We built an entire civilisation around the idea that more information would make us wiser. We have more information than any humans who ever lived. We are not wiser.

The modern internet argument cycle: someone posts an opinion. Someone else screenshots it. A third person quote-tweets the screenshot with "this is wild." A fourth person writes a thread about the thread. Nobody has changed their mind. Everyone has lost 40 minutes. The sun sets on another day of human progress.

I've been a professional writer for over a decade and it still amazes me how many folks are CONVINCED they can just do this shit. Nobody walks up to a surgeon and says "I reckon I could have a crack at that." But writing? Everyone's got a world-changing essay in them apparently. It's in there. Somewhere. Behind the spleen.

The word “community,” a timeline: 1950: The people who live near you and help when your house floods 1990: A group of people with shared interests who meet regularly 2010: An email list you can’t unsubscribe from 2015: Anyone who follows a brand on Instagram 2020: A Discord server with 40,000 strangers and one moderator 2024: A Slack workspace your company forces you to call a community because it’s cheaper than actual culture

The most useful productivity system is subtraction.

Every enterprise app feels like typing on a mushy membrane keyboard. You click a button and get a gentle animation, a swooshy transition, a soft bounce, and zero clear feedback that anything actually happened. The entire B2B software industry optimized for how tools feel during a fifteen-minute sales demo instead of how they perform across an eight-hour workday, and the result is professional software with the tactile precision of poking a marshmallow.

"Follow Your Passion" is terrible career advice. It assumes happiness is a fossil in your soul waiting to be dug up. "Love What You Do" is 10x better. It recognizes passion is built, not found, in the reality of your work.

There's a whole generation that learned irony before sincerity and now they're trapped. Can't be earnest without a layer of self-deprecation. Can't be enthusiastic without signaling awareness of how cringe enthusiasm is. The price of never being vulnerable is never connecting.

'Touch grass' is what extremely online people tell other extremely online people as if taking a 20 minute walk will cure the spiritual rot of spending 8 hours a day in the discourse mines

If I genuinely believed I was 18 months away from superintelligence that could solve cancer, I would probably not be pivoting to horny chatbots, but that's just me (a person with priorities)

"Turns out if you criticise private jets on LinkedIn you make a lot of dudes who don’t own private jets real mad. Which supports my theory that all men secretly believe they will one day own a private jet."

Feeling scattered? Can’t focus? Everything feels urgent but nothing feels clear? I wrote (and tested) a 90-day protocol to reboot your mind. No gimmicks. Just discipline, attention, and real thinking. 🧵 1/10

People are shocked to discover they need to fact-check ChatGPT and I'm having the uncomfortable realization that they never fact-checked their uncle's Facebook posts, their friend's medical advice, or literally anything Google's top result told them, and suddenly the last decade makes sense...

Prediction: future generations will judge our approach to mental healthcare similarly to how we view medieval approaches to physical illnesses. Making healthcare inaccessible for the organ most likely to malfunction seems obviously irrational in retrospect.

Every best seller now is called something like “Gone” and “Vanished” I miss when books had titles like “An Account of the Fortunes and Misfortunes of Miss Arabella Wren, A Young Lady of Considerable Charm and No Inheritance, Who Was Thrice Deceived, Twice Abducted, and Ultimately Vindicated, Through No Fault of Her Own, but by the Unlikely Grace of a Retired Corsair with a Limp”

There is no “good” social media platform. Every single one of them is terrible in its own uniquely horrifying way. 1 of 14

RSS never tracked you. Email never throttled you. Blogs never begged for dopamine. The old web wasn’t perfect. But it was yours.

Mastodon is the only platform where saying “this was compiled with Cargo nightly” is considered foreplay.

If you live in a community with 98% vaccination rates, you can afford to be the 2%. You can post wellness memes about "natural immunity" and still get herd immunity as a side effect. Your child is statistically safe, not because of your parenting, but in spite of it. https://www.theindex.media/the-herd-immunity-illusion/ https://www.theindex.media/the-herd-immunity-illusion/

Cool won’t save you. Irony won’t protect you. Apathy won’t set you free. The world is burning, and the people mocking from the sidelines are dead weight. Give a shit. Stand for something. Be cringe. It’s the only way anything has ever changed. https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-embracing-cringe/