Month: August 2025
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As a society, our various addictions often have very little to do with personal failings or indiscipline. They have everything to do with a culture that shames and stigmatizes normal, healthy behaviors that simply look “weird.”
Since we’re often punished for being ourselves and doing what we want, we have to sneak around. That creates guilt and anxiety.
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The self-destructive response is to forbid yourself from doing things you enjoy and then wait for the desire to spill over into binges. It’s a familiar story. Depriving yourself of something only enhances the desire. So most Americans live in a relentless loop of binges, purges, and moral panics.
You don’t have to be an expert in sociology to see how other cultures have consistently outperformed us in terms of health and happiness.
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As we near the end of industrial civilization, there’s no end to the prescriptions for mental health. Here’s one I haven’t heard:
Be weird.
Jessica Wildfire, The Case for Being Extremely Weird -
A day of resting is the visible sign that a person lives from the grace of God and not from works.
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Human beings who have been reduced to machines and have been exhausted need rest so that their thoughts can clear, their feelings purified, and their desires be oriented anew.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Conspiracy and Imprisonment -
I spent the afternoon going down an AI rabbit hole researching the state of AI coding tools and vibe coding in the last 2 years since I last tried this for myself. Obviously, it has come a long way with Claude Code looking very helpful, being more ‘agentic’ and solving some (but not all) of the forgetfulness and context window problems I saw before. The biggest change might just be that everyone is using better prompt to plan and guide their work than before.
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How We Traded Anxiety for Apathy
Today I read Joan Westenberg’s post on How We Traded Anxiety for Apathy, which lays out the concerned citizen to doomer pipeline which seems to summarize the journey many people have undertaken in the last 5 years. After hearing about…
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We need good liturgies, and we need natural ones: we need a life neither patternless nor over patterned, if the city is to be built. And I think the root of it all is caring. Not that that will turn the trick all by itself, but that we can produce nothing good without it. True liturgies take things for what they really are, and offer them up in loving delight.
Robert Farrar Capon, Bread and Board -
At some thoughts one stands perplexed, above all the sight of human sin, and wonders whether to combat it by force or humble love. Always decide ‘I will combat it by humble love.’ If you resolve on that once and for all, you can conquer the whole world. Loving humility is a terrible force: it is the strongest of all things, and there is nothing else like it.
Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov -
Identity turns out to be porous – at least the parts that have to do with what you listen to, what you watch, what you eat, what you read. So go ahead, it’s okay, there’s no need to be cool: abandon the canon, shake loose from fixed coordinates, collapse into the blueberry gifts of whatever turns you on.
Jeff Gordinier, My Tie-Dyed Transformation