2026-03-16 13:28:30
In my Notes app, there is a graveyard of abandoned self-improvement projects: morning routines, book titles, names of journalling and meditation apps I downloaded with genuine conviction and opened twice. I am, it turns out, excellent at thinking about becoming better – less gifted at the actual becoming.
Sara Hussain has a super short piece in Vogue India (!) that cuts right to it. She describes the exhausting loop of modern self-awareness – the constant monitoring, the diagnosis of every mood, the reflexive therapy-speak:
“Everything began to feel like a diagnostic exercise. If I’m tired, it’s burnout. If I’m irritated, it’s dysregulation. If I don't reply to a message immediately, I’m either protecting my boundaries or avoiding intimacy. I am never simply annoyed. I am always processing.”
We’ve become so fluent in the language of our own interior lives that we’ve started living there permanently, renovating the same rooms over and over while the outside of the house – other people, the world, the actual stakes of being alive – slowly falls into disrepair.
Hussain is careful not to dismiss therapy or emotional intelligence altogether. Naming patterns helps. Awareness is genuinely useful. But there’s a point where awareness becomes surveillance.
“There are plenty of things in this world that demand seriousness and accountability. War, violence, the steady erosion of rights. But instead of broadening our focus outward, many of us have turned it inward, turning critical thinking into overthinking; hyper-policing our thoughts and language until having a personality feels like a risk assessment exercise. And it’s exhausting.
In moments when collective action is desperately needed, we’ve somehow built a culture that exhausts us before we even get there. If everything requires total moral coherence at all times, participation starts to feel impossible. Silence becomes safer than imperfection.”
This isn’t entirely our fault. Neoliberalism has spent decades insisting that everything – health, happiness, success – is a matter of personal responsibility and individual optimisation. Of course that’s going to produce a culture of compulsive self-interrogation. The system basically rewards it.
Alex Olshonsky pushes this further in a fascinating essay on thinking as addiction. His argument is that the same compulsive mechanism driving substance dependency – escape the feeling, reach for relief – is what keeps us locked in endless mental loops.
“The object shifts from opiates to Instagram to productivity, but the move is always the same: escape the feeling and reach for the next thing that promises relief. Thinking is just a higher-status version of this. It grants you the feeling of control.”
The answer here probably isn’t to simply stop reflecting. Some introspection is good and necessary. The question is whether looking inward has become so consuming that we’ve lost the habit of looking outward – at each other, at the mess we’re collectively in. Hussain puts it well:
“Turning every inner state into something that needs fixing has made life feel smaller, not more expansive.”
Which, when you think about it, is a strange irony. All this work on ourselves, and we’ve somehow ended up with less of ourselves to give.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-03-09 13:21:11
There is a special kind of gaslighting that nobody intends. It lives in the well-meaning question – ‘have you tried magnesium?’ – and in the friendly observation that someone looks well. It’s in the get-well cards we send, with their built-in assumption that getting well is, in fact, what happens next.
But for the chronically ill, it isn’t. And we’re incredibly bad at sitting with that.
Kristie De Garis has been ill since she was 21. She spent two decades doing everything right – cutting out sugar, gluten, dairy, alcohol, stress, late nights – accumulating an ever-longer list of restrictions that did not, in the end, produce the improvement logic seemed to promise.
In her short essay on chronic illness and meritocracy she reflects on the unintended ableism our system perpetuates.
“We tend to understand illness as something you either die from, or recover from. Those of us who are chronically ill live in the awkward inbetween space. Not dying, but not getting better either. Not an emergency, not something fully resolved.”
That inbetween space is where most ableism lives. Not through intentional prejudice, but through a belief system that treats effort as a moral virtue and outcomes as its rightful reward. Chronic illness is, by its nature, a rebuke to that belief:
“The idea that illness might be something you manage indefinitely, without progress, without reward, is deeply uncomfortable to a culture that has an ingrained belief that effort always produces results.”
“Chronic illness disrupts that extremely saleable, inspirational narrative. It produces people who do everything right and still don’t get better. In fact, I have never met a group of people who are doing more right than the chronically ill. And society, rather than question the belief, questions the person.”
Her strongest reframing is of ableism not as individual cruelty but as something with an economic logic behind it:
“Ableism isn’t just cruelty or ignorance. It’s the enforcement arm of meritocracy, which exists to protect the hyper-capitalist belief that ‘more’ always pays off. The existence of chronically ill and disabled people challenges this simply by the fact that they continue to be ill.”
The chronically ill aren’t just inconvenient to the story we tell about effort and reward – they actively destabilise it.
De Garis is careful not to fully exempt herself from this logic. She writes about still catching herself searching for the magic lever, the right supplement, the adjustment that might finally tip things. She knows it’s internalised ableism – knowing doesn’t dissolve it.
“Part of this is fear. Fear that if I stop striving, I will have no one to blame but myself. But also that other people will read any acceptance as giving up, or laziness, or self-pity.”
If I’m finding the counterweight here, it’s something like this: The belief that effort matters isn’t wrong. The problem is the assumption automatically attached to it – that outcomes will always match. As a framework for understanding human bodies, it falls apart.
Her reflections are well worth a read, particularly if you have someone in your life navigating this terrain. It won’t give you the magic question to ask them. But it might help you retire a few of the unhelpful ones.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-03-02 12:47:49
Reading is dead. Attention spans are toast. We are, collectively, heading toward a post-literate wasteland of reels and soundbites – our once-curious brains reduced to dopamine-seeking mush. At least, that’s the general vibe online.
I’ll admit I’ve sort of subscribed to this thesis. You probably have too. It feels intuitively right in the way that a lot of decline narratives do. But they are often a little too tidy, a little too satisfying, which should probably be our first clue that something’s off.
In Text is King, Adam Mastroianni (see also DD305) argues that the death-of-reading panic is mostly vibes, not data. Book sales in 2025 were higher than in 2019. Indie bookstores are booming. And actual reading time data shows a dip – but a modest one, concentrated mostly around the arrival of broadband internet in 2009, not the smartphone era we love to blame.
“If the data is right, the best anti-reading intervention is not a 5G-enabled iPhone circa 2023, but a broadband-enabled iMac circa 2009.”
His more interesting argument, though, isn’t really about the numbers. It’s about human nature. The ‘death of reading’ hypothesis assumes that people were only ever reading to fill time – that they never truly wanted it, and that Instagram and TikTok simply revealed their real preferences. But he calls BS:
“Everyone, even people without liberal arts degrees, knows the difference between the cheap pleasures and the deep pleasures. No one pats themselves on the back for spending an hour watching mukbang videos, no one touts their screentime like they’re setting a high score, and no one feels proud that their hand instinctively starts groping for their phone whenever there’s a lull in conversation.”
“Finishing a great nonfiction book feels like heaving a barbell off your chest. Finishing a great novel feels like leaving an entire nation behind. There are no replacements for these feelings. Videos can titillate, podcasts can inform, but there’s only one way to get that feeling of your brain folds stretching and your soul expanding, and it is to drag your eyes across text.”
He also makes a more general point about the influence of books. You don’t have to read a book for it to shape how you think. Ideas that get written down are like an invisible scaffolding of culture, and tuning out doesn’t protect you from them:
“Being ignorant of the forces shaping society does not exempt you from their influence – it places you at their mercy.”
To be fair, the declines in reading, however modest, are real. Not everyone who used to read has simply swapped it for something richer. After eight hours of having dense information beamed into my eyeballs, picking up a book at the end of the day is often the last thing I feel like doing. What that does to a society (and especially younger generations) over time isn’t a trivial question, even if the panic has been overdone.
But Mastroianni’s broader point holds. Text has outlasted radio, TV, dial-up, broadband and most likely TikTok. Yes, soundbites and reels hit the spot – fast food always does. But there’s a reason people keep coming back to the longer, slower, more nourishing stuff.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-02-23 12:39:49
By the time you’ve finished reading this sentence, seventeen new big things have happened on the internet. Most of them will be forgotten within the hour – including, probably, by the people who posted them. Spend 10 minutes on any feed and try to recall what you consumed. Speed turns out to be a surprisingly effective substitute for substance.
Veteran tech journalist Om Malik has a nice diagnosis for this feeling. In a recent essay, he argues that the organising principle of our information ecosystem used to be authority: you earned attention by being right, by being credible, by being worth reading. What replaced it is velocity.
“What matters now is how fast something moves through the network: how quickly it is clicked, shared, quoted, replied to, remixed, and replaced. In a system tuned for speed, authority is ornamental. The network rewards motion first and judgment later, if ever. Perhaps that’s why you feel you can’t discern between truths, half-truths, and lies.”
“Networks compress time and space, then quietly train us to live at their speed.”
It’s more of a structural argument than a moral one. In other words, nobody woke up one day deciding to make the internet worse. The platforms built incentive systems that rewarded speed above everything else, and rational people – writers, reviewers, newsrooms – responded accordingly. Malik believes that the algorithm is not some toggle you can flick off; it is the culture. (Worth noting, though: the algorithm has owners. It isn’t a force of nature.)
He uses YouTube tech reviews as a case study. When a phone embargo lifts, dozens of polished reviews drop simultaneously – same talking points, same mood lighting, same conclusions. The reviewer who spent three months actually living with the product? Mostly gone from the feed before anyone finds them.
“The system rewards whoever speaks first, not whoever lives with it long enough to understand it. The ‘review’ at launch outperforms the review written two months later by orders of magnitude. The second, longer, more in-depth, more honest review might as well not exist. It’s not that people are less honest by nature. It’s that the structure pays a premium for compliance and levies a tax on independence. The result is a soft capture where creators don’t have to be told what to say. The incentives do the talking.”
This dynamic extends well beyond tech reviews:
“People do what the network rewards. Writers write for the feed. Photographers shoot for the scroll. Newsrooms frame stories as conflict because conflict travels faster than nuance. Even our emotional lives adapt to latency and refresh cycles. The design of the network becomes the choreography of daily life.”
The result is a culture optimised for first takes, not best takes.
To be fair, the authority-based media of the past wasn’t exactly a golden age of truth-telling – gatekeeping had its own distortions, its own capture, its own blind spots. Malik, to his credit, has no romantic attachment to the old days. What we’ve lost isn’t some pristine past, but a slower metabolism that at least gave an idea time to be wrong before it was replaced by another one.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-02-16 12:41:15
For years, ‘knowing how to code’ was treated like the golden ticket. Even junior software developers were paid absurd amounts of money, and those who couldn’t speak computer watched with a mix of envy and bewilderment. ‘Learn to code’ became the new ‘get a college degree’.
Well, software development is having its assembly line moment. As the machines become more capable, human input is being dramatically devalued. Coding is transforming from craft to manufacture, from bespoke tailoring to fast fashion.
In ‘The rise of industrial software’, Chris Loy argues that AI is turning software from a carefully crafted product into an industrial, disposable commodity.
“In the case of software, the industrialisation of production is giving rise to a new class of software artefact, which we might term disposable software: software created with no durable expectation of ownership, maintenance, or long-term understanding.”
Loy draws comparisons to other industrialised outputs. Just as industrial agriculture gave us both abundance and obesity – cheap food alongside malnutrition – industrial software comes with its own set of unhealthy side effects:
“Industrial systems reliably create economic pressure toward excess, low quality goods. This is not because producers are careless, but because once production is cheap enough, junk is what maximises volume, margin, and reach. The result is not abundance of the best things, but overproduction of the most consumable ones.”
Loy’s comparison of LLMs to steam engines made me pause. The steam engine didn’t just make factories more efficient – it fundamentally restructured civilisation. And software, unlike cheap clothing or ultra-processed food, isn’t just one industry among many. It’s become the substrate of every industry. So it’s easy to see how, for better or worse, the industrialisation of software will have far-reaching consequences.
Of course, industrialisation never completely erases craft. Handmade clothing still exists, so does organic whole food. Loy raises the possibility of an ‘organic software’ movement – the farmers markets of the software industry, if you will. Maybe there’s a future where bespoke code becomes a luxury good, signalling care and quality in a sea of disposable slop.
The bigger question, though, isn’t about craft – it’s about stewardship:
“Previous industrial revolutions externalised their costs onto environments that seemed infinite until they weren’t. Software ecosystems are no different: dependency chains, maintenance burdens, security surfaces that compound as output scales. Technical debt is the pollution of the digital world, invisible until it chokes the systems that depend on it. In an era of mass automation, we may find that the hardest problem is not production, but stewardship. Who maintains the software that no one owns?”
In another essay, Loy argues that developers aren’t being replaced but that their role shifts from writing code to setting practices, from solving problems to architecting systems where AI writes the software. Software that nobody fully understands.
Many developers got into this work because they liked solving puzzles and building things, not because they dreamed of one day becoming middle management for a very fast, very confident intern who occasionally hallucinates. Such is ‘progress’, I guess.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
2026-02-09 12:48:17
I grew up thinking the USA was basically one giant action movie with better shopping. Then I heard stories from friends who’d visited, and it started to feel less like a blockbuster and more like a cautionary tale. Medical bankruptcies from routine procedures. School shootings treated like weather events. Elections where the person with fewer votes can still win.
So when someone first mentioned ‘American exceptionalism’ – speaking very little English at the time – what I heard was ‘acceptionalism’, which I interpreted as America’s unique ability to somehow accept these flaws and carry on anyway. Turns out my linguistic confusion might have accidentally described reality better than the actual term.
The notion of American exceptionalism has seen a weird inversion. Amanda Shendruk’s recent viral post is a visual reminder that American exceptionalism is real – just not in ways many Americans think.
Then I came across Adam Bonica’s essay, which is both realistic about America’s dysfunction but also still hopeful about its future. He opens with a childhood memory of watching the Berlin Wall fall when he was six (like me, I was eight), transfixed by strangers embracing, hammers in hand.
Now a political scientist, Bonica studies why transformative political moments like that almost never happen, until they do – and he’s convinced America might be approaching its own wall-smashing moment.
Like Shendruk’s piece, he points out that much of America’s dysfunction are solved problems somewhere else:
“Universal healthcare is not some utopian fantasy. It is Tuesday in Toronto. Affordable higher education is not an impossible dream. It is Wednesday in Berlin. Sensible gun regulation is not a violation of natural law. It is Thursday in London. Paid parental leave is not radical. It is Friday in Tallinn, and Monday in Tokyo, and every day in between.”
“There is another America inside this one, visible in the statistics of nations that made different choices. Call it Latent America: the nation that would exist if our democracy functioned to serve the public rather than protect the already powerful.”
But Bonica believes that the current turmoil might contain the seeds of its own undoing – in large parts because systemic corruption is now in the open:
“Hidden corruption persists because it is difficult to mobilize against. Exposed corruption shifts the axis of politics from left versus right to clean versus corrupt, people versus oligarchs. That’s a fight authoritarians lose.”
Twenty-eight years the Berlin Wall stood. Then it fell in a matter of hours. Some transformations require decades of patient building and arduous organising. Others arrive like a fever breaking, sudden and irreversible. There was a moment when enough people stopped believing in the wall’s inevitability and saw it for what it was: a political choice that could be unmade.
“The wall looks permanent until the day it comes down. So it goes with all institutions. They are not immutable fixtures but human creations, designed to solve the problems of one era and replaceable when they fail the next.”
And, gosh, is America’s wall visible now! Rendered in Shendruk’s damning charts, performed daily by oligarchs courting power without shame. And once the mechanisms are this exposed, the fiction that any of this represents normal democratic function becomes harder to maintain with each passing day.
And now to this week’s discoveries. – Kai
