert, armadillos in the arctic. What would we learn by studying such animals? One obvious lesson is that if we wanted to help them, we should send them home. It would be a waste of time—or worse—to focus on what they were thinking, feeling, or doing, since these would be the downstream outputs of an animal in the wrong environment.
For example, we could draw all sorts of conclusions by watching a crab scrabble at the smooth surface of a tree branch. Perhaps there is food just under the bark. Maybe it’s a mating ritual or territorial instinct. The correct explanation, of course, would be that the crab is trying, unsuccessfully, to burrow in the sand. Yet we’d have a hell of a time figuring this out if we didn’t already know that crabs belong on the beach.
…
Humans, of course, are crabs in the canopy. We are vacuum cleaners on the roof. This modern world we have built, in the blink of an evolutionary eye, is not our ancestral home. So we live in many ways for which we were not designed—for example, in the constant presence of so many strangers. Yet few people carry this perspective with them, even into fields like therapy, where you might expect it to be foundational. The result is that when distress appears in its various confusing forms, therapists and laypeople rarely treat it as situational pathology—as the noxious byproduct of a poor fit between person and environment.
Millenials vs GenZ
Enjoyed this little dig at GenZ culture (as an elder millenial)
Won't Fix Self Help
"Won't Fix" self help #self-help #self-improvement
I can't read this article (members only!), but I love and wholeheartedly endorse the concept.
I'd like to propose a third option: the reasonable // rational recognition that most of your personal flaws are "Won't Fix" bugs, and the single most productive thing you can do about them is stop trying to patch them.
The self-help industry's entire business model depends on convincing you that every single bug in your system is fixable, that with the right framework, the right habits, the right coach, you'll finally refactor yourself into a clean, well-architected human being. But how many of your core personality traits have actually changed in the last decade?
The honest answer, for most people, is...very fucking few.
I also like the coding analogies used in the post 😊.
Self-improvement culture is a perpetual second-system rewrite of the self. You're constantly trying to architect Human 2.0, the version of you that's disciplined and calm and focused and doesn't check their phone 96 times a day (which is, by the way, the actual average for American adults, according to Asurion's widely cited research). But Human 2.0 never ships. You keep accumulating half-finished refactors and abandoned meditation streaks alongside a growing sense that something is fundamentally wrong with your willpower.
The alternative is the wrapper pattern. When you have a piece of legacy code that works but has an ugly interface, you don't rewrite it. You write a thin layer around it, a wrapper, that presents a clean interface to the rest of the system while leaving the messy internals untouched. The legacy code keeps doing what it always did, and the wrapper translates between the old system and the new requirements.
In Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day Stevens, the butler, reflects on the decades he spent perfecting his professional dignity at the expense of, well, everthing else. His entire life was a refactoring project: eliminate the personal, optimize for service, become the ideal version of what a butler should be. By the end of the novel he's technically excellent and profoundly diminished. He optimized the wrong thing for forty years because he never stopped to ask whether the specification itself was flawed.
Won't Fix is the practice of questioning the specification. Most of the things you're trying to fix about yourself are only problems relative to some imagined ideal of a person you were never going to be. Your distractibility is a bug in the "focused knowledge worker" spec but might be a feature in the "person who notices interesting things and connects them unexpectedly" spec. Your sensitivity and your stubbornness, your tendency to monologue about niche topics at parties: all Won't Fix, and all load-bearing, and all probably okay in the big, heat-death-of-the-universe scheme of all things.
Stop trying to ship Human 2.0. Tag the bugs, write the wrappers, and get back to building something worth building. The most productive version of you probably looks a lot like the current version of you, plus a few well-placed adapter patterns and minus about thirty self-help books worth of guilt about not being somone else.
2026-02-11
LLM Information Inflation
This section from Brandur's latest newsletter made me laugh out loud
A conventional practice for execs at Snowflake was to send out what was called a “snippet”. Usually on a weekly cadence, these were emails containing personal notes on ongoing action and details on what their divisions were working on. The first thing you notice about “snippets” is the sheer volume of them – in the default set of on-boarding mailing lists you start getting them from every part of the organization on day one. The second thing you notice about snippets is their length – comprehensive detail, painstaking even. Essays once a week.
One might even say a suspicious amount of detail. Detail that includes a few too many tables, emoji, and emdashes. Yes, most of these were undoubtedly LLM-generated.
But LLM use isn’t just reserved for execs. In fact, Gemini was on by default, so everyone who received one of these long scrawls got a short, three point summary on top of it. The summary was so concise and so convenient that most recipients (including yours truly) read nothing further.
You have to step back and appreciate the absurdity of this situation. An executive enters three lines to produce a small novella which he then bulk emails to the rest of the organization. Receivers get an automatic three line summary that … looks a lot like what the sender wrote in the first place. The novella’s read by no one except a few stragglers who aren’t in on the joke yet. Is this progress?
There’s a punch line about information theory in here somewhere.
2026-02-10
Raw Japanese Denim Guide
Raw Japanese Denim: A Beginner's Guide #jeans #selvedge
Just putting it here for future reference. I currently own a pair of Nudie jeans made from Japanese raw denim, and another pair of bespoke Japanese raw denim jeans stitched at Monks of Method. Since over six months ago, I have only been alternating between these two jeans for my bottomwear. I haven't gone back to any of my other bottomwear in that time, no cap!
So I guess it will be a while before I have to go back and buy another pair of denims. Which is a bit of a bummer because some of these jeans look really cool. Maybe I can donate one of my jeans and get one of these instead, just to keep things fresh.
2026-02-04
Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 Mondays
Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 Mondays #life #finitude
We plan our lives like we're editing a movie trailer.
The trip to Portugal, or the product launch, or the transformation photo at the gym. The big moment where everything crystallizes into meaning. We accumulate these peaks in our imagination, and then arrange them into a montage that proves our existence mattered, and that we really lived.
Then we spend the actual substance of our lives doing laundry and feeling crappy about it...
If you work a standard career from twenty-five to sixty-five, you'll experience roughly 2,080 Mondays. That's 2,080 alarm clocks set against your biological preferences and 2,080 inbox avalanches, plus 2,080 instances of navigating traffic or public transit while still metabolically processing the weekend. Add in the Tuesdays through Fridays, and you're looking at roughly 10,400 ordinary workdays across a career. Meanwhile, if you're fortunate enough to take two weeks of vacation annually for forty years, you'll accumulate 560 vacation days. The ratio is roughly 19:1 in favor of the mundane.
So we get to a question worth sitting with:
Do you actually like your average Monday?
The psychologist Philip Zimbardo has a framework called "time perspective theory." People differ in how much mental weight they assign to past, present, and future. Future-oriented people tend to achieve more by conventional metrics, but they also exhibit a consistent pattern of sacrificing present satisfaction for hypothetical future rewards. When researchers follow these people over time, they find that the anticipated future keeps receding and the scaffolding remains permanent.
Seneca diagnosed this exact pathology in first-century Rome. He observed that people guard their property vigilantly but waste their time freely, treating it as an infinite resource. "You act like mortals in all that you fear, and like immortals in all that you desire," he wrote.
The barely tolerated Monday is a down payment on a life that never arrives, a perpetual advance payment for goods that don't ship.
human infohazards
human infohazards - by Adam Aleksic - The Etymology Nerd #linguistics #culture #social-media
Traditionally, we’ve used the model of a virus to describe how ideas spread. I’ve already written about memes as if they can “infect” new “hosts” along an epidemiological network, and we literally use the phrase “going viral” to describe internet popularity.
I don’t think the idea of viral memetics is quite right to describe what’s happening here, so I’ll be referring to these infohazards through the framework of parasitic memetics. Unlike a virus, which just replicates and moves on, the parasite lives inside the host of the internet, feeding on the resources of our attention. There is a clear formula to a parasitic meme:
- Do something terrible
- People criticize you, bringing you attention
- Attention brings profit and influence, making it easier to do more terrible things
- Repeat
And yet there’s a fundamental difference between this problem and the atomic bomb: one infohazard is an irrefutable fact of nature, and the other is entirely dependent on the current structure of social media platforms. Parasitic memes are only possible online because everything is optimized around attention metrics. Beyond easily circumventable terms of service, there is no measurement rewarding kindness or social cohesion. This means that, if you disregard your own morality, the internet becomes a game you can optimize, where you “win” through any content possible, especially if someone criticizes you.
Parasitic memes are uniquely enabled by the ease of distribution. Newspapers and television channels had plenty of problems, but at least those forms of media had institutional gatekeepers preventing obviously evil content from being transmitted. Those barriers are now gone, and more people are finding out that they can use the disconnect to their advantage.