Silicon Valley’s Grow-or-Die Culture Is Costing Us ✦
We need to focus on and celebrate different kinds of successful organizations:
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Everything I share — writing, short curated lists, and links. You can also find me on Threads.
Are You Addicted to Doing - Mindful ✦
On that day I realized clearly that busyness is a choice. We may have deadlines, projects, and activities, but we have the freedom to choose whether we become action addicts and busy-lazy, or just observe the experience of many activities. It’s a choice. And the ability to make that choice comes from developing a clear mind, free of action addiction.
Workism Is Making Americans Miserable ✦
What is workism? It is the belief that work is not only necessary to economic production, but also the centerpiece of one’s identity and life’s purpose; and the belief that any policy to promote human welfare must always encourage more work.
Opinion Collusion Was a Seductive Delusion ✦
Indeed, the truest horror in Mr. Mueller’s finding is that we did not need Mr. Putin to be pulling the strings. We know now that under our shambolic democracy, a man as unfit as Mr. Trump really can legitimately acquire all the terrifying powers of the presidency without being controlled by a foreign puppet master.
The Reason Conspiracy Videos Work So Well on YouTube ✦
It’s probably just random flux or luck, but that doesn’t make it feel less weird. As the psychologist Rob Brotherton argues in Suspicious Minds, “Our ancestors’ legacy to us is a brain programmed to see coincidence and infer cause.” And what that means, Brotherton says, is that “sometimes, it would seem, buying into a conspiracy is the cognitive equivalent of seeing meaning in randomness.”
How Things Work ✦
As our experience has shown, that freedom was illusory. The system is still there. It pushed back. The power structure remains. There are just some new people at the apex, prime among them the techlords flush with monopoly profits. They are as sensitive to criticism as any other ruling class, but with the confidence that they can transform and disrupt anything, from government to the press.
Have Bad Handwriting The U.S. Postal Service Has Your Back ✦
If the computer can't read the address because of water damage or your grandmother's ornate script, it sends a picture of the address to a computer at the Remote Encoding Center.
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs - STRIKE! ✦
Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
The Secret Power of ‘Read It Later’ Apps — Forte Labs — Medium ✦
The end result is the same person who spends 127 hours per year on Instagram (the global average) complains that she has “no time” for reading.
How to Be Polite ✦
Sometimes I’ll get a call or email from someone five years after the last contact and I’ll think, oh right, I hated that person. But they would never have known, of course. Let’s see if I still hate them. Very often I find that I don’t. Or that I hated them for a dumb reason. Or that they were having a bad day.