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?

Paul Stamatiou:

Before we had AI answer engines, and before we had search engines we just had lists of links with web directories like aliweb, Yahoo! Directory and dmoz. You’d tediously wade through these directories to find and absorb content you were interested in, or just to explore and tinker. Everything online was created by people and you were getting a glimpse into their world with each site.

The web grew. We gained search engines, blogs, feed readers, social media and more. While there were new ways of creating content and new ways of consuming, when you really needed something you’d still turn to a search engine and click around until you found what you needed.

This led to inevitable moments of delightful and serendipitous discovery. There was real joy in discovering another unique voice online, someone whose articles and interests were right up your alley. Their style of writing lended itself to being devoured in one sitting, while you scan their site to see how you can bookmark or subscribe to keep tabs on their latest works.

It wasn’t just about stumbling upon a random personal blog that was a fun occasion. It was finding communities you didn’t know existed.

This entire piece nails so many things I’ve been feeling over the past couple of years.

I found this article by Sally Rooney at the New York Review (archive) fascinating:

The last remaining red ball is stranded up by the cushion on the right-hand side, and the cue ball rolls to a halt just left of the middle right-hand pocket. The angle is tight, awkward, both white and red lined up inches away from the cushion. O’Sullivan surveys the position, nonchalantly switches hands, and pots the red ball left-handed. The cue ball hits the top cushion, rolls back down over the table, and comes to a stop, as if on command, to line up the next shot on the black. O’Sullivan could scarcely have chosen a better spot if he had picked the cue ball up in his hand and put it there. The crowd erupts: elation mingled with disbelief. At the end of the frame, when only the black remains on the table, he switches hands again, seemingly just for fun, and makes the final shot with his left. The black drops down into the pocket, completing what is known in snooker as a maximum break: the feat of potting every ball on the table in perfect order to attain the highest possible total of 147 points.

Watch a little of this sort of thing and it’s hugely entertaining. Watch a lot and you might start to ask yourself strange questions. For instance: In that particular frame, after potting that last red, how did O’Sullivan know that the cue ball would come back down the table that way and land precisely where he wanted it? Of course it was only obeying the laws of physics. But if you wanted to calculate the trajectory of a cue ball coming off an object ball and then a cushion using Newtonian physics, you’d need an accurate measurement of every variable, some pretty complex differential equations, and a lot of calculating time. O’Sullivan lines up that shot and plays it in the space of about six seconds. A lucky guess? It would be lucky to make a guess like that once in a lifetime. He’s been doing this sort of thing for thirty years.

What then? If he’s not calculating, and he’s not guessing, what is Ronnie O’Sullivan doing? Why does the question seem so strange? And why doesn’t anybody know the answer?

And, after reading the article, watch the match described. I’ve been playing pool since I was a teenager; I’m decent at best. This makes me never want to pick up a pool cue again.