Alex Burns

Yes, this is 2024, where life increasingly feels like a huge in-joke that started on the internet. Once upon a time we had subcultures: punks and goths, hippies and emos. Now we have Gen Z’s perceptive trendspotters pinpointing a style or a mood that is sweeping the zeitgeist, coining a label for it — often with the suffix “-core” — and sharing it... See more

It felt like proof of something I’ve often sensed but have been unable to express, which is that trying too hard to control people’s impression of you is an insult to both your humanity and theirs.

Any avid self-deprecator immediately understands this logic: if we believe that the worst version of ourselves is the true one, we’re protected from being ambushed by our own inadequacy. Better to overestimate our flaws than to fail to see them in the first place. But this strategy is fundamentally isolating, leading us to create a brittle carapace... See more

the internet’s sprawling databases, real-time social-media networks, and globe-spanning e-commerce platforms have made almost everything immediately searchable, knowable, or purchasable—curbing the social value of sharing new things. Cultural arbitrage now happens so frequently and rapidly as to be nearly undetectable, usually with no extraordinary... See more

In about the 13th century, we first get “like” in our language and it is a verb. Then around the 15th and 16th centuries, we start to use it in similes. And then around the 16th century, you start using it as a conjunction, where instead of just being between two objects, you’re expressing similarity between an object and a whole sentence: “He rode... See more

We are not going in circles, we are going upwards. The path is a spiral; we have already climbed many steps.

— Herman Hesse, Siddhartha