What makes a life interesting? I've been radicalized on this issue for a long time. It is the reason why this blog exists at all. I've consistently struggled to put those thoughts in writing; in lieu of an essay, I've made a list of things that say something meaningful about the time and place I live. I'll try to keep this updated.
the tags at the top right corner of this website
Ribbonfarm's The Premium Mediocre Life of Maya Millenial
Agnes Callard's concept of unruliness
The New Yorker on the New Left
biological improvisation (indivisibility + probability density + power set of possibilities) kills determinism
Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal: we operate within closed loops of meaning, the joy of Jon Bois' 17776, Calvin & Hobbes, Calvinball, The hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy, Transcendentalists, Emerson, Whitman's song of myself, Thoreau's Walden, many more
my experiences as a seasonal laborer for the City of Woodinville, Suburbia & suburban literature, Lynnwood, Washington, the case of the Lynnwood Light Rail, the Northline Village development, Redmond, Bellevue, Seattle, stormwater management facilities, commuter town, arterials, regional malls, asphalt oblivion, Aurora
Kafka, Brazil (1985), The Little Prince (2015)
self-deceptive fashion as empty mimicry, streetwear, low-resolution aesthetics (e.g. vaporwave/eboy/indie)
"I'm embarrassed because I'm not a real person yet."
Goodhart's law, noncompetes, fake clubs and student organizations
Wes Silvestro's the Prestige Trap, the local dependence of philanthropy on consumer tech, careerist philanthropy
"The only reason you're allowed to do that is because tech funds heretics."
LinkedIn, FAANG, asian cultural complacency, committees & activities, boba, global foodie culture
My experiences as a youth ambassador for the Gates Foundation Discovery Center, museum boxing, performative discourse, theory begets theory, SSC on internet atheism, feminism, and psuedoscience, Intellectual Imposters & Social Text, the ineffectiveness of online petitions, SSC's toxoplasma of rage, Ordinary Language, leftist tiktok, Andrew Gelman, Taleb vs Nate Silver on predictive polling, Arrow's theorem is not very profound
The Gates Foundation, Effective Altruism, Chris Kraus's Aliens and Anorexia, Simone Weil's theory of sympathetic starvation
Open source Web culture, white male Cory Doctorow, Neal Stephenson DIY ethos & self sufficiency, hacker news, Robbie Barrat
dude ranches, science tourism, Jeff Bezos, McMurdo Station as a tourist destination
Malcolm Gladwell, Weapons of Math Destruction, Freakanomics, Mine*, Nudge, Grit, 99% invisible.
Not just including self-help books about theories of people or everything, because Dale Carnegie's How To Win Friends and Influence People isn't especially temporally relevant. The above are mentioned as trends in thinking that I have actually noticed in conversation.
Read a little bit and then stop reading, don't get intimidated, (hyper)text will inevitably be presented at a saturation limit, most philosophers probably don't understand Kant, Nihilism is not bad if you're happy, Postmodernism: pretty dumb, there were very few legitimate art "movements" and none anymore
Baseline teenage literature: John Greene/Paper Towns/something? Wallflower something
Survivalist Literature as an Existential Plea
Ribbonfarm's A Beginner's Guide to Immortality
Feynman: "You can know the name of that bird in all the languages of the world, but when you're finished, you'll know absolutely nothing whatever about the bird. You'll only know about humans in different places, and what they call the bird".
Tomorrowland, nanotechnology, the end of the future, life in 2000 will be like...
Transcendent education: outer space, Narnia, Magic School Bus, museums, climate change
Transcendent science fiction: Borges on reality, possibility, linguistics, Italo Calvino on artistic expression and Invisible CIties, Cixin Liu's human computers, Interstellar, Ted Chiang's The Story of your Life
stagnation sci-fi: Interstellar, A Canticle for Leibowitz, various YA dystopian novels (fifth wave)
solarpunk without the cutesy 3d renders aka the Biosummit dream aka Ursula Le Guin's vision for harmony between human technology and human nature, 2312, the expanse
Shirley Jackson's The Lottery, to lesser extent Lois Lowry's The Giver
Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse, Albert Camus on society and individualism in The Fall & The Plague
Paul Graham's essays, Mr. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse, Hamming's You and Your Research, Richard Feynman's memoirs
The replication crisis, the science funding crisis, IP & drug patent law, innovation & capitalism, there is only a single transcontinental railway built in the US, the unhinged nature of the Industrial Revolution (Richard Rhodes' Energy)
Simulacra and Simulation, Bullshit Jobs, 4chan, office reddit, crypto speculators, Chuck Palanuik, Stoicism, Rene Girard's mimetic desire, ironic saturation, Chad/Virgin dichotomy, Alpha/Beta/Sigma, Greta Thunberg/Boyan Slat (Thiel fellow), the Institute of Memetics
Howl, Beat Generation, The Great Gatsby, the Situationist movement
Ayn Rand**, baseline human values, The Futurist Manifesto, Chirico
long distance running
My belief that technology does and can continue to break the hedonic treadmill. More succinctly, Universal Basic Paraglider
My belief that our baseline of happy memories are aesthetic experiences
The American Earthworks movement, yoga, My belief that low resolution QOL is exponentially worse than high resolution, deep work, my belief in working on what you're interested in
the Suburban Origami American Biotech Dream
The Least Interesting Generation
Applied Divinity Studies on Millenials as the Most Interesting Generation
Ragged Clown's 'stuff I have done that you have not probably', a prototypical example of Quora's influence on meTyler Cowen's The Complacent Class
The Great Stagnation