Month: October 2025

Optimizing Ourselves to Death

Science
Jason Tate

Nick Maggiulli:

Perell highlights the fatal flaw of optimization—what’s it all for? What’s the point of better health if you have no one to spend it with? What’s the point of being sexy if you aren’t having sex? What’s the point of living forever if you have nothing to live for? We need a push toward “unoptimization” as Tim Denning calls it, to solve this. Because we aren’t machines. We aren’t pins in a pin factory. We are people. And people don’t need optimization. If you’re a manufacturer trying to make millions of products or a search engine trying to answer billions of queries, you need optimization. But if you’re an individual trying to live a good life, you don’t. What you need is purpose, fulfillment, and connection. Yes, you also need good health, a good career, and good prioritization of your time. But these pursuits shouldn’t consume your every waking hour. 

I think I needed to read this right now.

Thrice Talk New Album With Yahoo!

Thrice
Jason Tate

Thrice talked with Yahoo! about their new album:

Yeah, it was fun, especially lyrically. We decided to split the record partway through making the last record, Horizons/East. It was just Horizons at the time, and so I didn’t have a ton of time to end up theming /East as intensely as I wanted to. But knowing /West was coming, I had a couple of years to really ruminate and distill some of that. So it was actually a lot of fun, and I feel like it’s the most thematically rich, dense record we’ve done other than The Alchemy Index.

And, because the Asana shoutout made me laugh:

We use an app called Asana to share at the points that we feel like something is in a shareable spot. In the past, we’ve passed Dropbox files around, but we haven’t done that in a little bit. That was when we weren’t living in the same place, and it was harder to jam in person. So, now, it’s a bit more of, like, “Here’s this idea,” and then we jam on it.