Feed

People say you know you’ve found your type when you feel mortified by its description

*It’s like I’ve been playing this game called Tech for the past 30+ years of my life and I just don’t feel engaged anymore, but not because I got bored of the game — like it happens with many regular games. It’s not boredom or fatigue. It’s more because the game has gone through a series of updates that have ultimately made it so much worse.*

Sitting around doing meaningless work, feeling as if you are wasting a third of your day that drains you (making it difficult to want to do anything in the second third), which makes you want to stay up late to “get the most out of your day,” which ruins the last third.

Nothing has as dire an impact on productivity as poor communications.

At a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island, the late Kurt Vonnegut informs his pal, the author Joseph Heller, that their host, a hedge fund manager, had made more money in a single day than Heller had earned from his wildly popular novel *Catch 22* over its whole history. Heller responds, “Yes, but I have something he will never have . . . *Enough*.”

When you can’t express what you mean, it’s usually because you don’t know what you mean.

While having so much internet real estate in the hands of just a few slumlords is a big problem, it’s not the *main* issue. It’s that these companies actively encourage people to share *whatever* they want, with little regard to truth, public health, or safety — all because outrage is the best way to maintain viewership which leads to more ads and more product sales.

These were porn *shrines.* In hindsight, they were also leading indicators of some of the very serious psychological damage the lockdowns had wrought on the world. Those early-COVID images of depopulated city streets—these were their precise corollary. They showed you where the people went. Or where at least some of them did, likely the ones who were not exactly models of stability and robust mental health to begin with. Even so, it seemed beyond dispute that sixty years ago some of these gooners would have been fathers. Small-business owners. Dependable men in hats riding slow commuter trains, their mindscapes perfumed with thoughts of stocks, bonds, lawn care. Well, what could you do? Certain social systems had failed, certain historical trend lines had converged, and now we had these guys to deal with.

the honest truth, as I see it, is that things are actually pretty bad right now. Nearly everything in the political arena — the candidates, the policies, the extremism, the AI slop, the punditry, the writing, the thinking, the principles — it all seems to be getting worse in basically every meaningful way.

The next time you're coming up with ideas, tell yourself, *Forget about good ideas, let's come up with a list of ten bad ideas.* The dumber the better! I bet you’ll find that easy.