2026-05-11 16:05:02
We already know play is good for us, the same way we know sleep matters and vegetables exist. Knowing hasn’t made us do it more. In The most radical act in an age of outrage is to play, Zander Phelps argues that our collective retreat from play isn’t accidental but an outcome of systems that keep us anxious and distracted – and that playful curiosity might be one of the last ways to stay human and hard to manipulate.
I almost skipped this piece, because – well – there are genuinely terrible things happening in the world right now, and ‘go play more’ can feel like advice from someone who hasn’t checked the news lately. But Phelps earns his argument. He’s not offering a wellness tip. He’s making a structural point about why disengagement from play serves certain interests rather well.
“Unused faculties atrophy. And when faculties atrophy, systems built on compliance thrive. They reward predictability. Anger and fear make us predictable. Creativity, curiosity, and divergent thinking make us harder to steer. Emotional manipulation becomes simpler when imagination shrinks.”
Which is to say: our collective anxiety isn’t just a side effect. It’s the point. The antidote Phelps proposes isn’t a digital detox or a meditation retreat.
“Where does sovereignty begin? Not in Washington or Silicon Valley. It begins with self-regulation. I cannot control the global news cycle, but I can control my nervous system. I can decide whether I will outsource my emotional state to the latest headline or cultivate internal stability. For me, that cultivation happens through play.”
The mechanism is simple: “Play expands our adaptive capacity. Fear contracts it.” What that means in practice:
“Real-world play, such as tossing a ball, learning to juggle, or building something with friends, reintroduces novelty, problem-solving, and collaboration. It broadens capacity in ways no algorithm can replicate.”
Getting a dog forced me to reckon with this in a way I hadn’t expected. Twice a day, I’m outside, training and playing, watching something be purely, absurdly delighted by movement. It’s not exactly the kind of play Phelps talks about but something in that hour genuinely resets me. I don’t touch my phone. I’m just there in nature with a hectic furball, hands covered in dirt and saliva. It’s uncomplicated, unproductive presence, and I didn’t know how much I needed it.
“[Play] builds resilience, flexibility, and social connection. It restores a sense of agency because the reward is internal. You are not waiting for a notification to feel validated. You are generating joy through participation.”
Which sounds obvious. Until you notice how rarely you actually do it.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-05-04 15:43:40
Extended travel a few weeks ago finally gave me a chance to burrow into my podcast backlog. I was on a train listening to this 2025 conversation between legendary Australian journalist Peter Greste and novelist Omar El Akkad, whose book One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This I included in DD344. Towards the end of the interview I found myself wiping tears off my cheeks.
The whole conversation is meaty and devastating. Greste and El Akkad go deep on the gap between Western liberal values and the reality of Gaza, the cynicism of ‘lesser evil’ politics and the theatre of performative progressivism.
There is a barely contained exhaustion in El Akkad’s voice. Here is a writer being asked, yet again, to explain to a Western audience why opposing a genocidal war is the only morally defensible position. He does it anyway, with astounding clarity.
Near the end, an audience member – a new parent – asks El Akkad how to raise a child to be ethical and truthful in a world so obviously marked by hypocrisy and violence. His answer is the part that got me on that train. I’m going to just let him speak, because no paraphrase would come close, but do yourself a favour and listen to the whole thing.
“My son’s too young for any of this. My daughter isn’t. She’s getting to an age where eventually my natural desire to sort of bubble wrap her is gonna have to give away. And I’ve been trying to think of how to explain this to the two most kind-hearted decent human beings I’ve ever met in my life. And I don’t know. I have no idea. None.
I have instead been trying to sort of work my way around in this very circuitous way of talking about how to be in this world. How to exist, how to be a decent human being in a world that is so indecent so much of the time, not because most people are indecent, but because we’ve handed the reins of control to profoundly indecent human beings.
I found myself coming back to one of the many things that have affected me profoundly over the last two years: I don’t know how many of you know of Aaron Bushnell, the person who self-immolated outside the Israeli embassy in DC. I would never ask any of you to go watch that video. It’s horrific. But if you have, you know that towards the end of that video, the security apparatus shows up, and you’ve got one guy asking for a fire extinguisher and another guy pointing his gun at the flames.
And insofar as I’m going to talk to my kids at some point about how to be in the world, I will try to explain that throughout their lives, going forward, there are going to be so many benefits to being the kind of person who points their gun at the flame, or more to the point, allows someone else to hold the gun to the flame on their behalf. And that despite all of those benefits, the best thing they can do to be a force for some kind of positive change in the world is to try and be the person who’s reaching for the fucking fire extinguisher.
That is the closest I have come to trying to figure out what I want to tell them about how to be in the world. But that is also coming from a place of profound embarrassment, because it should not be the case that I have to tell them any of this. We screwed up, and that’s why this is happening.”
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-04-27 15:17:23
One of the more bizarre features of this era is that even people who are doing objectively well by any reasonable measure can’t seem to shake the feeling that they’re falling behind.
Financial journalist Hanna Horvath has written a very clarifying essay on why this might be happening. She traces how ‘middle class’ stopped being an economic category and became a psychological one – a story about the kind of life you think you deserve. Which means when the story doesn’t match the reality, the gap hits hard:
“‘Middle class’ has become a psychological container that absorbs all of this anxiety – the gap between self-concept and lived experience, between what you were trained to expect and what the economy actually delivers. The term ‘middle class’ holds a feeling. And right now, the feeling is dissonance. ‘I have what I was told would be enough, and it isn’t, and I don’t know who to be angry at.’”
Horvath argues that there are two distinct experiences at play. Some of us feel ‘material precarity’ – when the basics genuinely slip out of reach – and others feel ‘positional precarity’ – when you earn well but the life that income was supposed to buy keeps receding.
What unites both groups is structural. Neither is accumulating capital. Both live off income perpetually – although at different levels. The resentment from not being able to get off the treadmill – rather than flowing upward toward those who are hoarding vast amounts of capital and/or shaping policies – tends to travel sideways (hatred of ‘elites’) or down (hatred of immigrants).
“The family earning $75K and the family earning $350K have more in common with each other – structurally, in terms of their relationship to capital – than either has with the family whose wealth generates its own income without labor. Both are running on the treadmill. One is running slower, but neither is able to get off.”
When the big goals feel permanently out of reach, doom spending becomes rational: if the future you want isn’t coming anyway, you might as well buy the thing that makes today bearable. Meanwhile, “they’re dealing with an entire consumer economy that’s been redesigned around making the base tier uncomfortable enough to push you toward a premium tier you can’t afford.”
The result is a growing share of our society who did everything right and yet are one bad quarter away from a financial crisis. The psychological result is the same across both groups: “the inability to plan, to imagine a future, to trust that effort connects to outcomes”.
The misdirected anger isn’t an accident, Horvath writes. Rather than recognising their shared position, the two groups tend to organise against each other:
“The fallen working class turns atavistic – nostalgic for a past economy that included them. The educated-but-blocked class turns progressive – demanding systemic reform. Both are responding to the same structural forces. But instead of recognising that shared position, they organise against each other. The resentment becomes horizontal instead of vertical.”
I really appreciate that Horvath doesn’t just leave it at diagnosis. A phrase that stood out to me was ‘manufactured dissatisfaction’ – the idea that some of what we feel is structural and real, but some of it is the consumer economy doing exactly what it was designed to do: keeping us in a state of aspirational lack so we keep spending, upgrading, chasing the next tier. Understanding this and separating the two is where agency begins.
Her most useful and immediately practical suggestion is really simple: name which precarity is yours.
“Money anxiety feels similar at every income level, but the mechanics are often different. If you’re in material precarity, the work is protecting the floor – building a buffer, reducing exposure to the extraction economy, making the system work for you where it can. If you’re in positional precarity, the work is harder to see because it’s quite psychological: separating what you need from what you were trained to expect.”
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-04-20 15:23:09
Camilo Moreno-Salamanca shared something recently that I has stayed with me. He describes the pull between two speeds: the race to be at the technological vanguard on one side – keeping up with prompts, agents and chatbots – and on the other, the slow, the analogue: books, friends, the mundane. He arrives somewhere I recognise: “I’m not sure if humans are designed to operate in this mode.”
I’ve been sitting with this post, trying to untangle the different aspects of this discomfort.
One is moral. When I use AI tools, I’m aware that I’m participating in something I haven’t fully consented to – underwriting a set of values, a concentration of power, a particular vision of the future that I didn’t choose and wouldn’t vote for. It’s a reality constructed for us by platforms and capital. Engagement with it feels like complicity, but complete disengagement seems ever more futile. Stepping back and saying ‘I’ll watch from the sidelines’ or even downing the tools entirely (i.e. changing careers) is a privileged option only available to some.
Another aspect is about the life I want. I’m deeply convinced that the good life is found in real connection, in being present in the physical and the local rather than being constantly yanked into a world mediated by screens and platforms. And yet that version of the good life feels more and more like nostalgia. My appetite for slowness has intensified, and I distrust that a little. Getting older has a way of making retreat feel like principle, instead of what it often is: habit or fear.
And then there’s identity. Since my teenage years, technology and the web have shaped my life in ways I’m genuinely grateful for – education, connections, work I benefitted from immensely. But I find it increasingly hard to be part of an industry that is building a future I fear is becoming deeply anti-human. The person with seventeen browser tabs and a Claude Code subscription and the person who considers human creativity and the arts indispensable – they both feel like me. I’m just not sure they can fully coexist anymore. The tension is real.
Participating in capitalism has always asked us to make a kind of peace with dissonance – between what we value and how we actually live, between the world we want and the systems we help perpetuate. But what I’m being asked to accept – and overlook – keeps expanding.
Like Moreno-Salamanca, I arrive without answers. Underneath all the discomfort, the same question keeps popping up: are we really supposed to live like this? I’m not sure we need to answer it. The discomfort is already doing that.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-04-13 15:36:03
Inequality is one of those words that does its own damage just by showing up. By the time you’ve read it, your brain has already mentally filed it under ‘nothing I can do about’. That was before oligarchy stopped being an idea you mainly encountered in history books.
I’ve had this recent 70-page report on inequality called Resisting the Rule of the Rich sitting in my reading queue for months. I hate reading PDFs, but I finally read it so you don’t have to.
You already know it’s bad. Here’s how bad – just a few of the many stark numbers:
The report shows that the most unequal countries are up to seven times more likely to experience democratic erosion – such as weakened courts, restricted civil liberties and the slow normalisation of authoritarian practices.
When wealth at this scale converts into political influence through media ownership, campaign financing and direct access to power, democracy starts functioning less like a shared system of governance and more like a shareholder meeting most of us weren’t invited to.
Before anyone mentions philanthropy, the billionaire’s get-out-of-jail-free card: the late German billionaire Peter Kramer called it a bad transfer of power from politicians to billionaires because it is no longer “the state that determines what is good for the people, but rather the rich who decide”.
The report suggests we establish an Independent Panel on Inequality – essentially what we do for the climate (IPCC) but for economic injustice – to give policymakers timely, accurate guidance on runaway wealth concentration. (The IPCC comparison is either inspiring or a warning, depending on your level of optimism.)
The policies such a panel would champion are kind of obvious but – as you’d expect – politically difficult: tax extreme wealth, cancel unsustainable debt in the Global South, break up monopolies, raise wages, fund public services properly.
There’s a mention of philosopher Ingrid Robeyns, who proposes an ‘extreme wealth line’ – a cap beyond which private wealth is taxed heavily and redirected to public purposes. If we accept a minimum wage, why not a maximum wage?
What this report did, more than anything, was shift something in how I relate to inequality. I’ve always cared about it, but it always felt like a condition rather than a mechanism; something out there in the world that is just a measure of a flawed system – like the rise and fall of the unemployment rate. But that framing misses the point.
Extreme wealth concentration is a one-way ratchet that steadily reshapes the rules of politics, media and public life – until what we call democracy is less a check on power than a polite fiction around it. None of that is inevitable, the report insists – and I want to believe it. What does seem clear is that treating inequality as a condition instead of a mechanism is exactly the kind of passive acceptance that lets the ratchet keep turning.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-04-06 15:22:46
Over the Easter long weekend I did some light podcast listening – and by ‘light’ I mean an 80-minute deep dive into the psychology of why most people, most of the time, don’t want things to change. Nice timing, for a holiday built around resurrection. Ha!
The podcast, recommended by a reader, was a conversation between journalist David Roberts and NYU psychologist John Jost about ‘system justification’ – the idea that humans are strongly motivated, often unconsciously, to defend and prop up the social, economic and political arrangements they’re embedded in. Even when those arrangements are working against them.
Roberts makes an obvious but important observation in his intro: when we look at history, what actually demands explanation isn’t rebellion – it’s the absence of it. “What demands explanation is voluntary servitude.”
Jost’s research suggests this isn’t apathy or ignorance. It’s psychology. The status quo offers something alternatives can’t: certainty. Familiarity. A sense of safety and belonging.
“It’s the devil we know. Whereas alternative social arrangements, utopian social systems, et cetera, these things often raise more questions than they answer.”
Challenging the system – even a broken one – means tolerating that uncertainty, risking social exclusion, and potentially making yourself a target.
What surprised me most is that this tendency to justify the status quo hits hardest among those the system treats worst. If the system is legitimate and you’re still not getting ahead, the only conclusion left is that you are the problem, that it is a personal deficiency. This is how systems reproduce themselves through the psychology of the people they’re failing.
There’s a depressing Catch-22 baked into all of this too. The moments when change feels most necessary are exactly the moments when people cling hardest to what they know.
“Thinking about how to improve things is a luxury that we can only really have as a society when we’re feeling like things are pretty good… When there’s a lot of discord, when there’s a lot of uncertainty, when there’s a lot of insecurity or threat, it’s difficult for people to think about alternatives.”
Climate change – which will generate exactly that kind of disruption – is his most troubling example: strong system justifiers “tend to perceive policy solutions aimed at addressing climate change as more threatening to the status quo than they do the threat of climate change itself.”
And yet. Progress does happen. Jost’s view is “two steps forward, one step back”. Change has always managed to fight its way through, often by working with system justification rather than against it. That means the most effective reformers throughout history have rarely positioned themselves as revolutionaries tearing things down – they’ve framed change as the system finally living up to its own stated ideals.
None of this makes the difficulty of change go away – but it does reframe the work: less about having the right arguments, more about creating the conditions under which people can bear to imagine something different.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
