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draft: false
tags:
- dispatch
references:
- title: "Opinion | There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness - The New York Times"
url: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/therapy-estrangement-childless-millennials.html
date: 2025-06-03T15:48:53Z
file: www-nytimes-com-7wlxcp.txt
- title: "Searls of Wisdom for April 2025 | justin․searls․co"
url: https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/
date: 2025-06-03T15:49:19Z
file: justin-searls-co-bifdrg.txt
- title: "The Imperfectionist: Navigating by aliveness"
url: https://ckarchive.com/b/zlughnhk8772ma7qrr9qehwzgng00f6
date: 2025-06-03T15:49:22Z
file: ckarchive-com-yhbgos.txt
- title: "Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era | The Walrus"
url: https://thewalrus.ca/moleskine/
date: 2025-06-03T15:49:29Z
file: thewalrus-ca-714tb6.txt
- title: "Junk Contemplations | Brain Baking"
url: https://brainbaking.com/post/2025/05/junk-contemplations/
date: 2025-06-03T15:49:34Z
file: brainbaking-com-s3rbn8.txt
- title: "How to think - cliophate.wtf"
url: https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think
date: 2025-06-03T15:49:38Z
file: cliophate-wtf-ja3aad.txt
---
Some thoughts here...
@@ -31,10 +56,33 @@ Some thoughts here...
### Links
* [Title][4]
* [Title][5]
* [Title][6]
* [There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness][4]
[4]: https://example.com/
[5]: https://example.com/
[6]: https://example.com/
> I thought of the love I felt for the unborn little thing within me — just then, just beginning to make its presence known with a kick and flutter and a flip — and I felt bowled over by all that I had not understood. The love my parents had felt, do feel, that I had recognized in the abstract, I had so often overlooked.
* [Searls of Wisdom for April 2025][5]
> Planet Earth is undeniably a bit of a shitshow at the moment, but I'm actually feeling optimistic that we're approaching the precipice of something that will—once we get to the other side of it—feel like the beginning of a sea change in how information is organized, constituted, and distributed. To wit: skepticism of information technology has materialized and matured from opposite ends of the political spectrum, and advocates from both sides are meeting in the middle with relatively boring policy prescriptions like regulating the use of smartphones in schools and expanding the scope of antitrust actions. Seems… fine, actually?
* [Navigating by aliveness][6]
> And if in a year or two or ten the paragraphs above look hopelessly naïve … well, I think I’ll be glad to have been naïve, in this context. Because I suspect that a certain form of naivete may be a precondition for aliveness.
* [Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era][7]
> “Do you know there’s a section of our customer base that buys a fresh Moleskine every time they come into a store? We have no idea what they do with them”
* [Junk Contemplations][8]
> All of these things hurt my eyes, even though this has more or less been the state of stuff in our home for the past two years. I just can’t get used to it, something keeps on urging me to clean up, and I indeed have the feeling that that is exactly what I do all day long every single day—without much success.
* [How to think][9]
> I expect that when, and if, the AI revolution arrives, people who have the ability to think are the ones who will not be left behind. Thinkers will be the ones who will thrive in these uncertain times.
[4]: https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/therapy-estrangement-childless-millennials.html
[5]: https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/
[6]: https://ckarchive.com/b/zlughnhk8772ma7qrr9qehwzgng00f6
[7]: https://thewalrus.ca/moleskine/
[8]: https://brainbaking.com/post/2025/05/junk-contemplations/
[9]: https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-thi

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[1]skip to main content
[2] [logo]
• [3]Archives
• [4]Works
• [5]About
• [6]More...
Junk Contemplations
10 May 2025
The coffee table is spilled with Playmobil figures, a dirty towel, a simple
wooden dollhouse, an undressed doll, and a purple teddy bear wearing diapers
the wrong side up sitting in an empty plastic ice cream container. To my left
of the couch, a dolphin plush is chilling next to a pile of assorted picture
books. To my right, an elephant plush wearing a scarf is catching some z’s. All
of these things hurt my eyes, even though this has more or less been the state
of stuff in our home for the past two years. I just can’t get used to it,
something keeps on urging me to clean up, and I indeed have the feeling that
that is exactly what I do all day long every single day—without much success.
I make my way through the house to the new home office downstairs while kicking
aside a few more randomly placed toys—both the toddler’s as well as the dog’s.
After emptying and moving the IKEA BILLY bookcases, I had another cleanup cramp
and threw a random array of mediocre books in a couple of bags to donate to the
thrift store nearby. The shelves were roomy for exactly one week. After that,
we had to consolidate another bookshelf, more children’s books leaked into the
home office, and the cramp returned. It is itching badly. Yet it did not stop
me from ordering more books.
A month ago, I couldn’t open the drawer beneath the TV stand that stores my
Nintendo Switch games. Oh hi cramp, how are you? Not good? No? Let’s do this
together then! Only thirty minutes later, I had sold nine of them on Vinted, a
European online second hand marketplace. But there be dragons! The last time I
did something rash like that to a video game collection dear and near to my
heart, I heavily regretted the action afterwards. You know, that GameCube Fire
Emblem: Radiant Dawn for €10 that’s now worth €150 kind of regret.
Back in the home office, a naked wall urged me to drive off to IKEA and get one
of those five by five KALLAX storage shelves. Somehow, it seemed like a good
idea. I could move my board games from the hallway to make space for more junk
for the kids and I had more room to buy more stuff for myself! Yay! Wait a
minute, more stuff ultimately means more cleanup itches resulting in sudden
outbursts of throwaway-rage. It looks like all I do is pester myself by wanting
and getting more junk which all contribute to a restless instead of a calm
mind. Why do I do this?
I used to think that I was pretty immune to the whole “fear of missing out”
hype. It turns out that I’m not. I hate the philosophy of Limited Run Games,
yet my last order probably won’t be my last (hello Gex Trilogy). I don’t like
BoardGameGeek’s The Hotness list, constantly teasing you to go off and buy new
games instead of properly learning to understand the mechanics of the ones you
already have, yet somehow I’m easily convinced by friends influenced by the
very same list to bring home new stuff anyway.
The junk that hurts my eyes is not just the junk of the kids. It’s also my own.
That is coming from a man who read and deeply respects Fumio Sasaki’s Goodbye,
Things; is a regular listener of The Minimalists; and frequently picks a fight
with his wife about how disorderly she dares to chuck her clothes into the
wardrobe. Somehow, somewhere, the sense of it all seems to have gotten lost. In
my defence: The Minimalist guys and Fumio Sasaki don’t have kids. Marie Kondo
didn’t have any and now that she does, she’s dialling back on the cleanup
magic. See what I did there? I tried to hide my own urge to collect junk by
placing someone else’s junk front and centre. Oops.
I tried to optimize the new home office space by jamming in as much as I could.
But two old computers next to the modern workstation in front of a window felt
too messy to comfortably be and work in so I am temporarily forced to tear down
and store the Windows 98 Athlon and Windows XP Core2Duo setup. Not even a KVM
switch would have saved the day here. Yet a new problem arose: since we have
neither basement nor attic, we don’t even have the space to properly store
stuff like this. And no way in hell am I going to let go of these machines.
While attempting to make room in the wardrobe (simply because that’s the
largest closet we have), I found an old 12" CRT tube and more old computer junk
stuffed in there “just in case”. I guess these can go… Yes, that last sentence
was typed with a sense of reluctance.
All these junk contemplations do not help in calming the spirit. If anything,
that spirit is triggered and working overtime right now. More junk needs to be
moved across the house because of a renovation and more runs to IKEA need to be
made because of an upcoming family expansion. Yup, we made it worse.
Perhaps I need to kill off the music CD collection, even though that one is
quite modest. That smaller case could be replaced by another BILLY extension.
And it’s been years since I last touched that Evercade, who even has that many
handheld gaming devices anyway? On to the get-rid-of list it goes. But wait,
are you sure? Are you sure? [7]Are you sure?
Meanwhile, those empty KALLAX holes beckon: now that I do have the space to
store more board games, perhaps it’s time to re-read that wanted list…
[8]braindump [9]stuff [10]collecting
You Might Also Like...
• [11]The Challenge Of Buying Games At Physical Stores 06 Jun 2024
• [12]Overlooked Reasons To Still Buy Physical Media 25 Sep 2023
• [13]Is Collecting Physical Games Worth It (Part III) 29 Oct 2022
• [14]Double-dipping and Market Prices 05 Jul 2021
• [15]Flea Market Season 22 Jun 2021
Bio and Support
[avatar2024]
I'm [16]Wouter Groeneveld, a Brain Baker, and I love the smell of freshly baked
thoughts (and bread) in the morning. I sometimes convince others to bake their
brain (and bread) too.
If you found this article amusing and/or helpful, you can support me via [17]
PayPal or [18]Ko-Fi. I also like to hear your feedback via [19]Mastodon or
email. Thanks!
JavaScript is disabled. I use it to obfuscate my e-mail, keeping spambots at
bay.
Reach me using: [firstname] at [this domain].
↑ [20]Top | [21]Archives | [22]RSS Feed | [23]bv | [24]© CC BY 4.0 License.
[25] [brainbakin]
References:
[1] https://brainbaking.com/post/2025/05/junk-contemplations/#top
[2] https://brainbaking.com/
[3] https://brainbaking.com/archives/
[4] https://brainbaking.com/works/
[5] https://brainbaking.com/about
[6] https://brainbaking.com/more
[7] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yNY6ZstdUdY
[8] https://brainbaking.com/categories/braindump
[9] https://brainbaking.com/tags/stuff
[10] https://brainbaking.com/tags/collecting
[11] https://brainbaking.com/post/2024/06/the-challenge-of-buying-games-at-physical-stores/
[12] https://brainbaking.com/post/2023/09/overlooked-reasons-to-still-buy-physical-media/
[13] https://brainbaking.com/post/2022/10/is-collecting-physical-games-worth-it-part-iii/
[14] https://brainbaking.com/post/2021/07/double-dipping-and-market-prices/
[15] https://brainbaking.com/post/2021/06/flea-market-season/
[16] https://brainbaking.com/about
[17] https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=R2WTKY7G9V2KQ
[18] https://ko-fi.com/woutergroeneveld
[19] https://dosgame.club/@jefklak
[20] https://brainbaking.com/post/2025/05/junk-contemplations/#top
[21] https://brainbaking.com/archives
[22] https://brainbaking.com/index.xml
[23] https://brainbaking.com/bv
[24] https://brainbaking.com/copyright-and-tracking-policy
[25] https://brainbaking.com/links

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The Imperfectionist: Navigating by aliveness

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[1]cliophate.wtf [2]Start Here [3]Reading [4]About Me [5]Now
How to think
When I originally saw this tweet, I chuckled.
[bsky-1200x]
Then I realized: I do the same thing, and so do the people around me. That is,
we outsource our thinking to a machine, which can’t think in the first place
(though that fact is a whole separate piece I am working on).
Since the rise of Generative AI, what I caught myself doing is using tools like
ChatGPT or Claude to go through problems. Not as a help, but instead had it
spit out an answer that I then (at times blindly) adopted as my own solution.
And going by that post above, and the anecdotal evidence I have, I am not alone
in this.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
This is not thinking. Again, the machine cannot think. It can only match
patterns and emulate writing. But thanks to increasingly sophisticated models,
the solution the machine gives us seems like the solution we were looking for.
But if I am not the one thinking, and thus not the one solving the problem
(because problem-solving is what thinking ultimately is), I have learned
nothing. I have just taken another one's thoughts (and again, the machine
cannot think) as my own. I see little value in this.
This phenomenon is, however, not a recent problem, even though Generative AI
has exacerbated it. Outsourcing our thinking to other things, or people, is
something humanity has been doing forever.
Before Generative AI, we outsourced our thinking to influencers and whatever
the algorithmic timelines fed us. Before that, it was to politicians,
celebrities, and other people in power. Before that, it was the churches. And
before that, it was the shamans. (To be fair, people still do this.)
But at least in these examples, the thinker we outsource to is human. We can,
most often, deduce what their agenda is. But what is the agenda of a machine
that has been trained by a group of people who probably don’t even understand
how that machine works in the first place?
I believe that in this age, at a time when we get inundated with information
from all directions, the ability to think is the most important skill we have.
I expect that when, and if, the AI revolution arrives, people who have the
ability to think are the ones who will not be left behind. Thinkers will be the
ones who will thrive in these uncertain times.
And this is how to think:
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I see four parts that are necessary for thought. You need to cultivate all
four, because one or two alone may not be enough to form your best thinking.
These are:
• Thinking in silence;
• Thinking through inspiration;
• Thinking by writing;
• Thinking by not (actively) thinking.
Thinking in silence
AI, algorithmic timelines, and generally just the noise^[6]1 we live in, don’t
give us the space to think. They hijack our attention and concentration.
This is our fault. Whenever we have the slightest moment of silence—and we call
that boredom—we try to fill the void with whatever we can find.
But there is a reason you have your best thoughts under the shower, or as soon
as your head hits the pillow. These might be the only moments you experience
true silence and boredom.
When we manage to turn off the outside world, we are able to listen to our
inner voice. That is thinking. That voice that speaks to you, at times maybe
roughly, though that is for another essay, is what thinking is.^[7]2
By listening and talking to the inner voice, we can give it problems to solve.
We can mentally go through the steps and let our minds untangle whatever we are
currently working on. If we feed it with the correct pieces, and let it do its
job without interruption, it’ll allow us to solve the puzzle.
This is hard. Thinking is an active skill (though there is a passive element to
that, more soon) that burns a lot of energy. The brain alone consumes, on
average, around 400 calories per day. To give you an idea: 30 minutes of
running burns the same amount. (So feed your brain the nutrients, exercise, and
rest it needs.)
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
I am a strong believer in cultivating silence to let our minds go wild and
start forming thoughts. It is not easy, though, modern civilization likes to
flood us with distractions. Therefore, I try to find moments throughout the day
where I embrace silence. (And I am not talking about absolute silence like you
have in outer space. You don’t need 0 decibels; rather, what you need is to not
have inputs. White noise is completely fine and might even be beneficial to
some. If I struggle with sounds, I listen to a mix of white noise and
thunderstorms.)
But embracing silence is hard for me. I struggle with this because I have the
tendency to fill the silence with... something. Anything. Not necessarily
because I’m afraid of the silence, but because boredom is at times painful.
Boredom is just so... boring.
I’m not used to it anymore, so I have to force myself to accept it. And only
then can I sit in silence and let my mind work. And every time I give it the
space it needs, I am surprised by what that squishy thing in my skull is
capable of.
Thinking through inspiration
While the building block above shows how to create space for thinking, it’s
inspiration, I believe, that sparks thought in the first place.
Not every thought is worth something. I doubt this is a surprise to you, but if
we’d follow every thought we’d ever have life would be pretty fucking weird.
To succeed at thinking, we need to feed our minds the necessary material to
refine what happens up there.
This happens through a process I (and I probably stole it) call
cross-pollination.
Cross-pollination is when you take a whole bunch of Lego bricks from all kinds
of different sources to build your own castle in your mind.
You achieve this by consuming broadly.
But not all consumption is equal.
There is a reason everyone talks about [8]brain rot currently, because
mindlessly scrolling through TikTok and watching people do whatever the
algorithm gets them views, is not the type of consumption I am talking about.
Rather, we’re talking about content (and it can still happen on TikTok, the
medium is NOT the problem) that challenges you.
For me, this content primarily exists as the written word. It is the reason [9]
why I read as much as I do. But I also find it in blog posts like these, or
newsletters, or at times even on text-based social media like Bluesky or
Threads (though let me be real, this is the exception, most content on there is
mediocre).
If this resonated with you, there’s more.
Subscribe to get future posts delivered to your inbox. No spam.
And if you want to support my writing, [10]click here.
You can find that content also in multimedia formats, be it podcasts, YouTube
videos, or (good!) TikTok shorts. Or you find it as a little nugget in some
random TV show or movie. Or while talking to other people, or observing nature.
What is important here is that you consume actively. Not necessarily to learn
every time you look at something, but by spending focused time with the media.
And yes, for that, you need to put away your phone, turn off your gaming
console, or whatever else you are currently doing. NO multitasking. We all know
by now that [11]multitasking doesn’t exist. Sit with the material, consume it,
and let it feed your thoughts with new Lego bricks.
One very important thing, however, is this: don’t only consume things with
which you agree or that you already believe. All this does is feed your idiocy
(and we are all idiots) and enforce negative cycles.
Consume stuff you hate. Consume what the enemy created, whoever that enemy is
(and then ask yourself, why do you have enemies?). Consume things that are
uncomfortable because they might show you truths you want to hide from. Consume
broadly and widely, and outside of your comfort zone, because it gives you
perspective and shows you things you may not have known.
I am not saying you need to adopt these views. Not if you fundamentally
disagree with them, and especially not if they are just plain wrong. Bigots are
bigots (and I believe they are bigots because they do not consume what their
“enemies” create). But this at least shows you what not to think about.
This is crucial, too. This is anti-thinking, another part of having “good”
thoughts. But how do you know what to anti-think if you don’t know what is out
there?
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Thinking through writing
Yes, I am biased. But I believe that writing is the other necessary skill to
succeed in our current times.
Because what writing allows is to sort and distil the thinking you do, break it
down into pieces and recombine it with other stuff.
As long as the thinking just stays in your mind, I’d argue that it is
worthless. This is especially true for ideas. Everyone has ideas. The world
certainly does not lack ideas.
Ideas are not worth anything if they do not lead to future steps.
The first step is to write it down. Because writing is the one other magic
trick humans possess.
And before you tell me that Generative AI is taking this from us: LLMs do not
write.
What they do might look like writing, it might feel like writing, but it is not
writing. Instead, GenAI outputs text, syntactically flawless text, yes, but
devoid of any substance. The machine just breaks down writing into a
mathematical formula^[12]3, robbing writing of all that makes it magical. (And
a lot of us lack the necessary taste to understand that this writing is simply
not good. Grammatically correct ≠ good.)
So you need to write yourself. And as the screenshot at the beginning of this
essay ironically shows, even writing down your problem as an AI prompt
clarifies your thought.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
There are two ways to solve problems through writing, and I alternate between
the two of them: they are writing slowly, and writing fast.
Writing slowly
I’d argue that to write slowly you have to write by hand. Be it on a piece of
paper, or like I do, on [13]one of these fancy e-ink devices.
But through writing by hand, you are forced to slow down, simply because your
hand cannot catch up to the speed of your thinking. And this allows you to
“de-jumble” the mess in your head before you put it down on paper.
This blog post was first brainstormed on the equivalent of two sheets of A4
paper, and what came out was basically a completely finished post that just
needed a bit of polishing (to transform bullet points into proper prose, for
example).
I write most of my blog posts this way. I also write my journal by hand every
morning, and most of my notes are handwritten, too.
Again, this is to make sense of what is in my head, by giving me the space (and
the silence, there are no inputs when I do this) to think through things.
(In theory, you could also use an old-school typewriter. Because if you type
too fast on that thing, you jam the keys. This is a great analogy because if
you write too fast by hand, you jam your brain.)
Writing fast
Another practice I follow is what I call the brain dump. This has to happen on
a computer, either by typing if you are a fast typist or maybe by recording a
voice note.
The value of the brain dump is by “emptying” your mind. The goal is not to form
perfectly finished nuggets of thought but instead to unload all that is in your
mind, all that is taking up your mental bandwidth.
Often, what comes out of a brain dump session is not truly valuable if looked
at through a vacuum. It is important that you don’t filter and instead write
everything down that comes up, unedited and raw.
When you look at this brain dump, you’ll realize that most of it is trash. That
is ok, that is the point of the exercise. You want to get the trash out of your
head.
But with a certain distance (I never read the brain dumps the day I wrote
them), you may find certain specks of gold. Here and there, you see a nugget
that, if you disassemble it, might lead to something. And then I’d suggest you
take that nugget and go through it by writing by hand.
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
Thinking by not (actively) thinking
Because thinking is problem-solving, in theory, the result of thought is a
solved problem.
Sometimes you can’t solve the problem when you actively think about it. You
just can’t find the solution, no matter how much time you spend on it.
In these cases, stop. Take some distance. Let it rest, do something completely
different, and ignore it for a few hours or days.
You may have experienced this before. You struggled for hours to come up with a
solution, kept failing, and ultimately gave up.
But then, in the unlikeliest of situations, you had the epiphany you waited
for. The complete solution to your problem suddenly came up in your mind as if
planted there by some alien life form when you were not paying attention.
This is thinking by not thinking. It is passive. It happens without you forcing
it, in the subconscious, while you do other things. I don’t know why it
happens. I don’t understand what processes run in our subconscious mind in the
background, I only know that I’ve experienced this before.
As a writer, the way I use it is to never hit publish on bigger pieces (like
this one) the day I wrote them. I often let them sit and ripen in the back of
my mind. When I sit down with them again, I often perceive things I hadn’t
before.
The same goes when I struggle to fix a problem at work. Giving myself the space
to not think about it is apparently what I need to solve the toughest of
problems.
So sometimes, don’t think. Some people seem to be really good at this.
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Tools for Thinking
I’m planning to expand this section into a separate post in the future, but
here are a bunch of tools and tricks I rely on to help my thinking.
While the above steps are the basis needed to think in the first place, the
tools below are what help me have “better” thoughts.
• Mental models: You may have heard of Pareto’s principle, aka the 80/20 rule
, or Occam’s Razor, or Compounding. These are mental frameworks that might
not always be true, but that allow you to see things in different lights.
There are a lot of them. In theory, all that follows below could be
considered a mental model.
• First principles: Break your thoughts down to the most basic truth. Dig at
it for as long as you can until you discover the one raw fact that must be
true. Strip away assumptions. Build from there.
• Socratic Questioning: Ask layered, open-ended questions to clarify, probe,
explore and question.
• 5 Whys: Ask why until you discover the root cause behind a problem. The
first, second or even third level is often not the true reason a problem
appeared.
• Inversion: Do the opposite of what you were planning to do. Instead of
asking how to succeed, ask yourself how to fail. Then avoid that.
• Reverse-engineering: Start from a finished system. Deconstruct it to see
how it was built, then replicate (and improve) it with your own toolset.
• Feynman Technique: That’s what I am doing here. I want to learn how to
think, so I teach it in simple terms to the reader. When I struggle to
explain a part, I find gaps in my knowledge. I go back and improve.
There are many more tools in my toolset, but these are the ones I (try to) rely
on the most. I’ll expand this into a separate post down the line, so [14]
subscribe to the newsletter or [15]RSS feed to get notified when it goes live!
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Thinking is the most crucial skill we need to develop amidst our current,
uncertain times. It will help us make sense of the mess of the world, and
especially of the mess in our minds.
By becoming better thinkers, I’d argue we become better humans. And by becoming
better humans, we’ll be able to make the world a better place.
None of this is easy. It requires a vast amount of effort from us, not only to
take the time to think or improve our thinking, but also to reject what
interferes with it.
It is probably why a lot of people will not do this. Instead, they might
complain, shout at the clouds or simply give up. It is, after all, easier to
feel defeatist than to struggle.
Those of us who hone this skill (and thinking is ultimately a skill) will learn
a superpower that brings us ahead of the majority.
It’ll make us superhuman, and I strongly believe this.
So, go and practice thinking.
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Some notes on AI: I bashed Generative AI, LLMs and algorithmic timelines a lot
in this post.
The reason is I strongly believe we should not be offloading the skills that
make us human to machines.
But I still use ChatGPT on a near-daily basis. The difference is that I (now)
use it to complement my thinking. I use it for research (and then fact-check,
because it still hallucinates a lot), I use it as a learning tool, or to see
things from different angles by actively asking it to do so. It often fails,
but sometimes it helps me.
Generative AI is a tool we need to learn how to use. I keep comparing LLMs to a
friend who has a photographic memory and remembers everything. But he is also
just plain stupid. He makes shit up. He doesn’t know what he is talking about,
but just parrots what he learned by heart. (And memorizing ≠ understanding.)
Sometimes he parrots something really intelligent, but that is more a
coincidence than anything else. We just give this randomness more weight than
we should, as we find it “magical”.
And as for algorithmic timelines: they are mostly shit. Their only worth is if
you use them as a marketing tool.
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1. This is not a new development, however. The Stoic philosopher Seneca, back
in 62-64 AD, already complained about how noisy Ancient Rome was back then
([16]On Quiet and Study). And he didn’t even have Instagram, TikTok or
ChatGPT. [17]↩
2. Some people do [18]not have an inner voice. I cannot imagine what that
would be like, as mine never shuts up. But I’d love to hear from you. [19]↩
3. The way LLMs “write” is by calculating what word is most likely to follow
the preceding one. But since it was trained on gazillions of data
(so-called tokens), it’s rather good at emulating the way humans write. But
two things: since we’ve just argued that writing is thinking, and thinking
is a human practice, we cannot call what the machine outputs as writing.
These machines don’t understand meaning, they excel in (statistical)
patterns. And second, the creators of these machines want us to believe
that there is more magic in that output than there is. If they can sell us
the idea that the machine has created something original by thinking, we’ll
have more faith in these tools and thus will throw money in their
direction. [20]And they need a shit ton of money. [21]↩
[22]Clarity
This is me
'Sup, I'm Kevin
[23] [24] [25] [26]
If this resonated with you, there’s more.
Subscribe to get future posts delivered to your inbox. No spam.
And if you want to support my writing, [27]click here.
[28]Newer Post [29]Archive [30]Older Post
References:
[1] https://cliophate.wtf/
[2] https://cliophate.wtf/start
[3] https://cliophate.wtf/reading
[4] https://cliophate.wtf/about
[5] https://cliophate.wtf/now
[6] https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think#fn:1
[7] https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think#fn:2
[8] https://www.calm.com/blog/brainrot
[9] https://cliophate.wtf/reading
[10] https://ko-fi.com/cliophate
[11] https://hbr.org/2010/12/you-cant-multi-task-so-stop-tr
[12] https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think#fn:3
[13] https://overkill.wtf/supernote-manta-review/
[14] https://newslettter.cliophate.wtf/
[15] https://cliophate.wtf/
[16] https://www.stoics.com/seneca_epistles_book_1.html#L56
[17] https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think#fnref1:1
[18] https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/09567976241243004
[19] https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think#fnref1:2
[20] https://www.wsj.com/tech/ai/sam-altman-seeks-trillions-of-dollars-to-reshape-business-of-chips-and-ai-89ab3db0
[21] https://cliophate.wtf/how-to-think#fnref1:3
[22] https://cliophate.wtf/archive/topic:clarity
[23] https://bsky.app/profile/cliophate.wtf
[24] https://threads.net/@cliophate
[25] https://overkill.social/@cliophate
[26] https://instagram.com/cliophate.wtf
[27] https://ko-fi.com/cliophate
[28] https://cliophate.wtf/taste-voice-genai
[29] https://cliophate.wtf/archive
[30] https://cliophate.wtf/redesign

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Monday, May 19, 2025 [39]
Searls of Wisdom for April 2025
Remember April? April was a month in a long line of months that left me (and,
one presumes, a lot of people) asking themselves, "how did we end up here?"
Well, that's what you have this weird newsletter for. And we'll get to that, I
promise.
In terms of stuff I did since last time we chatted:
• Cut a couple ([40]1, [41]2) good Breaking Change episodes. The content is
questionable, but the audio quality has never been better
• Summarized what I consider to be the [42]easiest-to-assess traits of strong
programmers
• Started using [43]GitHub Copilot in Agent mode, and recorded my [44]vibe
code deflowering live on YouTube
• [45]Made Reddit angry by using a computer to [46]generate background images
for my house's rooms in HomeKit
I also started a vlog. Right now it just lives in this album in my Photos
library, but initial reviews are unanimously positive!
I started a vlog
As I start writing this, I'm sitting on an A350 bound for Tokyo, and the flight
attendant just announced we won't have WiFi over the Pacific, because Viasat or
whoever hasn't launched their latest satellite yet. As a writer and programmer
whose greatest impediment to creative output is the risk of distracting myself
on the Internet, learning that I would be forced offline for 13 hours triggered
a familiar relief. My body softened. Maybe I'll actually get some sleep. If I
play my cards right, I might manage to write one whole e-mail between now and
when I land. [Update, 19 days later: I did not.] In any case, being kicked off
the 'Net for a few hours once in a while can be restorative.
In fact, as luck would have it, one answer to the question posed at the outset
("how did we end up here?") is also, more or less, "because Internet." So
today, let's talk a bit about the World Wide Web and how tangled in it we've
become.
In a world experiencing an unprecedented degree of economic volatility,
fifty-fifty ideological polarization, and routine technological upheaval,
there's at least one trend line moving in a clear and consistent direction:
[47]people [48]across [49]the [50]world [51]increasingly [52]agree [53]things
[54]are [55]bad [56]and [57]getting [58]worse.
Why is this? And if everyone feels that way, why does the prospect of
leveraging that unanimous sentiment into effecting positive change feel more
hopeless than ever? How can it be that living standards have never been higher
and public sentiment has never been lower?
The answer eludes us because it is the water we swim in. Or, rather, the [59]
Information Superhighway we ride on.
People are so accustomed to today's global and instantaneous exchange of
information that we seem to suffer a collective amnesia as to how recent an
innovation it is. One reason it's sneaked up on us is that information is
inherently invisible, so the most successful information technologies penetrate
our minds with minimal disturbance to our environment. In fact, the world
mostly looks the same as it did forty years ago. And while it would make for
rather dull cinema to consider that Marty McFly could totally get by wearing
his 1985 wardrobe in 2025, at least he wouldn't have to worry about whether his
hoverboard would work over water. We may not have gotten the flying cars we
were promised, but at least we can hang our hats on how much friction we've
eliminated from payment processing.
[60]An elder millennial's history of the Information Age
Every year or so, I find it clarifying to take a few moments to reflect and
look back at the progression of the Information Age over my lifetime. We've
come a long way:
• Forty years ago, my parents had a black-and-white television connected via
coax to an antenna mounted on our house's roof. I have dim memories of
nightly news broadcasts glowing through the curved glass of Dad's
then-massive 30" CRT television; the static causing the anchor to dance and
flicker like a flame. We got an hour of news each night from any of three
sources (well, four, since we were within range of Canada's CBC over VHF),
and each covered the same mostly local, mostly mundane topics in a format
that was mediated by longstanding journalistic norms
• Thirty years ago, they upgraded to a color TV and basic cable service,
which brought with it access to CNN. The news now came to us 24/7. Its
coverage was national rather than local—blanketing dozens of media markets
would have been cost-prohibitive—and this surely accelerated the
nationalization of partisan politics. But CNN's novel format was dull and
unfocused as producers struggled to figure out how to fill so much airtime.
My family also had a 14.4 kbps dial-up modem and an America On-Line
subscription that charged us by the minute—neither of which posed a
problem, as there was so little to do on the World Wide Web. Still, for the
first time, we could reach out and retrieve information on demand, even if
it was limited to outdated and uninteresting marketing fluff hidden behind
[61]AOL Keywords
• Twenty years ago, our Comcast service was upgraded to include broadband
Internet. Publications now had real websites and computers had real
browsers. When news was breaking, I'd visit my favorite bookmarks and
repeatedly mash F5 to receive updates. Information could finally travel
instantly across the globe, but distribution depended on the initiative of
individual users to search and surf for it. A smattering of self-hosted
weblogs emerged as noteworthy upstarts, but media as actual people
experienced it remained unchanged—monolithic outlets mediated news coverage
at the whims of enterprising editors and eccentric billionaires, just as it
always had
• Ten years ago, we were all glued to our phones. Incredible as ubiquitous
wireless connectivity was, the chief innovation of the era was the
disintermediation of information. Legacy outlets that tossed newspapers
onto doorsteps were quickly outflanked by social media apps that pushed
notifications onto home screens. Whether you were pulling-to-refresh
Facebook or Twitter or Instagram, the contours of our new information
ecosystem began to take shape: an endless firehose of "content" from
billions of voices. Before long, a handful of platforms achieved so-called
"network effect" and injected themselves as the new mediator class,
personalizing each of our feeds by cherry-picking content so as to maximize
our engagement and their advertising revenue
• As for today, we are witnessing the apex of the previous era and the dawn
of the next. With each generation of mobile connectivity, we've invented
new ways to saturate every available megabit of bandwidth and every spare
moment of attention. Most people spend multiple hours each day lost in an
infinite scroll of vertical video. Textual thoughtleaders have given way to
video influencers. Active curation has succumbed to passive consumption. If
the 2010s represented an eruption of hot takes being spewed across
ideological lines, the magma has cooled throughout the 2020s as users have
been sorted into like-minded pools of lackadaisical discontent. For most
people, "news" no longer exists—people simply hear things. Who they hear
from and about what is selected by an algorithm designed to provoke
newly-invented emotional reactions that the market greatly values:
unfulfillment so as to scroll past more ads, uninhibition so as to make
more purchases, unsatisfaction so as to keep coming back. By now, most of
us have long since traded away our capacity for emotional regulation in
exchange for the promise we'll never experience boredom again
• And what of tomorrow? One can only imagine what fresh hell they have in
store for us. Will human creators be replaced by celebrity avatars? Will
targeted display ads give rise to individualized video trailers starring
you in a film about how an irrational mid-life car purchase will make an
idealized version of your high school crush want to sleep with you? And who
needs an imaginary friend when your kid could grow up with an omnipresent
AI companion to shape their cognitive and social development—while also
subtly influencing which brand of chips they'll buy? I'm honestly hopeful
the answer is yes! (If only because such a future indicates we still have a
functioning economy with access to fresh water…)
The timeline above might feel truthy to you. Maybe it maps to your experience
as well. And forgive me if this all reads as obvious—you've probably also
looked back from time to time and considered the dizzying pace at which the
world has changed. Growing up, progress was defined by more access to more
perspectives delivered in less time and less money. But now, with the benefit
of hindsight, it's starting to feel that information itself has been
transformed as well: more personal and more engaging, but ultimately less
actionable and less satisfying.
[62]We don't love to win, we hate to lose
A line from [63]Interstellar acts as its thesis, cohering a narrative that
extends light years and spans generations. Perhaps appropriately, it takes an
AI to tell the human characters this:
Newton’s Third Law. The only way humans have figured out how to move
forward is to leave something behind.
Humans are generally very sensitive to loss, and the psychological phenomenon
known as "[64]loss aversion" describes a powerful force motivating people to
stand athwart history and moderate the pace of change. We know it best for all
the ways it leads humans to make irrational, unwise decisions (staying in a bad
job too long, holding onto your worthless NFTs, refusing to cancel Netflix),
but the reason loss aversion exists to begin with is that in nature there are
countless more ways in which avoiding loss is adaptive behavior. I'm sure some
ancestor of mine hundreds of thousands of years ago only survived because they
refused to let go of a banana… loss aversion isn't all bad.
Anyway, loss aversion is why attempts to take away the Internet as we
experience it today—as we saw earlier this year with TikTok and as I witnessed
again on this plane—cause people to get upset. In January, the Internet was
pounded with videos of 20-somethings half-jokingly [65]swearing fealty to the
CCP to advocate for their favorite app. On today's flight, a finance bro threw
a tantrum demanding outsized compensation for missing a full day of trading as
he pointed to his ticket, which erroneously labeled the plane as being
"WiFi-equipped."
We can all relate to how it feels to have something we find precious taken away
from us, like bananas or TikTok or WiFi. We are less attuned to, but still
plenty capable of lashing out over, intangible potential loss—as we've seen in
the debate over [66]net neutrality or the spectre of [67]ISP data caps. But
when it comes to this particular discussion where the sort of philosophical
loss being described can only be conveyed through a careful comparative
analysis over a period of decades? We're cooked.
We all might harbor nostalgia for the way things were, but loss aversion can't
help us reclaim such distant past. Any attempt to actually go back would itself
be perceived as an unacceptable loss. Like it or not, humans are now a race of
TikTokers—at least until some new thing outdoes TikTok in a manner that people
like you and me will only read as depraved but in which the rest of the world
will view as incremental progress.
[68]What exactly was lost?
Even people clamoring for a return to the pre-Internet glory days of Real
Journalism wouldn't actually be willing to trade in their smartphones for one
measly hour of nightly news from a handful of national broadcasters. In
general, it's easier to wholesale vilify a new technology (video games!
smartphones! TikTok!) than to drill into its unintended consequences while
simultaneously acknowledging its merits. So instead of buying a dumbphone and
moving to a cabin in the woods in the vain hope that it will transport me back
to the 90s, it seems more useful to sit and have a think about the positive
attributes of the long-dead media ecosystem and consider what it might look
like to reclaim those benefits in a modern context.
On reflection, I can think of two important benefits of the highly-constrained
media environment of the pre-Internet era that almost sound quaint by today's
standards:
First, it turns out that a scarcity of sources—not speed or accuracy of
reporting—is what gave news media its authority in society. For the most part,
people walked around with a shared understanding of the world they occupied,
accepted a broad base of agreed-upon facts, and associated the oppositional
"other" as belonging to distinct, geographically-defined media ecosystems.
Americans largely believed their neighbors were good people, didn't doubt the
safety of fluoridated water, and mostly imagined their enemies as people living
in countries that didn't air Murrow or Cronkite. This situation resulted in all
kinds of terrible outcomes for people whose interests fell outside the narrow
range of that day's [69]Overton window, but it did foster a sense that "we"
were on the same "team" operated by a common government that would from time to
time "do things." It's hard to imagine a single country for which that
sentiment still rings true today. Fringe ideas that would have been banished to
stuffed-and-mailed-from-home newsletters with fewer than fifty subscribers in
the 1970s now form a latticework of overlapping constituencies necessary to
winning any level of elected office in the United States.
Second, it sure feels like the scarcity of scope of available information had a
tendency to focus society on a tractable set of clearly-defined problems. When
engaged voters in Detroit subscribed to one of its two regional papers, the
number of topics under debate was constrained by how many column-inches would
fit in the "A" section of either. As a result, it was actually possible to keep
abreast of "the issues" (arbitrary as they might be) throughout an election,
form comprehensible opinions, and support candidates based on their positions.
This reality began dissolving with the advent of social networks and new media,
before disappearing entirely once algorithms started drawing from that well to
populate everyone's feeds. Today, we doom-scroll timelines that are customized
to our unique desires and anxieties, effectively corralling each of us into a
community of one. The thought of plopping a half-dozen random voters into a
focus group with the expectation their policy priorities would circumscribe a
preordained set of traditional issues simply beggars belief. (The political
press tends to confuse this phenomenon with polarization, but it's actually
worse: polarized disagreement presupposes agreement on what people disagree
about.) Hell, pluck any two people for whom a pollster would rate as
"highly-engaged" and—forget about reading the same paper—they probably wouldn't
have even heard of each other's self-reported #1 issue.
So, what did we lose by gaining infinitely-connected networking technology? We
lost a shared sense of the world we collectively inhabit, as well as the most
pressing issues facing it. As a result, it's no wonder that people from
seemingly every developed country believe things are going to hell: modern
information distribution organizes around ideological borders as opposed to
geographic ones and is scientifically engineered to engender
emotionally-charged, high-stakes attachment to any of a thousand disparate
animating issues.
So that's neat.
[70]Maybe this is coming to a head
Intellectuals like you and I who can still be bothered to read and write text
in excess of a thousand words have, in recent years, started to detect that
something is amiss here. I, for one, have been worried about this shit since
well before it was cool. The approaching endgame started to materialize with
Facebook's [71]introduction of the News Feed in 2006 and began to feel
locked-in with the Internet's collective [72]pivot to video in 2015. These
moments stand out as milestones in both of two parallel timelines that have
played out with approximately zero awareness of or interaction with one another
(until recently):
1. The educated, book-reading class has tackled the changing information
landscape with the same journalistic detachment as it would any other
"social epidemic," like second-hand smoke or teen pregnancy. Its movement
can be charted by a familiar progression of the sort of sleeper-hit
nonfiction books we see written in response to any such societal issue:
from [73]identifying the problem to [74]exhorting individual resistance to
[75]offering parenting advice to [76]bargaining with the changing world
before eventually [77]pathologizing its effect on children. This culminated
in a variety of tech-skeptical [78]policy prescriptions, [79]antitrust
suits, and [80]saber rattling by the Biden administration
2. While journalists merely adopted the dark, the alt-right was born in it,
molded by it. As early as 2005, I remember memes originating on [81]4chan
and later showing up on [82]GAF before landing on [83]IGN and ultimately
being deposited as sediment in the collective male gamer id. Sometimes the
meme pipeline was harmless, like when [84]"Rickrolling" emerged from
4chan's duckroll trend in 2006, but it was just as often horrifying. I ran
into Brianna Wu several times the year [85]Gamergate broke out, and I
genuinely struggled to reckon with the real-world consequences she suffered
at the hands of a few basement-dwelling edgelords. 4chan's notoriety peaked
when it birthed [86]QAnon, but one can draw a straight line from the image
board to any of the [87]men's rights movement, cesspool of [88]pick-up
artists, or phenomenon of [89]incel mass shooters. By 2024, dank meme
laundering had taken many of these deplorable positions mainstream, and a
male-coded political constituency ("the [90]Manosphere") emerged around
[91]Barstool Sports and [92]Joe Rogan, espousing a masculine [93]
primitivism skeptical of effete knowledge work
Both tracks have seen phenomenal success in their own way.
The poindexter liberals in their ivory towers of intellectualism wrote a bunch
of books about how smartphones are bad and as soon as it became about "the
children", they inadvertently turned the Christian right against the same
technology that had radicalized them in the first place. The streams are really
crossing now that Republican states are climbing over each other to [94]ban
[95]phones [96]in [97]schools and [98]social [99]media [100]accounts for
minors.
Meanwhile, a handful of hentai-hoarding incels on 4chan spewing memes and
conspiracy theories wound up getting to choose the Vice President with J.D.
"maybe the Internet was a mistake" Vance. The lines are again blurring as
ambitious Democrats like [101]Pete Buttigieg and [102]Josh Shapiro court The
Male Vote by showing up on right-leaning podcasts men apparently listen to. And
whether it's evidence of [103]horseshoe theory or a sign of a broader belief
that technology companies are fucking up our civilization, MAGA diehards like
Matt Gaetz [104]have found common cause with liberal firebrands like Lina Khan
in support of breaking up the likes of Google, Meta, and Amazon.
Planet Earth is undeniably a bit of a shitshow at the moment, but I'm actually
feeling optimistic that we're approaching the precipice of something that
will—once we get to the other side of it—feel like the beginning of a sea
change in how information is organized, constituted, and distributed. To wit:
skepticism of information technology has materialized and matured from opposite
ends of the political spectrum, and advocates from both sides are meeting in
the middle with relatively boring policy prescriptions like regulating the use
of smartphones in schools and expanding the scope of antitrust actions. Seems…
fine, actually?
I don't expect any of the solutions being proposed today to, you know, work.
But it definitely feels like we've hit a critical mass such that the changes we
see in information technology during the next decade will look markedly
distinct from the last four. 🤞
© 2025 Justin Searls. All rights reserved.
References:
[1] https://justin.searls.co/
[3] https://justin.searls.co/posts/
[4] https://justin.searls.co/casts/
[5] https://justin.searls.co/links/
[6] https://justin.searls.co/shots/
[7] https://justin.searls.co/takes/
[8] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/
[9] https://justin.searls.co/clips/
[10] https://justin.searls.co/spots/
[11] https://justin.searls.co/slops/
[12] https://justin.searls.co/mails/
[13] https://justin.searls.co/about/
[14] https://justin.searls.co/search/
[15] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
[16] https://justin.searls.co/posts/
[17] https://justin.searls.co/casts/
[18] https://justin.searls.co/links/
[19] https://justin.searls.co/shots/
[20] https://justin.searls.co/takes/
[21] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/
[22] https://justin.searls.co/clips/
[23] https://justin.searls.co/spots/
[24] https://justin.searls.co/slops/
[25] https://justin.searls.co/mails/
[26] https://justin.searls.co/about/
[27] https://justin.searls.co/search/
[28] https://justin.searls.co/subscribe/
[29] https://searls.co/
[30] https://github.com/searls
[31] https://youtube.com/@JustinSearls
[32] https://linkedin.com/in/searls
[33] https://instagram.com/searls
[34] https://mastodon.social/@searls
[35] https://twitter.com/searls
[36] https://justin.searls.co/newsletter
[39] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/
[40] https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change-v36-hedgelord/
[41] https://justin.searls.co/casts/breaking-change-v35-gpt-casserole/
[42] https://justin.searls.co/links/2025-04-14-the-best-programmers/
[43] https://justin.searls.co/shots/2025-04-11-11h17m26s/
[44] https://justin.searls.co/tubes/2025-04-19-17h46m37s/
[45] https://justin.searls.co/takes/2025-04-14-10h39m58s/
[46] https://justin.searls.co/shots/2025-04-13-20h54m45s/
[47] https://www.ctvnews.ca/video/2025/01/25/canadians-believe-the-country-is-moving-in-the-wrong-direction-nanos/
[48] https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/pulse-check-april-2025
[49] https://www.ipsos.com/fr-fr/ce-qui-preoccupe-les-francais
[50] https://tg24.sky.it/mondo/2025/03/26/unione-europea-sondaggio-eurobarometro
[51] https://www.ipsos.com/es-es/predicciones-para-el-2025
[52] https://wpolityce.pl/polityka/725066-alarmujacy-sondaz-dla-tuska-zle-oceny-sytuacji-w-kraju
[53] https://oglobo.globo.com/economia/noticia/2025/01/01/61percent-dos-brasileiros-acham-que-economia-esta-no-caminho-errado-aponta-datafolha.ghtml
[54] https://www.afrobarometer.org/publication/ad816-south-africans-score-their-government-poorly-on-its-economic-performance/
[55] https://www.afrobarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/AD958-Nigerians-see-grim-economic-picture%5EJ-favour-reinstating-fuel-subsidy-Afrobarometer-19march25.pdf
[56] https://www.ipsos.com/sites/default/files/ct/news/documents/2024-06/What%20Worries%20the%20World%20April2024-ja.pdf
[57] https://www.arabbarometer.org/2025/01/the-authoritarian-impact-does-political-mitigation-really-matter-to-egyptians/
[58] https://www.afrobarometer.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/01/AD935-Kenyans-blame-govt-economic-management-for-increasing-cost-of-living-Afrobarometer-9jan25.pdf
[59] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Information_superhighway
[60] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/#an-elder-millennials-history-of-the-information-age
[61] https://www.reddit.com/r/lostmedia/comments/1gck7fx/partially_lost_aol_keyword_content/
[62] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/#we-dont-love-to-win-we-hate-to-lose
[63] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstellar_(film)
[64] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loss_aversion
[65] https://www.theverge.com/2025/1/13/24343063/tiktok-ban-goodbye-chinese-spy-trend
[66] https://redditinc.com/blog/an-analysis-of-net-neutrality-activism-on-reddit
[67] https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2024/10/please-ban-data-caps-internet-users-tell-fcc/
[68] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/#what-exactly-was-lost
[69] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overton_window
[70] https://justin.searls.co/mails/2025-04/#maybe-this-is-coming-to-a-head
[71] http://web.archive.org/web/20060911084122/http://blog.facebook.com/blog.php?post=2207967130
[72] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_to_video
[73] https://www.amazon.com/Shallows-What-Internet-Doing-Brains/dp/0393339750
[74] https://www.amazon.com/Deep-Work-Focused-Success-Distracted/dp/1455586692
[75] https://www.amazon.com/Tech-Wise-Family-Everyday-Putting-Technology/dp/0801018668
[76] https://www.amazon.com/Art-Screen-Time-Balance-Digital/dp/1610396723
[77] https://www.amazon.com/Anxious-Generation-Rewiring-Childhood-Epidemic/dp/0593655036
[78] https://www.warner.senate.gov/public/index.cfm/2021/2/warner-hirono-klobuchar-announce-the-safe-tech-act-to-reform-section-230
[79] https://www.reuters.com/legal/meta-will-face-antitrust-trial-over-instagram-whatsapp-acquisitions-2024-11-13/?utm_source=chatgpt.com
[80] https://www.reuters.com/world/us/biden-raises-alarm-about-dangerous-concentration-power-among-few-wealthy-people-2025-01-16/
[81] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4chan
[82] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NeoGAF
[83] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGN
[84] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickrolling
[85] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_(harassment_campaign)
[86] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/QAnon
[87] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_rights_movement
[88] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pickup_artist
[89] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Incel-related_violence
[90] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manosphere
[91] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barstool_Sports
[92] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joe_Rogan
[93] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primitivism
[94] https://generationfaraday.com/2025/03/17/indiana-takes-action-to-curb-cell-phone-distractions-in-classrooms/
[95] https://thecapitolist.com/senate-bill-proposes-phone-free-school-pilot-to-assess-academic-behavioral-impact/
[96] https://thehill.com/homenews/education/4863487-south-carolina-school-cell-phone-ban/
[97] https://www.katc.com/vermilion-parish/louisiana-bans-cell-phones-in-schools-parents-and-school-official-weigh-in
[98] https://www.texastribune.org/2025/04/30/texas-social-media-ban-warning-label/
[99] https://apnews.com/article/florida-social-media-ban-desantis-fd07f61e167bd9109a83cd7355b5f164
[100] https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/mar/23/utah-social-media-access-law-minors
[101] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgx7GvYSq64
[102] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZKu58ue-i1c
[103] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horseshoe_theory
[104] https://www.fastcompany.com/91229051/matt-gaetz-trump-attorney-general-pick-lina-kahn-big-tech

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[80]Business
Moleskine Mania: How a Notebook Conquered the Digital Era
“Do you know there’s a section of our customer base that buys a fresh Moleskine
every time they come into a store? We have no idea what they do with them”
[81]August 30, 2024August 31, 2024 - by [82]Roland Allen[83]Roland Allen
Updated 16:06, Aug. 31, 2024 | Published 11:22, Aug. 30, 2024
[84]A stack of filled moleskin notebooks on their sideBarry Silver / Flickr
In the summer of 1995, Maria Sebregondi was mulling over a knotty question,
sailing with friends off the Tunisian coast. At thirty-six, she had already
enjoyed a fruitful career, translating Marguerite Duras, Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, and Vladimir Nabokov into Italian. She was particularly intrigued by
the French pair of Georges Perec and Raymond Queneau, who wrote novels and
poetry using formal constraints as a spur to creativity. Perec had written an
entire novel, La disparition, without using the letter “e”; in Exercices de
style, Queneau told the same simple story in ninety-nine versions, using a
different prose form for each one. They called their playful genre Oulipo, an
acronym derived from the French for “workshop of potential literature.” So
Sebregondi was accustomed to the generation of ideas within set parameters, and
on this particular sultry evening, she was presented with just such a
challenge.
Her holidaying shipmates included Francesco Franceschi, a friend whose company
Modo & Modo sold designer gifts, and that night, he shared a problem. His
business depended on other people conceiving and manufacturing products for him
to sell, which kept profit margins low. What, asked Franceschi, could Modo &
Modo manufacture themselves and thus sell more profitably? The group exchanged
ideas long into the night, discussing emerging trends like cellphones, email,
and cheap flights. They decided that the consumer they wanted to target with a
hypothetical new product belonged to this new era: creative, free spirited, and
mobile. Sebregondi labelled their design-conscious customer the “contemporary
nomad.” But before any of the party could work out what to manufacture for
them, the holiday was over and she had returned home with her children to Rome.
• [85]Indigo May Have Lost the Plot
• [86]The Case for Never Reading the Book Jacket
• [87]How Do You Even Sell a Book Anymore?
The question nagged at her for weeks, and she toyed with ideas, including a
traveller’s toolkit containing exquisitely designed pens, bags, T-shirts,
penknives, and so on. Nothing met the requirements of Franceschi’s brief, which
demanded a product that would be easy to produce yet offer wide commercial
potential. Then she came across two passages in the book she was reading for
pleasure: The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin, a global bestseller since its
publication eight years before. In the novel, a lightly fictionalized version
of Chatwin explores the Australian outback, coming to understand that its
aboriginal culture offers an insight into the origins of human culture—and
perhaps into the restlessness of human nature itself. Conspicuously “creative,
free spirited, and mobile,” Chatwin himself seemed a perfect fit for the
“contemporary nomad,” and two passages in his novel triggered Sebregondi’s
memory:
“Do you mind if I use my notebook?” I asked.
“Go ahead.”
I pulled from my pocket a black, oilcloth-covered notebook, its pages held
in place with an elastic band.
“Nice notebook,” he said.
“I used to get them in Paris,” I said. But now they don’t make them any
more.”
“Paris?” he repeated, raising an eyebrow as if he’d never heard anything so
pretentious.
Then he winked and went on talking.
Later in the book, Chatwin expands on the story.
Some months before I left for Australia, the owner of the papeterie said
that the vrai moleskine was getting harder and harder to get. There was one
supplier: a small family business in Tours. They were very slow in
answering letters.
“I’d like to order a hundred,” I said to Madame. “A hundred will last me a
lifetime.”
She promised to telephone Tours at once, that afternoon.
At lunchtime, I had a sobering experience. The headwaiter of Brasserie Lipp
no longer recognised me. “Non, Monsieur, il n’y a pas de place.” At five, I
kept my appointment with Madame. The manufacturer had died. His heirs had
sold the business. She removed her spectacles and, almost with an air of
mourning, said, “Le vrai moleskine n’est plus.”
This passage had struck many of Chatwin’s readers; its intimations of mortality
seemed to foreshadow the author’s premature death only a year and a half after
the publication of The Songlines. But to Sebregondi, it meant something more
personal, because she recognized, from her time as a student in Paris, the
notebooks Chatwin described. Indeed, she still had several. Digging them out of
old boxes, she looked at them for the first time in years—and with new eyes.
Why had Chatwin become so attached to this particular model that he would order
a hundred rather than risk running out? How could such a utilitarian object
assume such importance? Then it struck her that she might have hit upon a
solution to Franceschi’s challenge—a simple product, easy to manufacture,
appealing to creatives and imparting promises of travel, of glamour, of
discovery.
Phone calls to France confirmed Chatwin’s account (a sensible move: Chatwin
always preferred a good story to the literal truth), and Sebregondi’s hunch was
confirmed by serendipitous sightings of le vrai moleskine in other contexts:
exhibitions of Matisse’s and Picasso’s sketchbooks, a photo of Hemingway at
work. This product, she realized, already had a pedigree. More to the point, it
had commercial promise, for millions around the world had already read
Chatwin’s endorsement. It even accorded with the classic principles of Italian
design: like an espresso, a pair of Persol sunglasses, or a Prada dress, le
moleskine was minimal, functional, and assertively black.
And yet, miraculously, no one made it anymore.
Sebregondi took the idea to Milan, where Franceschi realized that she was on to
something. With Chatwin having already solved the thorniest problem faced by
anyone marketing a new product (what to call the damn thing), the pair entered
what became a two-year process of product design, which resulted in the classic
Moleskine notebook.
You don’t need me to tell you what a Moleskine looks like, but you may not have
considered how insistently its design sends messages to the contemporary nomad.
The minimal black cover looks, at first glance, like it might be leather:
robust but also luxurious. The non-standard dimensions, a couple of centimetres
narrower than the familiar A5, let you slip the notebook into a jacket pocket,
and the rounded corners—which add considerably to the production cost—help with
this. They also stop your pages from getting dog-eared and, together with the
elastic strap and unusually heavy cover boards, confirm that the notebook is
ready for travel. The edges of the board sit flush with the page block,
ensuring that your Moleskine can never be mistaken for a printed book. In use,
it lies obediently open and flat, and the pocket glued into the back cover
board invites you to hide souvenirs—photos, tickets stubs, the phone numbers of
beautiful strangers. Two hundred pages suggest that you have plenty to write
about; the paper itself, tinted to a classy ivory shade and unusually smooth to
the touch, implies that your ideas deserve nothing but the best, and the ribbon
marker helps you navigate your musings. Discreetly minimal it may seem, but the
whole package is as shot through with brand messaging as anything labelled
Nike, Mercedes, or Apple—and, like the best cues, the messaging works on a
subconscious level.
But in case those cues alone were not enough, Moleskine spelled out its brand
values in the small folded leaflet which the notebook’s new owner would
“discover”—as Sebregondi tellingly puts it—tucked in the pocket. The leaflet’s
copy has evolved over time, and more and more languages have been added to it,
but the central message has changed little from the early, Italian-only,
version:
The Moleskine is an exact reproduction of the legendary notebook of
Chatwin, Hemingway, Matisse. Anonymous custodian of an extraordinary
tradition, the Moleskine is a distillation of function and an accumulator
of emotions that releases its charge over time. From the original notebook
a family of essential and trusted pocket books was born. Hard cover covered
in moleskine, elastic closure, thread binding. Internal bellowed pocket in
cardboard and canvas. Removable leaflet with the history of Moleskine.
Format 9 x 14 cm.
The leaflet opened with a lie (the new Moleskines were not “exact reproductions
of the old”) then immediately veered toward gibberish, but that didn’t matter.
Pound for pound, those seventy-five words proved themselves among the most
effective pieces of commercial copywriting of all time, briskly connecting the
product’s intangible qualities—usefulness and emotion—to its material
specification, thereby selling both the sizzle and the steak. Sebregondi and
Franceschi picked an astutely international selection of names to drop: an
Englishman, an American, and a Frenchman encouraged cosmopolitan aspirations.
“Made in China,” on the other hand, did not, so they left that bit out.
Modo & Modo ordered the initial production run of 3,000 notebooks in 1997, and
the new Moleskine first went on sale in Milan, in a small bookshop on the Corso
Buenos Aires. It sold through its consignment in days. Avoiding traditional
stationers, the company targeted design retailers and bookstores: the strategy
worked, and in 1998, they sold 30,000 notebooks. From 1999, they used their
existing networks to distribute around Europe and then across the Atlantic.
Within ten years, the American chain bookseller Barnes & Noble had become the
brand’s largest retail partner. Just as Franceschi had hoped, the high profit
margins transformed Modo & Modo’s fortunes. In 2006, a private equity firm
bought him out, and sales continued to grow.
In 2013, the Moleskine SpA launched on the Italian stock exchange, and in 2016,
a Belgian car distributor bought the company outright, for half a billion
euros. Small wonder that the story is now taught in business schools as a
textbook example of successful product design and marketing. In 2017, the story
came full circle when Moleskine and Chatwin’s publisher struck a deal to
publish a new edition of The Songlines, bound in the now-familiar black boards,
complete with elastic closure, rounded corners, ribbon markers, and pocket. You
bought it shrink-wrapped to a blank journal, embossed—in a gesture which
Chatwin would surely have recoiled from—with the motivational boost “Enjoy your
travel writing.”
Sebregondi herself stayed relentlessly on message for two decades, giving
scores of interviews whose recurring theme was that the Moleskine was “first of
all, an enabler for creativity.”
Having stayed with the business through its various incarnations, she stepped
back in 2017 and currently gives her time to the charitable Moleskine
Foundation, which aims to drive social change, especially in sub-Saharan Africa
and Eastern Europe, through—naturally—creativity. She also remains involved
with Oplepo, the Italian offshoot of Oulipo. Her most recent translation is of
Queneau’s One Hundred Thousand Billion Poems, in which the reader randomly
generates sonnets from the book’s thousands of rhyming lines, constraints
proving creative.
I bought my first Moleskine during the early years of that boom and, a while
later, found myself working for a book publisher keen to share in the
Moleskine-driven growth of the upscale stationery market. Notebooks, we
reasoned, had no words and no pictures—the tricky, expensive things that make
“real” books so difficult to profit from. How hard could it be to cash in? So
we created a range of notebooks, brightly designed and packed with gimmicks,
and placed a substantial order at the printers. I was charged with visiting
Barnes & Noble’s Fifth Avenue head office to present our wares, and I suggested
that our colourful product could supply healthy turnover if racked alongside
Moleskine in their stores.
The buyer eyed me skeptically. “Along with the Moleskines,” he said. “Do you
know there’s a section of our customer base that buys a fresh Moleskine every
time they come into a store? Once a week, some people. We have no idea what
they do with them.”
I showed off my samples, stressing the cream paper, the ribbon markers, and the
striking cover designs that supposedly set our brand apart. He shook his head
and handed me a familiar black notebook in response. “See this?” he said. “We
make them ourselves, own brand. The same size, the same number of pages. We use
the same paper, the same boards, we make them at the same plants in China.
They’re every bit as good as a Moleskine, and we ask half as much for them.” He
paused for effect. “And Moleskine still outsells us. And you’re asking me to
take shelf space away?”
I was learning a hard lesson about the power of the brand. Others, however,
made a better go of it. From 2005, Leuchtturm, whose specialty had been stamp
collectors’ albums, took on Moleskine, matching them for quality while
offering—the vulgarity!—a range of colours; older companies like
Clairefontaine, Rhodia, and Paperblanks refreshed their offerings. Western
hipsters, always alert to high-end Japanese design, started to import notebooks
from companies like Midori, Hobonichi, and Stalogy, which bested any of the
European brands with their exquisite papers and bindings (Moleskine and
Leuchtturm both use mainly Taiwanese paper). In the US, Field Notes struck a
utilitarian chord with a mid-century aesthetic. All presented a fresh spin on
the basic product, and all benefited from the product building that Moleskine
had done. If you cared for upmarket stationery, the 2010s were a golden age.
At the same time, the Moleskine became a potent status symbol. Tech CEOs toted
them, as did the designers, journalists, and writers whom Sebregondi had
envisaged—and even more people whose aspirations perhaps outran their actual
creativity. Spotted in your local Starbucks, these characters were easily
mocked: the satirical website Stuff White People Like made hay with their
accessorizing, as did the right-wing politician Karl Rove, who once told his
audience at Yale that he knew them to be pretentious by their Moleskines. The
mockery did nothing to hurt sales.
Neither did a growing interest, from psychologists and lifestyle gurus, in the
notebook’s practical effectiveness. Sebregondi herself suggested that the
notebook’s minimal form made it a perfect creative tool, talking of it in the
same terms as Queneau’s deliberately constrained work: “a simple object,”
giving her the “sense of extraordinary possibility born from small things.” The
productivity guru David Allen recommended making lists in notebooks, as did
neuroscientist Daniel Levitin; the journalist David Sax wrote a book, The
Revenge of Analog, which depicted paper notebooks (along with vinyl LPs, board
games, and film cameras) mounting a spirited resistance against digital
replacement. It became commonplace to contrast the old technology with the new.
The original Moleskine had launched at the same time as the Palm Pilot, the
first hand-held digital organizer, and had, from day one, faced competition
from increasingly powerful devices. The laptop, the BlackBerry, the iPhone, and
the iPad all seemed to offer far greater functionality than their paper
antecedent, but a stubborn constituency of users refused to move over into the
digital sphere, and numerous peer-reviewed studies soon showed that their
obduracy made sense. Something about the act of writing by hand, and the
production of a physical object, makes the older technology more effective than
the new. Sebregondi had, unwittingly, prompted serious inquiry into the
workings of the human brain.
My own interest in notebooks had also progressed beyond the commercial. I read
Samuel Pepys, loving the unfettered way in which he documented work, home,
leisure, his urban environment, and his sex life; then I discovered my
grandfather’s eye-opening pre-war diaries, just as wide ranging, although much
briefer. So I started keeping my own journal in 2002, and each year added to a
steadily growing heap of battered notebooks.
Writing a diary made me happier; keeping things-to-do lists made me more
reliable (which, in turn, made those around me happier), and I learned never to
go to a doctor’s appointment, or a meeting of any kind, without taking notes of
what I heard. But there appeared to be creative benefits too. Every artist I
met seemed to have a sketchbook to hand, as did graphic designers—and even web
designers, whose product was entirely digital. Authors all kept notebooks, as
did journalists, critics, and other creative types—and the more assiduously
they used those notebooks, the better their work seemed to be. The same applied
to my colleagues’ work: playful lists, diagrams, and sketches regularly
disgorged surprisingly good ideas.
When notebooks appear on the scene, interesting things happen. To open up to
the blank page and interact with it takes energy and sometimes a little
courage.
But the rewards may surprise.
Excerpted from [88]The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper by Roland
Allen. Copyright © Roland Allen 2024. Excerpted with permission from
Biblioasis. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without
permission in writing from the publisher.
[89]Roland Allen
[90]Roland Allen
Roland Allen lives in Brighton, England, and works in book (and notebook)
publishing. He has written books on bicycles and bread, has kept a diary for
decades, and enjoys stationery a little too much.
Tagged[91]audio[92]books[93]excerpt[94]history[95]homepage
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[1]Opinion|There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness
[2][3]
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/
therapy-estrangement-childless-millennials.html
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A pair of figures peer over a body of water in which is reflected the figure of
a parent and child.
Credit...Dadu Shin
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[11]
[12]OpinionGuest Essay
There’s a Link Between Therapy Culture and Childlessness
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Michal Leibowitz
By Michal Leibowitz
Ms. Leibowitz is a staff editor for Times Opinion.
• May 30, 2025
They mess you up, your mum and dad.
They may not mean to, but they do.
They fill you with the faults they had
And add some extra, just for you.
How many times had I read [21]a version of these lines or heard them recited?
The opening stanza of Philip Larkin’s poem “This Be the Verse” is a favorite of
fictional [22]shrinks and [23]wise folk. I can say the words by heart. But it
was only last year, my stomach already stretching with new life, that I reread
the poem and found myself focusing on the third stanza, which offers the
logical conclusion of the earlier two:
Man hands on misery to man.
It deepens like a coastal shelf.
Get out as early as you can,
And don’t have any kids yourself.
There are few decisions more fraught for members of my generations — the cusp
of millennial and Gen Z — than whether or not to become a parent. In 2023 the
U.S. fertility rate fell to a record low. Some of the decline can be explained
by [24]a delay in having children or a decrease in the number of children,
rather than people forgoing child rearing entirely. But it still seems [25]
increasingly likely that millennials will have the highest rate of
childlessness of any generational cohort in American history.
There are plenty of plausible explanations for the trend. People aren’t having
kids because it’s too expensive. They’re not having kids because they can’t
find the right partner. They’re not having kids because they want to prioritize
their careers, because of climate change, because the idea of bringing a child
onto this broken planet is too depressing. They’re swearing off parenthood
because of the [26]overturning of Roe v. Wade or because they’re perennially
commitmentphobic or because popular culture has made motherhood seem [27]so
daunting, its burdens so deeply unpleasant, that you have to have a touch of
masochism to even consider it. Maybe women, in particular, are having fewer
children simply because they can.
I suspect there’s some truth in all of these explanations. But I think there’s
another reason, too, one that’s often been overlooked. Over the past few
decades, Americans have redefined “harm,” “abuse,” “neglect” and “trauma,”
expanding those categories to include emotional and relational struggles that
were previously considered unavoidable parts of life. Adult children seem
increasingly likely to publicly, even righteously, cut off contact with a
parent, sometimes citing emotional, physical or sexual abuse they experienced
in childhood and sometimes things like clashing values, [28]parental toxicity
or feeling misunderstood or unsupported.
This cultural shift has contributed to a new, nearly impossible standard for
parenting. Not only must parents provide shelter, food, safety and love, but
we, their children, also expect them to get us started on successful careers
and even to hold themselves accountable for our mental health and happiness
well into our adult years.
So I want to suggest that there’s another reason my generation dreads
parenthood: We’ve held our own parents to unreachable standards, standards that
deep down, maybe, we know we ourselves would struggle to meet.
I: They Mess You Up
I turned 14 in 2010, right when self-harm rates for U.S. girls began [29]
ticking up. I was part of a generation of teenage girls who came of age with
the internet — with Tumblr, blogs, Snapchat and YouTube. With smartphones. With
the compelling urge to self-punish or annihilate.
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References:
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion
[2] https://www.nytimes.com/
[3] https://www.nytimes.com/
[8] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/therapy-estrangement-childless-millennials.html
[9] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/therapy-estrangement-childless-millennials.html#site-content
[10] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/therapy-estrangement-childless-millennials.html#site-index
[11] https://www.nytimes.com/
[12] https://www.nytimes.com/section/opinion
[13] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/therapy-estrangement-childless-millennials.html#after-sponsor
[15] https://help.nytimes.com/hc/en-us/articles/24318293692180
[20] https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/opinion/therapy-estrangement-childless-millennials.html
[21] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/48419/this-be-the-verse
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[23] https://www.google.com/search?client=safari&sca_esv=730791857161bc9a&rls=en&sxsrf=ADLYWIIzM3C6w-3BgMNesOMFxnIPr4UqSQ:1735773643039&q=this+be+the+verse+ted+lasso&udm=7&fbs=AEQNm0Aa4sjWe7Rqy32pFwRj0UkWwAFG7ranuZ26H8lR7pf_8AzBs6lnFFuPH6eU3OV27QLdrv7xAgNCyLdE47ea9xYrum71RBqtM2WCrFpEPdkQQSMW_9Ax_gFEn0J_HL-N4u79eZY_XjE_8W6eM0exMezM_gxd-9unzo5Y3EKgC-mcki7jqdxIUdAWV2ac7fdlRJDMShSTsGdfH4qPIBWx_K_KlUPk2Q&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwiVlZ3b1NWKAxXVDTQIHcM0Mq8QtKgLegQIHBAB&biw=1000&bih=886&dpr=2#fpstate=ive&vld=cid:f16250ed,vid:agld0a0JWB4,st:0
[24] https://www.economist.com/democracy-in-america/2018/10/31/americas-fertility-rate-continues-its-deep-decline?utm_medium=cpc.adword.pd&utm_source=google&ppccampaignID=17210591673&ppcadID=&utm_campaign=a.22brand_pmax&utm_content=conversion.direct-response.anonymous&gad_source=1&gclid=CjwKCAjwmrqzBhAoEiwAXVpgok5N1YRwrhtysJOLNrDdXLZg8KMOqw3OCtuxi6XyUejmfO2ZhX8aYBoCDQgQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
[25] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2023/11/03/millennials-only-children/
[26] https://apnews.com/article/abortion-tubal-ligations-tying-tubes-dobbs-roe-jama-2ec56d7f2707db083e513bdc74a5016d
[27] https://www.vox.com/features/23979357/millennials-motherhood-dread-parenting-birthrate-women-policy
[28] https://www.researchgate.net/publication/277306594_Disconnection_and_Decision-making_Adult_Children_Explain_Their_Reasons_for_Estranging_from_Parents
[29] https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2024/03/teen-childhood-smartphone-use-mental-health-effects/677722/
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