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:

1. the time it takes to get fed up with a specific short form video and scroll away from it

abeguence:

1. the time it takes to get fed up with an entire session of video-watching and eject yourself completely from it, which weirdly takes much longer than getting fed up with many of the components
2. ditto, but for a friendship

saeculum:

1. the time it takes for the people who were present at a given historical event to die out, so nobody is alive who remembers the thing directly. [note: this was a real Roman word I weirdly just learned recently]
2. ditto, but for an organization, when none of the people who founded it are still involved

saeculaminor:

1. when the people who were around for the start of an organization become the minority of the membership, and can't actually determine what happens in it any more, and have to watch as it mutates into something else while people who just joined recently tell them what the org is really about

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.

2026-05-18 19:11:27

Paul Grice was a philosopher of language whose Maxims of Conversation I find myself wanting to reference fairly often. It's not that I think they're correct in a deep sense (more on that later), but I do think they're extremely useful touchpoints, and I wish everyone knew them so I could quickly reference them.

The idea is that most people will usually obey these four norms in conversation, and will generally expect (subconsciously) that you are following the norms too. They are (paraphrased):

• People will try to be relevant to the thing said before (the maxim of relation).
• People will to speak as clearly, as briefly, and as orderly as possible (the maxim of manner).
• People will try to give as much information as needed, but not more (the maxim of quantity).
• People will try to say true things, and not to say false or unsupported things (the maxim of quality).

Again, I don't think these are good as Rules You Must Follow In Every Conversation, or that they universally describe what people actually do.

But I do think they're a reasonable description of what many people are doing in many kinds of conversations, and a reasonable baseline for what you can assume many other people will assume you're doing when you're conversing, such that it's useful to know them and useful to signal when you're planning to deviate from them. Like conventions of a literary genre, it's fine to rebel against the expectations, but that's very different from just not-knowing them.

So, for example: in general, people will assume that the next thing you say in a conversation will be directly related to the last thing spoken by the last person who spoke. Different people have different thresholds of relevance, which is already a good thing to be aware of. But if you have a very low relevance threshold, and you're launching into a story that's only tangentially relevant to what came before, you should be aware that the whole time you're saying it the listeners are liable to be trying to figure out why you're telling this story and how it connects to what was said previously, creating large cognitive overhead for them.

It's a little like when GoogleMaps keeps re-routing as you drive in the opposite direction that it thought you were going in, constantly spending its brainpower on figuring out how you could possibly get from where you are to where you said you're going, when actually you just weren't going where it thought any more. So it's polite – if you're going to say something not-super-relevant – to flag that explicitly, so people aren't left trying to connect the dots that aren't actually there.

2026-05-17 21:29:07

I had a lot of great questions and comments on last week's widget showing how unrepresentative we all are of the broader population.

E.g. several people asked me what the most common combination was, and exactly how common it is. And friend of the blog L. asked if the results were largely driven by age, and at the time I didn't have an answer to that.

So today I made an Explorer tool that lets you poke at the data more easily and see how rare various combos of answers are. E.g. If you're less-than-certain in the existence of God, think same-sex relationships are totally ok, and have a bachelor's degree (or higher), you're in a 1-in-6 minority among Americans as a whole. But I suspect you're much more common than that among this blog's readership, and that you're likely to be in an overwhelming majority among your own friend-group. And I truly think national politics gets distorted in part by people thinking their own views and traits are far more common than they really are, and I hope this tool can help us collectively train our intuitions on just how weird we actually are. Happy exploring, let me know what you discover!