2026-05-26 19:11:23
One thing that has bugged me for a while is when a brand goes downhill: there's a multi-year period where they can keep charging a premium based on their old reputation before the quality-lowering catches up with them.
I had an idea for a while to make a website to track such things, after several bad experiences of wasting a lot of time online trying to figure out whether positive reviews for a company were sufficiently recent to still be credible.
Anyway, it turns out someone else has already done this and made a website. I have complicated feelings about this site because I'm pretty sure that much of it is AI generated, and/but simultaneously I thiiiiiiiiiiink it's still correct? O brave new world, that has such people/entities in't. (Well: 'tis new to me).
I don't have anything deep to say about it, so this post just exists to direct you to their website. There's a funny unnameable feeling as a writer/thing-maker, where you plan to do something eventually but it feels like a chore, then you find out someone has already done it, and now you're liberated but also redundant.
Worse on Purpose
Ok, one comment actually: this person, or at least their website, seems more anti-capitalist than I am, whereas I'm closer to a cat theorist. I notice that there's a trend in family-run companies getting bought out and then becoming far less willing or able to catch mice, but I also think the world is more complicated than that – it's possible that the companies get sold because they're no longer able to produce at high quality, or that there's a salience bias in which companies we notice going downhill. Also, I suspect our time is most valuably spent on figuring out how to structure the institutions and incentives so the cats keep mousing (e.g. by siccing a bigger cat on them).
2026-05-25 19:11:24
Ok, hear me out. What if the best way to experience ideas (generally) is through conversation – hashing things out together, being inspired by other people's thoughts, reaching new thoughts that neither of you had alone?
And the entire history of aritcle-writing was a compromise for the era's technologies: we couldn't have country-spanning conversations, so one person wrote an article and then other people wrote Letters to the Editor in response, and we did our best approximation with what we had?
(I've been reading old magazines from the 30s-80s recently, and the letters pages are full of long ongoing conversations, implemented slowly. Or think about the Republic of Letters, or the Federalist Papers: long conversations carried out in essay form).
It's fun to hate on social media but: what if it has taken over because it's a closer approximation to conversation, and therefore a better way to develop ideas together?
Maybe the issue with social media is just the way it devolves into, well, strangers shouting at each other, and not having a shared trust base, and the ease with which one person (of any agenda) can hijack the whole conversation. But maybe if you build ways around that, it's actually a great way to think?
I've said before that my favourite social media is 5 person whatsapp groups, and I suspect that if I actually tracked such things a lot of my new thoughts in the last few years come out of those simmering soups.
I obviously don't mean this as absolutely as it's written – there's a different kind of deep thought that only happens when one person focuses on one thing for a long time, and then synthesises it all in one place. But still, maybe we've been letting that ideal get in the way of enabling the magic in written conversation as well.
2026-05-22 19:11:00
Some beloved friends of the blog were conversing about old units that had meaningful but flexible definitions, e.g. a 'pose' was the amount of land a farmer could plow before needing a rest. Here are my suggestions for units of time that ought to exist.
respuence:
abeguence:
saeculum:
saeculaminor:
2026-05-21 19:11:26
this is a remix[^1] of a post I wrote previously.
Most of the plot-lines of my life never resolved. At age 22 there were a few Big Stories in my life, they each felt momentous, and the thing I feared was that they might resolve "against" me. But what actually happened is that they never resolved at all.
Some of the most important people in my life just dissolved from it entirely – whether gradually, or suddenly – and mostly I've never heard from them or about them ever again. The stories we were co-writing stopped in the middle. Often we reached the disaster, but not the transformation, nor the atonement, nor the return.
In the end, the people and organizations I had the most trouble with neither got their comeuppance nor crushed me under their boot, but just.... stopped being part of my life, and I don't know what happened to them, and that's about it.
I wonder how much my original expectations were just a fiction created by fictions. Many of my ideas about life were forged by books and movies – most of the lives I got real knowledge of as a kid were fabrications – and maybe that's why I imagined that the stories of my life would have resolutions, whether good or bad or ugly.
Speculating about The Young is a good sign that you're getting spiritually Old, but I do wonder if the Youth of Today will not find an unresolved life as strange as I do. If you grow up in an age of scrolls and reels, snacking on endless morsels of standalone media from one eternal feed, does that change your expectation of narrative connection between events? Does it free you from the tyranny of a Life Story?
Maybe instead you learn to see life as a garden, filled with interesting and sometimes interrelated things to see and do, but without the expectation that stories should have a happy ending, or any ending at all.
[^1]: I don't think I've seen people write (explicit) remixes before, I thought I'd give it a go. They have three attractions for me:
One is that I get new readers over time, and mostly they've never seen my old posts, and that seems kind of arbitrary – these posts are no more or less timely than they were when I first sent them, so shouldn't I keep trying with the ones that seemed meaningful?
Two is that I think an idea is more likely to affect someone if it goes through spaced repetition. Some of my favourite newsletter writers do this by picking a few lenses on the world and applying them to endless different situations, thereby spaced-repeating the lens. I'm not sure I can do that effectively, so remixes seemed like an intriguing alternative.
Third is just that I want to see if I'm any better as a writer than I was two years ago. A man's reach should exceed his grasp, or what's a heaven for.
2026-05-20 19:11:25
A few times in my life, I've made decisions that had a feeling of extreme preordaindness: I met a person and felt I already know you, or had a choice to make and felt like I didn't really have a choice to make, the die had already been cast long ago.
There are many reasonable explanations for this phenomenon, but I want to proffer a somewhat unreasonable one.
People always say that, when you die, your life flashes before your eyes: you experience it all again, at least the highlights, at least briefly. Sometimes I like to believe (or symbolically believe) that the life I'm living now is actually just a playback of a life already lived.
In much the way that our dreams are not quite as 3D as our actual lives,[^1] I suspect that the implication here is that the beings whose lives we are replaying are higher dimensional than we are, having richer and denser experiences of which this life is just a projection. Much of the detail comes as a surprise, still, but some of the core facts of your life are so overwhelming that you recognize them as they approach you. Oh, you think: this is her. This is it. This is it.
[^1]: I don't think my dreams are 2D, exactly? But they're somehow... flatter than my real life? At least how I remember them, though I'm never sure how much the waking-me is accurately remembering the dream-me's experiences.
2026-05-19 19:11:00
A wise friend of mine once told me: if you're not happy with how your life is going, think about changing one of these things: who you're with, where you live, or what you do for work.
I'm no expert on living happily but I think this was good advice. And also that I think it can be non-obvious which of these are making you unhappy: e.g. you think you hate your job, but really you just hate your city, and if you moved elsewhere you'd find the same job pleasant.