Ryan Holiday with some great advice on reading:

These 31 rules by no means make a complete list, but if you implement even a couple of them, I’m comfortable guaranteeing you’ll not only be a better reader for it, but a better person too.

–It is not enough that you read. You have to read well. You have to read the right books. You have to figure out how to process and retain and of course apply what you read. As Epictetus said, “I cannot call somebody ‘hard-working’ knowing only that they read.” He said he needed to know what and how they read. He needed to know that their “efforts aim at improving the mind.” Because then and only then would he call you “hard-working.” Then and only then would he give you the title “reader.”

I didn’t read as many books as I wanted to this year. Other priorities ended up taking up my time. I read more from my RSS feeds than I think ever before but I need to make sure I bring book reading back into my daily routine.

Joan Westenberg:

Worshipping the grind is a side effect of status anxiety. If you don’t have credentials, or a network, or a novel idea, then you need to show you’re serious. And what better way than by staying in the office when everyone else goes home and tweeting about it? It’s peacocking: look how hard I’m trying. But effort is not value. Hours are not outcomes. Work is not the same as progress.

If your only edge is effort, you’re replaceable. There is always someone who can work longer. Someone younger, hungrier, more desperate. There is no long-term moat in exhaustion. And if you do somehow win that way, you might not like the prize. You’ll have built a system that only functions when you’re suffering.

This whole piece is great but these two paragraphs? Chef kiss.

Adam Mastroianni:

I think annoyance, like cholesterol, has a good kind and a bad kind. The bad kind makes you want to flee: backed-up traffic, crying babies on planes, colleagues who say they can use Excel when really they mean they’ve heard of Excel. But the good kind of annoyance draws you in rather than driving you away. It’s that feeling you get when there’s something you can and must make right, the way some people feel when they see a picture frame that’s just a bit askew, except a lot more and all the time. 

Whenever I fix the thing that’s annoying me, it does feel “fun”, I guess, but it’s not fun in the way that, say, going down a waterslide is fun. It’s a textured pleasure, the kind of enjoyment I assume that whiskey enthusiasts get from drinking extremely peaty, smoky scotch—on the one hand, it burns, but on the other hand, I kinda like how it burns.

Good annoyance is, I think, the only thing that keeps people coming back for more, indefinitely. There is nothing that a human with a normally-functioning brain can do for eight hours a day, every day, for their whole career, that feels “fun” the whole time, or even a large fraction of the time. We’re just too good at adapting to things. And thank God, because if we never got bored, we never would have survived. Our ancestors would have spent their days staring doe-eyed and slack-jawed at, like, a really pretty leaf or something, and they would have gotten eaten by leopards. Fun fades, but irritation is infinite.

I feel the urge to quote this whole thing.

Adam Mastroianni:

The blogosphere has a particularly important role to play, because now more than ever, it’s where the ideas come from. Blog posts have launched movements, coined terms, raised millions, and influenced government policy, often without explicitly trying to do any of those things, and often written under goofy pseudonyms. Whatever the next vibe shift is, it’s gonna start right here.

The villains, scammers, and trolls have no compunctions about participating—to them, the internet is just another sandcastle to kick over, another crowded square where they can run a con. But well-meaning folks often hang back, abandoning the discourse to the people most interested in poisoning it. They do this, I think, for three bad reasons. 

One: lots of people look at all the blogs out there and go, “Surely, there’s no room for lil ol’ me!” But there is. Blogging isn’t like riding an elevator, where each additional person makes the experience worse. It’s like a block party, where each additional person makes the experience better. As more people join, more sub-parties form—now there are enough vegan dads who want to grill mushrooms together, now there’s sufficient foot traffic to sustain a ring toss and dunk tank, now the menacing grad student next door finally has someone to talk to about Heidegger. The bigger the scene, the more numerous the niches.

#16:

I worked in the Writing Center in college, and whenever a student came in with an essay, we were supposed to make sure it had two things: an argument (“thesis”) and a reason to make that argument (“motive”). Everybody understood what a “thesis” is, whether or not they actually had one. But nobody understood “motive”. If I asked a student why they wrote the essay in front of them, they’d look at me funny. “Because I had to,” they’d say.

Most writing is bad because it’s missing a motive. It feels dead because it hasn’t found its reason to live. You can’t accomplish a goal without having one in the first place—writing without a motive is like declaring war on no one in particular.

I recommend this entire thing.

Michael Lopp, writing at Rands:

I’ve made a career being a human terrified by becoming irrelevant long before AI showed up to drive my car. You bet I am poking every bit of AI that I can. Daily. I am trying to figure out what it can and can’t do, and this article aside, I am optimistic, just like I’ve been for the last three decades, that revolutionary innovations will knock your socks off in the next few years. It’s still early days for AI. Really.

However, I am deeply suspicious of AI, especially after watching decades of social networks monetize our attention while teaching us to ignore facts and truth, minimizing our desire to understand. Many humans don’t check their facts; they believe what they read in the feed. Most humans believe the manufactured reality is designed to get them to believe someone else’s agenda. The convenience of these services and tools has made us lazy and, worse, not curious.

Ryan Holiday:

Anxiety, I’ve come to realize, is a very expensive habit. It has cost me so much. A lot of misery, a lot of frustration, countless hours of sleep. It’s caused me to miss out on a lot of things that are important to me. How many family dinners have I ruined by letting my mind wander to what could go wrong? How many minutes of vacations have I missed out on because I was preoccupied, lost in spirals about things that hadn’t happened? How many opportunities have I passed up because I was too caught up in my own fears? How many nights did I waste lying awake at night, worrying about what might or might not happen?

Joan Westenberg:

At some point, every creator hits a wall – it’s not burnout exactly. It’s misalignment. You find yourself fluent in a language you no longer believe in, you know how to hack the algorithm, when to post, what to say, how to craft the dopamine-hooked headline. You’ve learned to manufacture the kind of work that gets rewarded, but somewhere in the process you forget why you started making it at all.

The economy of attention doesn’t ask what you think; it asks how fast you can say it, how loud, and how often. And if you play long enough, you stop making anything for the people you care about and you start making it for the feed. The result is a race to the bottom with a leaderboard, a machine that needs to be fed even if it’s chewing up your integrity.

Preach.

The other byproduct of having been in that “game,” is you start seeing it everywhere. Numbers will go up, numbers will go down. Authenticity is the only thing that will last.

I hadn’t seen this before. Well articulated struggle with problematic art and growing up. I once commented that it’s a painful rite of passage into adulthood for your childhood faves to break your heart.

H/T: Kottke

Chuck Wendig:

It’s hard to focus. It’s hard to focus on the things in front of me, that I need to do. It’s hard to focus on the news, because it’s not just one thing, it’s a hundred things, news like fire ants, like you stepped on their mound and here they are, swarming, and each ant feels meaningless in the context of all these angry fucking ants. Looking at my phone or computer or any connected device feels like tonguing a broken tooth–an electric jolt of pain but one that feels paradoxically satisfying, like if I poke the bad tooth, maybe I’m fixing it, maybe poking it makes it fall out and the pain will go away. Which I know is fucking stupid so then I stop doing it — stop looking at the phone, stop poking the tooth. But there’s a little rat scratching in the back of my head and it makes me wonder, what are you missing, what aren’t you seeing, remain vigilant, constant vigilance, there’s a great wave coming, a wall of fire, a meteor, a swarm of wasps, better look, better click, and then I look, and am rewarded. By some definition of that word, “rewarded.” My anxiety is rewarded because things are bad, and things are happening constantly. 

Great essay. That very feeling is what I’m trying to avoid these days. Trying to fill the space with things that fulfill me and not continually stick my hand (and brain) directly into the hornet’s nest.

Joan Westenberg, with a great essay:

In the months, years since the pandemic’s peak, I’ve been unable to reconcile the cognitive dissonance. Seeing the inauthenticity and performance of modern happiness has made it impossible to achieve happiness through the same means. There’s a falseness to it all, a sense of how fragile the facade actually is.

After the collapse, after the burnout, after the creeping dread that none of the things I’d been told to care about were making me feel human, I started noticing what actually felt good. Not “aspirational” good. Not “productive” good. Just good. A grilled cheese sandwich eaten in the sun. A day without notifications. Saying no and not explaining. I didn’t see it as a philosophy. I just knew I felt less fake. Less hollow. Less like I was performing a version of myself I couldn’t stand anymore. Over time, I started tracing a pattern. What if I stopped managing my life like a brand? What if I let it be messy, private, low-stakes? What if that was enough?