One of the great insights of psychoanalysis is that you never really want an object, you only want the wanting, which means the solution is to set your sights on an impossible ideal and work hard to reach it. You won’t. That’s not just okay, that’s the point. It’s ok if you fantasize about knowing kung fu if you then try to actually learn kung fu, eventually you will understand you can never really know kung fu, and then you will die. And it will have been worth it.”
—The Last Psychiatrist, The Dove Sketches Beauty Scam
H/t to readers Karl and Ben who turned me onto Read Something Wonderful, a thoughtful collection of great writings on the internet. If you enjoy this newsletter, I suspect you’ll find some good things to read there.
Articles and Podcasts
The One Hundred Pages Strategy [Article]
The Lamp Magazine
How to read 100 pages per day. This is mostly an aspirational article for me, but I liked some tips like dividing reading into time slots throughout the day—morning, lunch, afternoon, and evening—making it easier to integrate reading into existing routines. This aligns with the idea of batching similar tasks, such as grouping creative or focused activities into specific blocks of time, which enhances productivity and reduces mental switching costs.
He also emphasizes the importance of putting away smartphones and other digital temptations. I started sleeping with my phone downstairs and found I’m more inclined to read a bit at night and sometimes in the morning as a result.
Do Not Remain Nameless to Yourself [Blog]
Letters of Note
On the importance of valuing your own contribution, not comparing it to someone else’s:
No problem is too small or too trivial if we can really do something about it.
…
Do not remain nameless to yourself – it is too sad a way to be. Know your place in the world and evaluate yourself fairly, not in terms of your naïve ideals of your own youth, nor in terms of what you erroneously imagine your teacher’s ideals are.”
Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30? [Article]
The New York Times
I read this article ten years ago and this section has always stuck with me:
As external conditions change, it becomes tougher to meet the three conditions that sociologists since the 1950s have considered crucial to making close friends: proximity; repeated, unplanned interactions; and a setting that encourages people to let their guard down and confide in each other, said Rebecca G. Adams, a professor of sociology and gerontology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. This is why so many people meet their lifelong friends in college, she added.”
Ten years later, I am not sure how much I have figured out about getting better at this. I posted a tweet looking for suggestions and got some good responses.
The most common response was sports/hobbies (poker night, volunteering, tennis, golf, etc.).
Why did the USA fail to pivot towards public transport in the ’60s and ’70s? : r/AskHistorians [Thread]
Reddit
Like basically every other American who has spent time in Europe, I lust after walkable neighborhoods and efficient public transportation. Two plausible explanations for why they don’t exist in the States are offered here:
- It was a way to ‘softly’ enforce segregation – people in upscale neighborhoods didn’t like the idea of a public transport network that let people in bad neighborhoods easily get to them and a public transport network that only spans part of the city is mostly useless. Robert Moses, the great New York city planner famously built the bridges over the road going to the beach so low that buses couldn’t drive on them, preventing people who couldn’t afford a car from going.
- American cities zoning regulations, unlike their European and East Asian counterparts, generally don’t allow large amounts of housing or commercial spaces to be built near transit hubs so you have to drive to the train which kind of kills the point.
Will AI Generate a New Growth Wave of Creative Destruction? [Podcast]
Hidden Forces
One of the better discussions I’ve heard thinking about the potential impacts of AI and “what’s next” through the lens of Schumpeterian growth waves. Schumpeterian growth waves are the idea that rather than steady change, economies and societies go through periods of intense innovation that disrupt existing industries followed by periods of relative stasis (akin to punctuated equilibrium rather than gradualism in evolutionary biology).
This way of thinking tends to emphasize an interplay of factors including a general purpose technology (e.g. assembly lines and mass production), an energy course (e.g. fossil fuels), a transport mode (e.g. cars) and the financial innovation (e.g. state investment subsidies like the Interstate system) that support them. This framework seems directionally correct to me in that it looks at the interplay of all these factors.
This was a great discussion of the history of prior waves like the automobile then a look at how a new wave may unfold. I had lots of notes from this, but one I’ll highlight is the impact of the social dimension on the growth wave after WW2:
The big social impetus [for the growth wave after WW2] is reactions to the experience of the 1930s and the Second World War. You have a whole extended generation of people whose life experience was: things suck.
I’m living in my parents’ basement, or I’m living in my parents’ home. I can’t get a steady job. And then the war happens, and a lot of those things evaporate. You do get a job. You do get steady employment. But also, you see people around you being killed.
…
In the U, … out of a male population of 80 million, we’re drafting 16 million, one in five, and then start to think about children, old people, workers at home. So a huge chunk of this generational slice is being drafted. And the war’s over. They want normalcy. They want jobs. They want a quiet life. So there’s an important social side here that intersects with the state policy.
Lots of echoes of Carlotta Perez and Bill Janeway if you’re into their stuff.