The Culture War is a toxoplasma. It bypasses your rational defenses by hacking your tribal loyalty circuits. If you find yourself genuinely furious about a minor controversy involving a sub-group you didn't know existed last week, you aren't "informed." You are being optimized for engagement.

I don't have a particular hill I'm prepared to die on, but there are a handful of slight inclines on which I'd be okay with experiencing mild discomfort.

"Facts don't care about your feelings" has mutated into a much dumber heuristic: "If I am hurting your feelings, I must be stating a fact." This is a logical fallacy. It is entirely possible to be an asshole and be factually incorrect. In fact, the correlation is likely positive.

We've entered the era of "brainrot." We became a global fragmentation of doom scrolling, context-lacking, uncurious, blindly accepting, regurgitating masses. The cycle of viral content is faster than the cycle of understanding. People aren't generating thoughts so much as playing back content they've absorbed.

Westenberg.

On Brainrot

The conservative commentator Erick-Woods Erickson observed on his Substack this week that Twitter has now convinced large swaths of the American ri...

I am begging you to stop calling your rambling 2-hour conversation a "deep dive." It is not a deep dive. It is snorkeling in the shit-infused shallow end of the Dunning-Kruger pool while shouting about supplements.

I'm skeptical of any productivity advice that requires you to be a completely different person. 'Wake up at 5am!' What if my comparative advantage is being someone who doesn't wake up at 5am

Both sides of every culture war issue agree on exactly one thing: that moderates are the real problem

90% of the "political influencers" on here are begging for attention in a crowded room by poorly rephrasing things they heard a smarter person say five minutes ago.

Philosophy is a great way to figure out why you're unhappy, but a terrible way to fix it

Every winter, when your sense of purpose goes quiet, you'll be tempted to believe that you've done something wrong. You haven't. You're just in a season. And seasons pass.

Westenberg.

The Harvest Will Come

I spent most of my twenties believing that purpose was something you found once and then held onto. A winning lottery ticket you kept in your wall...