Alex Dobrenko

“When you come out of the grips of a depression there is an incredible relief, but not one you feel allowed to celebrate. Instead, the feeling of victory is replaced with anxiety that it will happen again, and with shame and vulnerability when you see how your illness affected your family, your work, everything left untouched while you struggled to... See more

RITUAL Our problem isn’t just that we are in the habit of shirking important ideas. We are also prone to forget them immediately even if we have in theory given them our assent. For this, humanity invented ritual. Ritual can be defined as the structured repetition of important concepts, made resonant through the help of formal pageantry and

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Even The Platforms Want To Be Creators Now

The following was the result: one of the customers of the Glogowski company was a banker by the name of Gustav Perger and he often visited the company. He became familiar with my father, of whom he had a very good opinion, and he suggested that they set up a factory for the production of calculating machines together. In fact he had an ulterior... See more

These days it’s common to stumble across self-help articles lauding obsession as a precondition for success. But this is a thoroughly secular and sanitized concept that only became fashionable in the late 20th century. Obsession suggests compulsivity in a single-minded pursuit; it flirts with the pathological. Somewhere we lost the depth we sought... See more

Earlier this year, Dirt contributor Michelle Santiago Cortés wrote about “yearnposting”, examining the trend of Instagram and TikTok content for people that “want to be devastated (in a good way).” These posts, “combine the warmth of a wholesome meme with the hope of a motivational post and the raw emotion of a trauma meme,” like a video by noted... See more

he “online business industrial complex,” the network of hucksters vying for your attention and money by selling you courses and coaching on how to get rich online.

“The problem with things that release a lot of dopamine all at once is that our brains have to compensate. But this is really the key point — our brains don’t just then bring our dopamine firing back to baseline level,” she said. “It actually pushes dopamine levels below baseline. We go into a dopamine deficit state. That’s the way the brain... See more