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2026-11-14
Jazz Kissas
A music lover’s guide to Tokyo
I went down a rabbithole after visiting Tea and Vinyl today, and discovered that this listening bar phenomenon that I discovered recently was inspired by jazz listening bars in Japan. How does that not surprise me 🤷🏽♂️😊
Jazz kissas are a purely Japanese invention. Originating in the late 1920s, and popular throughout the ’60s and ’70s, they went into decline as home audio systems became more accessible. But the past decade has seen a surge of interest in the jazz cafés from young record collectors and audiophiles. In an age when music is a digital utility piped in through earbuds, visiting kissas has become popular among music fans in Japan and something of a pilgrimage for Westerners like me—all of us looking for a chance to experience listening as an act of veneration, appreciation, and fellowship.
The photographs in the article are lovely!
Tea and Vinyl
This time at Tea and Vinyl, I got a chance to listen to some awesome tracks curated by an awesome DJ, which led me down the rabbithole in the first place.
I was shazam-ing the tracks constantly because nearly every one of them resonated with. Later I fed the tracks to ChatGPT and asked it to analyse the general theme of the music. It came back with some interesting findings
The common theme is warm, organic, jazz-influenced music that sits somewhere between ambient experimentation and groove-oriented electronic music.
These eight releases don't belong to a single genre. Instead, they share a particular musical aesthetic: understated, textural, sophisticated, often playful, and more concerned with atmosphere and feel than conventional song structures.
I'd characterize the overall selection as:
Leftfield listening music — spanning ambient, modern classical, downtempo, acid jazz, dub, instrumental hip-hop, and deep house.
The most useful terms for discovering similar music are leftfield downtempo, organic electronica, Balearic, nu-jazz, ambient jazz, street soul, and experimental dub.
But I'd summarize the actual aesthetic as:
Warm, understated, adventurous music with a preference for sophisticated grooves, delicate textures, and unhurried musical development.
The interesting distinction is that this selection spans both music for introspection and music for movement, without sacrificing subtlety in either direction. That's the strongest thread connecting these releases.
2026-11-13
Portatec Alpha
All You Need to Know About Polartec Alpha, the Fleece Final Boss #hiking #clothing
Polartec Alpha is an ultralight, highly breathable fleece that's changing the way the outdoor industry designs. Here's everything you need to know about it.
I ended up down a rabbit hole of ultralight fabrics for hiking which also look good off the trail.
I was particularly impressed by this Ultralight Alpha Midlayer from HikerKind
Personal Site Tweaks
Made some tweaks to the personal site to bring it up to speed. The most consequential change in my opinion is changing the section header that said Coding to Artisanal Code. It's the end of an era 🤷🏽♂️.
2026-11-12
Technological Progress
Ideally, we’d evaluate technologies by whether they produce net long-term improvements in human well-being. But even if we could answer that extraordinarily difficult question, we’d face another problem: controlling their adoption. Technologies often spread less through collective deliberation than through competitive imitation. People adopt them because they confer advantages, but once enough people do, abstaining can become a disadvantage (looking at you, smartphones).
This makes evolutionary sense. Natural selection didn’t design us to maximize happiness; it shaped us to pursue outcomes that promoted reproductive success. Technology is one means to those ends. Our experiences matter, from evolution’s perspective, chiefly insofar as they steer adaptive behavior. It is behavior that leaves traces in the evolutionary record through its effect on genes; our experience disappears like soft tissue.
The Botox arms race, then, can produce a social dilemma: everyone might be better off abstaining, yet each person may be better off participating once others do. Escaping such dilemmas requires coordination. As Rob has argued, shared rules can “eliminate incentives to make individually advantageous but collectively undesirable choices.” Bans and taxes are two ways of attempting to align those incentives.
But coordination needn’t come from government. Moral norms and cultural institutions, including religion, can also help align individual and collective interests. Then again, culture can just as easily encourage the competition it might otherwise restrain. Consider some familiar American imperatives: Work hard and get ahead. Improve yourself. Don’t settle. Seize new opportunities. Make your own choices. Excellent advice for individual success; less useful when the race itself is the problem.
Ending with a succinct but profound thought.
And so we keep running—not always because we’re going somewhere, but often because, in the absence of the group figuring out how to stop, we as individuals can’t afford to.
AI Job Impact
Working It newsletter Nov 11 2026
This is an interesting grounded take on the AI jobs landscape by a mainstream media publication. Otherwise in the circles I hang out people are predicting a full blown apocalypse.
A big new forecast on job gains and losses shows an almost-neutral long-term impact from AI: a net gain of 1.7mn jobs by 2030. That’s made up of separate AI-related job losses (8.9mn) and gains (10.6mn). If true, it suggests that reports of an AI jobpocalyse are, perhaps, overstated 🤞🏼.
Helen Poitevin, distinguished VP analyst, digital workplace at Gartner, is behind this latest research. She told me that India and China are excluded from the numbers because of the “massive size of their agricultural workforce, which would skew some of the analysis”. The resulting prediction is interesting in its lack of impact: AI-related job losses by 2030, Helen said, could affect just “1.8 per cent of the workforce, so it’s actually quite small in terms of numbers”.
The bigger projected impact is on the shape and content of our work. Just over 20 per cent of workers (435.5mn) will have their roles radically changed by AI. “In the next few years we will be in a rebalancing and recalibrating time,” she said.
While the longer-term future may be relatively sunny 😎, today’s job seekers and would-be job changers face a big problem. Gartner highlights that the current recruitment market is essentially in hibernation 🐻: employers are “deferring” new job creation because of uncertainty over the impact of AI, or general economic conditions. In 2026, Gartner estimates 1.3mn positions were “deferred”, and that will rise to a collective 5mn by 2030. As an example of deferral, Helen said, a company might decide to hire 20 new staff rather than an initial plan to create 40 jobs.
Restraining hiring in this way is likely to be a short-term plan, Helen said. “Over time, we’ve seen many organisations that are more advanced in their AI strategies doing the corrective hiring” by taking on more people. For job seekers, it’s painful now, but Gartner’s overall jobs prediction is optimistic.
Men Are Ready to Be Normal Again
Men Are Ready to Be Normal Again
Logging it here just for the title.
Young Men Swung to the Left, Hard. No One’s Talking About the Reason Why
2026-11-11
Louise Carmen
The Birkin of Leather Journals #notebooks
Learned of a new brand today. Before this, the only real brand in my headspace around journals was TRAVELER’S COMPANY - トラベラーズカンパニー
For the journaling community, a Louise Carmen has become a coveted accessory. But for those unfamiliar, a leather journal that runs the same price as a midrange designer bag might come as something of a shock.
Fans can customize the notebooks, starting at $160 for a basic version of the trifold leather cover, with embossing, different styles of paper, and charms, which can run hundreds of dollars more. Multiple thin notebooks fit neatly inside the reusable leather cover, secured in place by elastic bands, and can be swapped out and rearranged indefinitely. Those who buy it see the journal folio as an heirloom worth investing in.
The French artisanal-leather stationery and notebook brand was founded in 2016 by Nathalie Valmary; her husband, Fabien; and their daughter, Victoire and has steadily grown in popularity via social media. Videos documenting the purchasing experience often gain hundreds of thousands of views, and Americans are now responsible for 60 percent of the brand’s online orders, Valmary told CNBC earlier this year.
2026-11-10
Odyssey and Ramayana comparisions
The Odyssey and the Ramayana: The Comparison That Won’t Die | The Juggernaut
This keeps coming up, and the article does a good job of drawing out the comparisions. But at the same time, it kind of waffles around a bit and doesnt get precise about the claims around a common origin for these epics, or the exact reasons why so many aspects of the character and the plotlines appear similar.
On the other hand, historians don’t feel confident enough to suggest that the texts are the result of cultural contact. “I think it has to be some sort of mix of both, probably some elements of diffusion and some elements of polygenesis,” Henry said, the latter referring to the independent development of storylines across geographies. “Exile, transformation, and victorious return is maybe almost by definition, a great adventure story.”
Sometimes, in our excitement to connect to each other, we might just go too far, Rao posited. “The Indian audience, they’re trying to connect,” he emphasized. “But I think it’s also important to look at the differences.”
So, yes, these texts aren’t carbon copies, nor do they try to be. So why, even after all these years, are we so obsessed with finding links between them?
Unfortunately, or fortunately, we’re just following in the footsteps of scholars before us. In 1784, philologist William Jones delivered a lecture titled “On the Gods of Greece, Italy, and India.” In 1873, German Indologist Albrecht Weber argued that Valmiki’s Ramayana had several links to Homeric texts. The bow contest, he wrote, “naturally reminds us of the bow of Odysseus.” He added, “the rape of Helen and the siege of Troy have served as a model for the corresponding incidents in the poem of Valmiki,” referring to Sita’s abduction and Lanka’s siege. “The same gods are invoked alike by Ravana and by Rama, just as is done by the Greeks and the Trojans in Homer.”
While others scholars posited that Homer was influenced by Valmiki, Weber’s hypothesis was that Valmiki was influenced by Homer. Weber believed earlier versions of the Ramayana didn’t include Sita’s abduction, Ravana, and Lanka’s invasion — supporting his theory that these elements were added after hearing Homer’s epics. “I do not indeed imagine that [Valmiki] had himself studied Homer, or even that he must have been aware of the existence of the Homeric poems,” he wrote. “I content myself rather with the simple assumption that in consequence of the mutual relations, which Alexander’s expedition into India brought about…some kind of knowledge of the substance of the Homeric story found its way to India.”
In 1893, another German Indologist, Hermann Jacobi, wrote Das Ramayana, countering Weber’s theories. He called the Ramayana “the unified work of an outstanding poet,” dating it between the 8th to 6th centuries B.C., contemporary to The Odyssey. For him, the “abductions” of Helen of Troy and Sita didn’t prove anything. The mechanism is also different: Sita is violently abducted, while Helen leaves consensually. “Since the abduction of women occurs almost everywhere at a certain stage of culture,” Jacobi wrote, “it is difficult to see why Indian legend could not have employed it independently as a motif.” He also pointed out that the bow was a common weapon in ancient India, so an archery contest for the hero could easily arise independently. “One searches in vain for such signs of borrowing; on the contrary, everything in the Indian narrative is fashioned differently from the Greek one.”
Which story came first, then, has been a question that has plagued us for centuries. Whom you choose to believe, Weber or Jacobi, is simply a reflection of which tradition you consider capable of ingenuity (why not both?). “That the Hindus produced such masterpieces of literature, closely rivaling Homer in beauty and in the power of portraying human emotions, is testimony to the worth and richness of the Hindu civilization,” Properzio wrote in 2009.
2026-11-09
Loneliness Epidemic and Architecture
Can we build ourselves out of a loneliness epidemic?
In 1932, Frank Lloyd Wright lamented that urban life had atomised into misery, describing the “anxious rent” that modern industrial cities such as New York forced their residents to pay. In his manifesto The Disappearing City, the US architect argued that their design reflected a historic urge to build fortresses, which stopped people from relating to one another.
Loneliness might primarily be a social problem, but it is an architectural one too. As Lloyd Wright observed, loneliness can be caused and reinforced by the shape of our streets and the design of our housing.
Japan could serve as a warning. In Tokyo, micro-apartments — some as small as 9 square metres — are increasingly capitalising on limited space as rents soar, up six per cent year on year, according to data from Savills. They replace the multigenerational arrangements that once kept loneliness from the door. Forty per cent of Japan’s residents reported feeling lonely this year, according to the Japanese Cabinet Office, the third highest in the world after South Korea and Turkey, according to the Human Index.
The article makes for grim reading, but for some reason I loved the photo that accompanied it
2026-11-08
Fade Farms
The Farms Where Vintage T-Shirts Grow #clothing
The warmer climate in England this past summer gave rise to the cultivation of some unlikely crops: tea, cantaloupe and vintage T-shirts.
William Cotterill has been tending to this last variety on a 15-acre plot of land about a half-hour from his shop, Millennial Vintage, in Stockport, England. The field is dotted with crucifix-like posts draped in old band tees, which he hoses down with salt water and dries in the sun. He repeats this process twice a week for six weeks, then dismounts the garments once they’ve achieved a satisfactory level of discoloration.
Admiring his handiwork, he said he’s had “fantastic harvests” this year on his “fade farm.”
2026-11-05
Friendship
I often hold on to some kind of hope that I can actually erase my past. I want to pretend that all the years that have passed—in particular, all the difficulty and challenge, especially the challenges that didn’t have a “happy” or “palatable” ending—simply never happened. One arena in which this tendency to erase my history takes place is in friendship itself. As in: new friends give me the chance to pretend my past doesn’t exist. And to be clear, there is something relieving about this – each new moment and each new friendship really is an opportunity to begin again. It’s very exciting to connect with new people and give them the most mature, most confident form of me, without having them see my little tucked-away drawer of all the experiences and actions that I’m ashamed of. But over time I’ve found that there is a shallowness to this way of connecting with others. There is a deeper and more honest joy in connecting more deeply with the people who have actually seen my ugly, messy drawer and have chosen to remain with me.
I am not sure I entirely agree with the sentiment above, but it did make me think because I have been that person who has constantly attempted to erase my past.
Waiting in line
When did waiting in line become the activity?
…Getting her hands on one of its elaborate flavoured iced drinks took around four hours, she says, but that long stretch of waiting has since paid off. “It was very much worth my time because the content I created at it has gotten me a lot of paid collabs and new connections with brands,” she says. “It was an inspiring and motivating way to start my time in New York.”
Once something to complain about, waiting in line for routine purchases has become a way to signal that you are part of something. Blame a lack of third spaces, but young people are queuing down the street for everything from froyo to Warmies plushies to Rare Beauty and Tank Air pop-ups. Even if you’re not posting “spend the day with me” videos from the queue – which many people do – you can simply walk past and post a video of everyone waiting. There are even entire dedicated accounts asking what people in New York are queuing for, and whether it’s “line-worthy”. So, when did waiting in line become the activity?
In an algorithmic culture, it’s easy to fall into the trap of feeling like you’ve “discovered” something new and exciting, only to show up and realise that thousands of other people were served the same video at the same time. This, naturally, shapes our experience of collective taste, where everyone is reading the same viral book, buying the same tank top and waiting for the same feed-worthy matcha, rather than stumbling into a local shop and finding something unexpected for themselves.
2026-11-04
Finding my thing
if you feel behind right now don’t worry you aren’t
this resonated with me today morning
But really I’m trying to find something. My thing. And if I do what I’ve done, I won’t find it. I need to change it up. So from now until the end of the year, the formats will vary, the content, even the days + frequency of when I post. I’m in experimental mode. The digital equivalent of going to Thailand, slinging on those awful trousers and finding myself.
I need to post what I’m interested in. For me to continue doing this for a long time, I have to make these for me. So what am I interested in?
I’ve stopped using Grok Bot for everything, except to ping me when Carlos Alcaraz is playing. I’m reading more long-form. I’m consuming less slop (and spending a little less time on X). I’m recording a voice-note every morning for a minimum of 10 minutes, and not doing anything with the transcript. I’m letting things percolate, noticing what I come back to.
Agents give you answers to everything. But if we’re ‘soul-searching’ or trying to connect the dots, an answer presented to us may not be the right path. Even if it’s a reasonable one. All I’m ‘optimising’ for here is - what do I really want to do? And noticing what I keep coming back to when I take the time to think on it.
This is not an ‘anti-ai’ stance at all. I love AI. I can do so much more than I ever could. It’s a tool though, not a person, and I use it as such. You probably need a grand total of one tool (an agent). Instead of looking at everything as an opportunity to optimise, I want to use AI for fun.
I want to use AI for fun . YES!
2026-11-03
as some wise person on Twitter once said, via Helen DeWitt: "procrastination is how you preserve the fantasy of your potential"
Supplements
My method was tripartite. I reasoned that though we can’t be absolutely sure, a supplement was, on balance, likely worth taking if three things held. First, we have a plausible evolutionary story about how we originally evolved in an environment with more of it, and our modern diets do not. Second, there is a logical, not obviously disputed, story about how it works. Third, the balance of evidence suggests that consuming the nutrient at least correlates with good health, and ideally well-designed trials show that it actually causes good health.
With such a rigorous method, how did everything fall apart? It’s a sad story. Ultimately, it was both a bad methodology and I applied it badly. The core problem is the same problem for all theorizing, the same problem the methodology of science was designed to solve: it is very easy to validate one’s tender hypotheses by looking carefully for validating evidence. Another perhaps equally big problem is that most science is nearly useless.
But there was a more profound problem. People like the wise Stuart Ritchie and my colleague Saloni Dattani had been telling me for ages that science was overloaded with complete nonsense, which I accepted on an intellectual level but had not really absorbed into my intuitions. My feeling had always been that we could still draw conclusions if we had a big enough pile of papers. But now I have come to believe that something like 90 percent of research is nearly valueless.
Just as Peatism was undermining my emotional investment in supplementation, an intellectual justification for supplement scepticism appeared in the form of a blog post by Milky Eggs. The average paper in nutrition science is so bad, because of the usual range of poor research practices ranging from fraud to p-hacking, that even large bodies of research papers can have not just the wrong magnitude of effect, but the wrong sign. It is surprisingly easy to produce dozens of papers showing something false, and what’s more, there is a bandwagon effect, and people do it all the time.
2026-11-02
Mood of the day
Very relatable at the moment for me.
2026-10-31
Letting Go
What it actually means to let go
For the sake of this discussion, let’s divide the self into two parts: the elephant and the rider. The elephant is our emotional/instinctive/physical/unconscious self. The rider is our cognitive/rational/planning/judging self.
For many people, this allowing motion is most familiar from moments of physical or social abandon. Like:
- Dancing intuitively
- Saying the stupid joke that floats into your mind as soon as it arises
- Hitting things with a baseball bat in a rage room
- Surrendering into intense physical intimacy
- Allowing your body to “walk itself” during a long walk
- Falling into a rhythm in exercise
Though different in mood and intensity, all of these examples share the feeling of yielding to the process. This is what you’re looking for. Yield to the flow of experience, while remaining still. Allow breathing, feeling, perceiving, to be as they want to be.
Loved the diagram accompanying the explanation above
2026-10-30
Chris Arnade on reading novels
I read novels for entertainment, but also to learn about culture because they reflect the societies that produce them, offering an ethnographic portrait of a place and time that can be hard to access by other means, especially in the distant past.
I’m particularly interested in the archetypes they reveal — the array of roles a society makes available, the models of personhood we can inhabit. Think of character selection in a video game.
These characters change from place to place and through time — novels both portray them and can change them. National stereotypes are no longer in vogue (deservedly so when they’re used to judge individuals), but they are largely correct. They are folk ethnography, a shorthand summary of the most popular choices on a culture’s character-select screen. The Japanese salaryman, the entrepreneurial American, and the English pub-dwellers are caricatures, but they are caricatures of the most popular roles available.
I’ve written several times before about my belief that every culture does this, because it’s one of the most consequential ways thick culture1 shapes life. Humans are cultural creatures, imbued with the ability to live any type of life, but only choosing to live one. Unlike any other animal, we hold the potential for many different selves, yet we settle into just one, and that self is a manifestation of where and when we grow up.
Yet, there are plenty of differences beyond appearance, embedded into the core of who we are, and how we see ourselves — our work ethic, concepts of honor, relationship to authority, attitude toward family obligations, definition of a successful life, conception of good and evil, and our understanding of beauty, art, and leisure.
For several decades it became intellectually fashionable to try and find human cultural universals, but in the end anthropologists found none. Or none that weren’t, as Clifford Geertz noted, either too trivial (we all need food) or too abstract (we all have a sense of justice) to divine much of anything about the human condition.
That doesn’t mean any group is not human, or without a soul (I am a Catholic who believes in universal human dignity after all), but that becoming one big happy global family isn’t an easy task, certainly not one that’s a shared Coke away.
Any traveler knows this, especially modern travelers, because while globalization has rendered our physical landscapes similar, you still feel like a stranger in a strange land. When in a foreign culture you are still an alien, and with that comes all sorts of misunderstandings, confusions, and imbalances3.
2026-10-29
Work-life balance
There’s no such thing as “work-life balance”
Work-life balance is unrealistic. That’s why I aim for satisfaction. And making practical progress in these three domains: health, work, and relationships. The time split is uneven. But that doesn’t matter. Because balance is the wrong target. The goal is to feel good in all three areas. I try to protect what matters in my health and relationships. And do my best work. The fundamental rule is full presence. I’ve stopped measuring myself against a standard I can’t sustain.
The Future of Work
Working It Newsletter Oct 28 20226
2026-10-26
Sleeping after Caffeine
Biohackers Found A Way To Fall Sleep After Coffee (Maybe Forever?) | Sprudge Coffee
Here’s the thing. Biohackers are tired. You would be too if you had to wake up at 3:00am to cold plunge, get in a HIIT workout, sun your butthole, and record multiple podcast episodes before the market opens and you can start day-trading AI companies. If you’re going to stay on that grind until 8:00pm you’re going to need multiple hits of caffeine throughout the day. But you also have to sleepmaxx and that means getting to bed at 10:00pm sharp, so what are you to do? You turn to rutaecarpine.
As reported by Scientific American, many biohackers are using the supplement due to its ability to rapidly flush caffeine out of the body, thus mitigating the length of the effects. Rutaecarpine works by causing the liver to produce more of the enzyme CYP1A2, which breaks down caffeine. Thus the more CYP1A2 you have, the faster you can nullify caffeine’s effects.
The Importance of Friction
Why a world without friction is a world without progress | Aeon Essays
In conversations, few words catch my attention faster than ‘friction’ – and especially talk of making things frictionless. From the workplace to grocery shopping, our societies seem to be striving to remove friction from everything. The motivation appears to be that decreasing resistance makes life easier and smoother.
Having spent a career as a tribologist, studying friction, wear and lubrication scientifically, I have some opinions on this. I’ll confess that, in most of my career, I too have sought to reduce friction, developing new materials, designs or even instrumentation in order to lower friction in a jet engine or reduce emissions from your car. However, I’ve also found myself trying to figure out how to increase friction to remove plaque on teeth.
The reality is that friction, despite seeming so antagonistic, is necessary and even productive. The force that resists motion has, since humans first struck a spark from a stone, been the very thing that propels us forward. And this paradox offers a lens through which to reread humanity’s entire technological history.
Brain Stacking
What is brain stacking? TikTok's latest trend wants you to put down your phone
TikTok has a new suggestion for anyone worried that endless scrolling has turned their brain into mush: Pick up a book. Or a crossword puzzle. Or a Sudoku. Better yet, stack them all together.
It's called "brain stacking," and the idea is pretty simple. Instead of reaching for your phone whenever you have a spare moment, you keep a collection of books, puzzles, journals, and other mentally stimulating activities within arm's reach. Think of it as a little library of things to do when you're bored that don't involve staring at another screen.
And in an era when "brain rot" has become part of our everyday vocabulary, it's not hard to understand the appeal.
Dark Nutrition
The Proponents of ‘Dark Nutrition’ Think Everything You Know About Food Is Wrong
When I first started thinking about these people, I had just turned 31. I ate in a way that I considered normal and at least loosely healthful: I cooked at home and focused on vegetables and whole foods, though there were plenty of French fries and beer around the edges. But as my friends and I made our way into our 30s, I noticed people starting to pay more attention to health and wellness, adopting various diets and “protocols.” There seemed to be an infinite supply of options circulating online, some of them wildly experimental. When I described my fascination with the more outlandish ones to a friend, she forwarded me a PDF of Ray Peat’s “Nutrition for Women,” an esoteric book whose principles are echoed by some of today’s diet influencers. Ah, my friend said, dark nutrition.
That was it: The term seemed to encompass everything from Kelly Pi’s eating to the people I’d seen promoting the health benefits of Coca-Cola. Dark nutrition wasn’t a specific diet; it was a style of thinking about food and health. Its adherents had concluded that the usual sources of authority — doctors, public health officials, food executives, pharmaceutical corporations — could not be trusted. The old order that told us to eat our vegetables was discarded. New ideas emerged, via podcasts and Instagram accounts and message boards, to fill the void. These perspectives didn’t all fit together; there were arguments over low fat versus high fat, low carb versus high sugar, Silicon Valley biohacking versus strains of naturopathy that approached mysticism. Still, these realms collided and overlapped. “The raw-milk guys and homesteading girls are watching each other’s reels now,” says Sami Reiss, who writes a popular newsletter about nutrition and wellness. “Whatever walls existed between those groups are disappearing.”
2026-10-24
Stickers
Very relatable
2026-10-22
Groupish Fads
As the sparks fly upward, we complexify
At this point in the thinkboi Substackosphere, most people have encountered Kegan’s theory of adult development. The core of this idea is: adults don’t stop mentally developing at puberty. Instead, throughout our lives, we advance through stages of mental complexity, as our environment demands it. Each stage of development is a shift in how we compose reality—where we get our notion of truth, and how we construct our identity.
These stages are:
1, the impulsive mode (young children)—very little split between subject and object, you are totally merged with your wants and feelings, you act when there’s an impulse to act.
2, the imperial mode (adolescents, maybe 10% of adults)—life is about meeting your own needs, other people are experienced as antagonists or allies in this effort.
3, the socialized mode (over 50% of adults)—what is good and true is judged by the feelings of others. Emphasis on relationships, fitting in, inhibiting desires.
4, the self-authored mode (less than 50% of adults)—where what is good and true is judged by an inner compass. Emphasis on authenticity, consistency, reconnecting with fully owned desires.
5, the self-transforming mode (a few %)—where the inner compass has been seen as only one of infinite potential systems, each with upsides and limitations. Emphasis on fluidity, paradox, meaning-making as an ongoing activity.
Around every idea, a groupish fad will exist
Have you ever wondered why, in Buddhist meditation circles, the stated idea is to deconstruct self-identity, but everyone talks the same, as if the real point is becoming the dullest vegetarian possible? Or why “contrarian first-principle thinkers” in the Bay, 6 years ago, all had the same ideas about what kinds of business to start? Or why there’s such a thing as “therapy culture,” which has little to do with what typically goes on in analyst’s offices, but is rather a watered-down collection of speech norms developed on social networks, used to torture hapless single men?
Kegan ends our confusion. There is an elegant reading of the above phenomena: for people in a socialized mode, ideas exist as components of group identities. When the Zen teacher says to people in the socialized mode, “when you meet the Buddha on the road, kill the Buddha,” what the socialized mode pupils hear is, “got it, we should act like our Buddha-killing teacher.”
In other words, every philosophy that advocates individual self-development will get codified, by its Stage 3 adherents, into an aesthetic, a set of collectively enforced priorities.
Dogmatism is a feature of humanity, not something that can be debugged
People’s realities are constituted by dogmatism, of differing levels of sophistication. In the socialized mode, the dogmatism is tribal. In the self-authored mode, the dogmatism is a system of truth, which organizes perception well enough, but makes certain thoughts unthinkable. Relatively few people abandon the prospect of a rigid system of values—and, when they do, it’s mostly as they approach middle age, in response to life’s increasing complexity, not an education about critical thinking.
And, this is Good, Actually. Do you think you’d be able to teach a band of rowdy teenagers why group cohesion is a good idea, via philosophical reasoning?
Recently, while I was commuting in New York, I marveled at the harmony of civilization, how so many with disparate priorities can peacefully coexist in public. On a given subway car, you have young Marxists who feel that society is being torn apart by capitalists, and corporate lawyers working out the multinational wranglings of giant enterprises. Both maintain this truce without thinking, keeping conflict mostly in the realm of Twitter or the voting booth. As anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy pointed out, if you put a bunch of rival chimpanzees on a cross-country flight, you’d have a massacre on landing. But a cross-country flight of rival humans is, like, every flight. If people didn’t have a baked-in tendency towards groupthink we would tear each other to shreds. As it is, our default tendency is to say “bless you” when our enemy sneezes.
2026-10-20
GenZ protests
Gen Z are taking to the streets around the world – here’s why
Something’s happening in the streets. This weekend, the world’s youth seemingly erupted into protest: teenagers and students mobilised across France and Belgium; young Albanians called for their prime minister’s resignation; and India’s youth-led Cockroach movement continued to challenge controversial changes to voter rolls. In Santiago, protesters marked the anniversary of Chile’s 2019 uprising by marching against government spending cuts. Elsewhere, crowds packed the streets of Lisbon and Milan to protest soaring living costs, while demonstrations in Brazil and the US turned attention towards democracy.
From classrooms to the ballot box, we explore what’s driving the unrest – and what protesters are demanding.
2026-10-18
Monstrous times
Came across this quote originally from Antonio Gramsci and embellished by Slavoj Žižek
The old world is dying, the new world struggles to be born, and now is the time of monsters.
From this article: Six Collisions for Protocol Monsters
2026-10-17
Hotspan
Forget Healthspan. Midlife Men Face Pressure to Extend ‘Hotspan’
Americans have become obsessed with longevity, extending not just our lifespan but also our “healthspan” — how long we live healthfully and happily. As a result, what middle age looks like has shifted too, thanks to everything from skincare to surgery. If we feel young and healthy on the inside, why wouldn’t we want to look that way on the outside? Now we’re all about extending our “hotspan.”
This perspective shift is more substantial for aging men, upon whom pop culture and society have traditionally set lower expectations of health and appearance. (This was explained most brilliantly, and unprintably, in an unforgettable Inside Amy Schumer sketch from 2015.) Millions now tune into “manosphere” podcasts extolling the importance — nay, necessity — of keeping up one’s vitality. And it’s about time: Women, of course, have felt pressure to stay hot forever since … forever.
2026-10-14
Perry Mehrling RIP
Perry Mehrling is no more and I teared up a little today morning when I learnt of his passing. His series of lectures on Money and Banking were a huge influence on me several years ago. I use his quote "Liquidity kills you quick" all the time with unsuspecting folks who sometimes don't realise how profound that statement really is.
Superstar podcasts are Silicon Valley’s way of talking to itself
Superstar podcasts are Silicon Valley’s way of talking to itself
All share an in-crowd mystique bordering on incestuousness. In April OpenAI reportedly spent $100m-200m to buy then-18-month-old TBPN (though there was no mention of the affiliation during Mr Altman’s interview). The “All-In” hosts are self-described “besties” with many of their billionaire interviewees. In San Francisco Mr Patel has shared digs with Anthropic’s researchers. They are fascinated by AI, which they talk about with passionate intensity and expertise. They are also an echo chamber, with a tin ear at times to the concerns of the rest of America.
But the rise of social media and the growing power and wealth of big tech generated a rift between Silicon Valley and news outlets. Mr Battelle says that parts of the tech establishment started to view traditional media as “anti-American” for questioning the “dominance of the tech hierarchy”. For their part, old media, whose business model has been hurt by the tech giants, sometimes smell of sour grapes. Podcasters, who share their guests’ techno-optimism, provide a friendlier platform.
Instead, AI is at the centre of their discussions. Unlike many parts of America, they treat it as almost the only topic worth discussing. But this obsession has further pushed Silicon Valley into a “monoculture”, says David Senra, an influential podcaster. Recently he has been to tech dinners where conversation veers only between AI optimism and doomerism. “It sounds like they are all reading the same tweets,” he says.
If all else fails, they can podcast from Mars. But will people still want to listen to them?
Learning as a social activity
Want to be a lifelong learner? Don’t go it alone | Psyche Ideas
The internet is full of resources for self-directed learning: for any subject, you can easily find blog posts about essential texts, links to university syllabi, and hours of YouTube lectures. When I attempted to make use of these guides, however, I often found myself disengaged and unfocused. I chastised myself for scrolling through social media while watching online lectures, or forgetting most of the ideas inside the books I read.
The problem, however, wasn’t my attention span. It was my approach: I was struggling because I saw learning as a solitary pursuit.
My interest in self-directed learning eventually led me to the Brazilian philosopher Paulo Freire, one of the most influential educational theorists of the 20th century. In his impassioned manifesto Pedagogy of the Oppressed (1968), he criticised the idea that ‘the teacher teaches and the students are taught … the teacher knows everything and the students know nothing.’ True learning, Freire believed, could be accomplished only ‘through the restless, impatient, continuing, hopeful inquiry human beings pursue in the world, with the world, and with each other.’
…But stories like these helped me realise that a formal education is, for many, only the beginning of one’s intellectual and creative life. I began, slowly but surely, to piece together what my own intellectual life looked like: taking online classes with writers and literary scholars; joining in-person book clubs to deepen my understanding of challenging texts; and finding friends who offered generous, useful feedback on my work.
Relationships like these might be the most important resource for learning something new. You can teach yourself almost anything, it turns out, within a community of encouraging and intellectually ambitious peers.
The Woman Who Wants You to Ditch Your Phone
The Woman Who Wants You to Ditch Your Phone
At the park, Lamm wore a thrifted black top with a paper clip in place of a missing button. She appears somewhat out of time, her face cleansed of TikTok makeup trends and her silhouette freed from the long jorts that have seemingly drop-shipped onto everyone in her age bracket. Unled by Google, unfed by DoorDash, unmatched on Hinge, she navigates a version of New York where seemingly everyone else is locked in a tragic embrace with a personal device. When she walks outside, she is now the rare human who is alert and open for engagement.
Theory-free AI
In "theory-free AI," a programmer does not create a software model of reality and then ask a machine-learning system to use statistical insights from its training data to guess at how to operate over that model. Rather, the programmer shovels vastly more training data into the AI's inbox and uses titanic amounts of computing power to analyze that data and find statistical relationships without trying to explain them.
The fact that a theory-free AI might demand far more cash to accomplish a task (even a "solved" one like playing chess) than an expert would charge is beside the point. Billionaires have money, they don't have expertise. Theory-free inference is a bid to substitute one for the other: the beauty and terror of being able to manipulate the world without studying or understanding it is that it can be done with money alone. No experts needed.
2026-10-08
Headphones and GenZ
Headphones are turning my Gen Z peers into idiots
Although to be fair this problem is not just endemic in GenZ.
The most obvious and probably most important detail is that we are funnelling so much of our attention through our ears. That would be worthwhile if we were imbibing material that we could value. From what I’ve heard – they’re not soundproof, you know – the majority listen to music while they commute. Music is fabulous, but we are nostalgic creatures, and more often than not these will be tunes we already know, and can mouth along to. It feels good, but how can we notice what we are hearing in the rush of the tube, or traffic?
Podcasts are no better. The great cultural theorist Walter Ong writes how difficult it is to convey intricate chronologies and complex relationships orally. Generally, auditory media are more distancing than involving, as we are cut off from the rest of the world. Reading, the obvious alternative, is a formidable neurological feat, intertwining value judgments and necessary empathy. Headphones in, we isolate ourselves from the full environment indispensable to human responsiveness. A colleague might tell you what they were talking about on The Rest is History last week; now enjoy their wide-eyed panic when you query a single specific detail.
Here, the major, pitiable folly is that our headphone obsession seems to induce a collective act of avoidance. Those who wear headphones are scarily impulsive, clutching for them and sliding them on ahead of a five-minute walk because it is easier than walking along with their thoughts. Many of my friends can’t read without a headphone in one ear. They are fiends for constant distraction; useful boredom – Nietzsche’s “unpleasant calm of the soul” – is being eliminated.
This has annoying consequences for all of us. Rudeness, chiefly, and the dying away of the small, valuable conversations that now can’t be had without an awkward gesture and the pronounced mouthing of “take them off”. Worse still, for many, the sounds of the world around them have virtually vanished, drowned by the voices and noises in their ears.
2026-10-07
Nimesh in Brooklyn Coffee Shop
Brooklyn Coffee Shop Episode 95 ft. @Findingnimesh
I am manifesting a life like Nimesh's character in this episode of Brooklyn Coffee Shop. I watched it like 7 times already!!! 😂
2026-10-06
Youth
Youth (TV Series 2026– ) ⭐ 6.5 | Comedy, Drama #tv
Been watching this new TV show and loving it so far.
2026-10-03
LinkedIn LARPMaxxing
LinkedIn is a soul-sucking hole of professionalism and a pit of hell that not even my worst enemy should spend the rest of his days in.
It’s this concoction of performative productivity and corpo speak producing cursed artifacts beyond human comprehension.
A place where normal human text goes to die and can only be kept alive by an LLM like a radiation protection suit.
And I wanted to look into the performative projects people keep making that are all over my feed.
That’s the real problem. Nothing on that site rewards you for getting better. It’s a platform built around selling yourself for a job, so what survives isn’t skill; it’s looking interesting. It’s just LARPing productivity. Go to some of these profiles, and it’s the same guy detecting potholes over and over and over with zero signs of improvement.
2026-10-01
AI Book Recs
AI book recs are making us all read the same thing #books
But, she adds: “AI destroys individual taste.” And in an age of constant online bombardment and soulless algorithms, cultivating your own taste feels more important than ever. If you’re getting the same reading recs as everyone else who types into Gemini that they loved Demon Copperhead, you may get a quick result, but it encourages a boring, conformist culture dominated by a handful of best-selling authors. You're not going to diversify your reading to the same degree as talking to your local bookseller or taking the time to browse the shelves. Something as routine as choosing a book can still be a creative task. As Bret Stephens writes in the New York Times: “We become more creative when we learn how to put a personal stamp even on routine things, making them unmistakably our own.”
Skilled Trades in place of AI
So You Think You Could Be An Electrician?
This is a sobering look at being employed in the skilled trades (plumber, electrician etc) from somebody who has been doing this for a while.
In the first place, college graduates still earn more than those without college degrees, specifically because of their academic credentials. In casual settings, people often fail to disentangle selection effects, but rigorous causal research actually does find substantial income effects of college graduation, often amounting to hundreds of thousands of dollars over the course of a career, though this can vary across majors. Completion of a four-year degree is critical to the earnings leap.
There’s moderate evidence that people in wealthy countries are increasingly risk-averse to things that might kill or harm them. For many folks, this may translate to an unwillingness to take on a nontrivial risk of death or injury via dangerous jobs. And there may be a subtler version of this in which people are reluctant to tinker with physical objects for fear of destroying them. I’ve found that when I coach people through DIY projects, they’re often extraordinarily fearful. And not just of electrocution or falling, but of doing something incorrectly or pushing a broken thing past the point of being reparable. (And this appears to be something that blue-collar people — perhaps due to hubris or ignorance — don’t seem to worry about as much.)
While the optimal quantity of risk-taking for a given job probably isn’t zero, it’s difficult to broadly argue against placing a high intrinsic value on human life or the avoidance of pain and chronic disability. People abandoning the trades for safe, high-paying jobs is understandable.
Trades jobs are generally among the best blue-collar jobs, and within the trades, specialized union jobs are especially coveted. These jobs are less accessible to people on the lower end of the blue-collar hierarchy. They often require training, social connections, certifications and licensing, and technical competence. I asked several acquaintances in union trades about the selection process for their jobs. Each described an initial process with 100 to 200 candidates, followed by testing and interviews that winnowed the field to one to two dozen. The final selection of between four and eight job entrants was less clear but appeared to include a mix of connections, previous credentials such as military service, and measured ability.
this bit about the usage of AI in the skilled trades was really interesting
With improvements to video interpretation capabilities, AI could remove much of the complexity from the minds of human tradespeople. For instance, a future job site worker equipped with smart glasses and an earpiece might receive continuous direction via an AI interpreting and providing feedback on their actions. In some cases this is similar to the way I occasionally use LLMs, although at a lower level. It’s much faster to ask for torque specifications via an earpiece than to reference a manual. One of the most failure-prone jobs in residential HVAC, for example, is setting airflow. A technician might install or service a dozen manufacturers, each with three varieties of fan type and dozens of models each with unique switch set points. On complex HVAC installations there may be dozens or even hundreds of reference points such as these. Many are nearly impossible to memorize or reasonably guess. An AI with good access to the technician’s field of view and perfect equipment knowledge could readily coach dumb hands through this task.
Managers of Machines
Citadel Hunts for ‘Managers of Machines’ in Quant Hiring Push
Manager of Machines could turn out to be a common title on LinkedIn
“People can now effectively manage two, four, and in some cases even more processes. Humans are now also becoming ‘managers of machines’,” said Arora. “Those humans, unlike machines, are not easily replaced.”
2026-09-22
Maxxing
Maxxing treats life as a problem when it’s a mystery | Psyche Ideas
Where might the scientification of the good life lead us? In recent years, this relatively innocuous application of science to life has curdled into something grotesque. We are now in an era of what Gen Z calls ‘maxxing’: internet slang for ruthlessly quantifying and optimising social or physiological traits in pursuit of better social standing or lifestyle. The most notable figure is Clavicular (real name Braden Eric Peters), the figurehead of ‘looksmaxxing’, a sub-genre of maxxing that urges people, usually young men, to optimise their physical proportions and facial structure to meet ideal standards. The purpose of looksmaxxing is to ‘mog’, or dominate other men by being more attractive. Common interventions include smashing the jawbone to achieve facial symmetry, self-prescribed methamphetamine to manage weight, and the injection of peptides for supposed skincare benefits.
In The Philosophy of Existentialism (1956), Marcel offers a critique of modernity. It begins with a simple observation: the modern world appears broken in the way a machine appears broken. Science affords us the ability to understand how something works, to set standards of ideal function, and therefore to know when things fall short. Brokenness becomes an essential feature of this world. For Marcel, this tendency to see the world as broken eventually turns inward. We come to see ourselves as nothing more than an ‘agglomeration of functions’ (physiological, social, even economic) that adhere to scientifically determined standards amenable to restoration, preservation or enhancement.
This changes the way we approach life. Whether it’s getting your 10,000 steps in a day, cultivating a healthy relationship with your family members, or meeting your KPI’s at work, life becomes governed by what Marcel calls a ‘vital schedule’ designed to repair, regulate, even optimise these functions. Hospitals, once understood as places of care, attentiveness and solidarity in the face of suffering, become repair shops. Workplaces, once sites of vocation, craft and communal purpose, become sites of efficiency. Even my daily naps are tweaks to my own vital schedule. Marcel’s warning is that total immersion in functionality excludes something: ‘this world is, on the one hand, riddled with problems and, on the other, determined to allow no room for mystery.’
Marcel’s key observation is this: ‘having’ is always a temporary excursion from ‘being’. As Marcel puts it in Being and Having (1949), ‘having tends, not to be destroyed, but to be sublimated and changed into being.’ Like dams that break the flow of water, the act of ‘having’ involves what Marcel calls ‘a kind of suppressed dynamic’. I can posit my body as an object for me, then work on it as if it were a broken machine, but I always have to return to my body as something to live in. The dam of ‘having’ my body as something to work on always breaks. This return to being is not incidental but structural: ‘being’ sustains ‘having’, the mystery of living will always encapsulate the solving of problems.
The scientification of the good life overlooks this. It promises a world of pure ‘having’, dictated entirely by diagnosing and solving problems. But the inevitable moments of return, in which the attitude of having and solving problems reverts to the mystery of being, puncture this fantasy. The life that we return to after tweaking it from afar still has to be lived, to be inhabited, and whatever this style of living is, it cannot be served by scientification. For Marcel, the maxxer’s tragedy is not that they are wrong about the value of optimisation, but that they have narrowed their existential horizon exclusively to problem-solving. Instead of trying to fix the mystery of being, maxxers should be finding ways to be at home in it.
2026-09-21
Unclenching
what unclenching feels like for me
This is a good list - a reminder for me to watch out for such signals.
Meditation
Average moments of a long-term meditator
Another similar article that struck out to me because I guess that's the kind of headspace I am in.
I keep thinking I need to take an entire year off to build up the rhythms I feel I need for long term wellness and health benefits. Meditation would be one of the things to pursue in that time.
2026-09-18
The Art of Managing One-Sided Conver
‘But enough about you …’ How to survive in a world of monologuists, interrupters and trauma dumpers
There is a name for this type of egocentric behaviour – “conversational narcissism”. Although it was coined by the sociologist Charles Derber in his 1979 book The Pursuit of Attention, the term seems more relevant than ever. “WhatsApp communication and voice notes are really a series of monologues,” says Charlotte Fox Weber, a psychotherapist. “In face-to-face situations, people are forgetting how to pause naturally, to make space to hear and listen. And people are chatting on the phone – an activity that at least requires turn-taking in a defined way – much less often.”
A lot of our communication online can feel weirdly transactional, focused on logistics or niche WhatsApp groups. According to Tamu Thomas, a life coach and author, this has damaged the art of improvised conversation. “People have less capacity for meandering conversations that don’t have a purpose,” she says. “A good dialogue is a back-and-forth between two people discovering new things about each other, even if they have known each other for years. Because there are now so many different channels available to stay in touch, some people are confusing communication with connection.”
Knowledge is power, though. If you can recognise the five types of common conversation hogger, it will be much easier to handle them.
the summary of the different categories from the accompanying newsletter
Fortunately, Chaudhuri also offered tips for how to deal with some of the worst conversational offenders, including:
• The serial monologuist. The real crime of the monologuist, says psychotherapist Charlotte Fox Weber, is not simply dominating the conversation – it is that “they often select topics that are not necessarily meaningful for anyone else.” Think: the time their baggage got lost at the airport, or their kids’ orthodontia. To handle this, try redirecting the chat without shutting the person down. Something like: “That’s really interesting, and it reminds me of….”
• The trauma dumper. This is the person who overshares without listening to others, and who dominates social gatherings with long discourses about the most intimate details of his life. Chaudhuri spoke to one therapist who suggested encouraging this type of person to reach out during the good times, not only the crises.
• The boomerasker. The term refers to people who ask a question simply so that they can answer it themselves. One approach is to give vague, short answers and then ask them the question back with more enthusiasm – that way you haven’t wasted time sharing. Or, you could boomerask them yourself and see how they like it.
the other two categories - the interrupter and the care bear
I am mostly a listener, so I have a tendency to let these kind of people go on. I have had to put up with a lot of serial monologuists and trauma dumpers, but not so much the boomeraskers.
2026-09-14
Just bury your trash
Just bury your trash - Works in Progress Magazine
It’s natural to assume that reusable always means better. But this intuition treats different materials as interchangeable and ignores the cost of making them in the first place. Once we account for energy, labor, and other inputs, reuse pays off only in selective cases.
The best case for recycling is where the materials themselves are scarce, and we can more cheaply reuse them than finding more of them. Batteries and electronics contain metals like copper, cobalt, lithium, and nickel. While we are not about to run out of any of these materials globally in a strict sense, their supplies are limited in practical terms. Plenty of copper ore remains in the ground, but it is getting harder and more expensive to extract as the highest quality and most accessible deposits have been depleted. In the case of cobalt, lithium, and nickel, production is geographically concentrated, meaning countries without natural supplies of their own have an interest in recycling in order to limit their dependence on imports. All of these, especially copper and nickel, are highly recyclable, with little loss of quality over multiple reuses. For these, recycling is sensible.
By contrast, there is no danger of running out of paper. We can always grow more trees, and that is in fact a decent way of removing carbon from the atmosphere. The silicon used to make glass is one of the most abundant elements on Earth.
2026-09-11
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