Alex Wittenberg

We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off “well”—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness. Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps... See more

This isn’t the only way forward. Very opinionated tokenomics might not be possible without each tokenized community having some sort of unique coordination token. The point is that if club tokens are representative of the memes, then “community M&A” might actually take the form of just… using the same token. 

This also makes it easier to see why the strategies generally recommended for defeating distraction—digital detoxes, personal rules about when you’ll allow yourself to check your inbox, and so forth—rarely work, or at least not for long. They involve limiting your access to the things you use to assuage your urge toward distraction, and in the case... See more

Ok, so life actually is short. Does it make any difference to know that?

If you ask yourself what you spend your time on that's bullshit, you probably already know the answer. Unnecessary meetings, pointless disputes, bureaucracy, posturing, dealing with other people's mistakes, traffic jams, addictive but unrewarding pastimes. 

If Substack’s app becomes a place readers turn to directly and are more likely to engage with, it becomes that much more valuable of a place to be for writers. In the same way we turned to email to escape the noise of Facebook and Twitter, readers of the future might turn to the Substack app to escape the noise of email. This is the nature of... See more

Who is creating those identifiers? And who is organizing data around them? Today, it’s nearly every site you visit, product you use, or company you encounter. Identifiers are listed in a database they have created, mostly private and siloed from every other company’s. Data is put there, and linked there, as well. Often this organized around a user... See more

It’s tempting to imagine that ending or at least easing the struggle with time might also make you happy, most or all of the time. But I’ve no reason to believe that’s true. Our finite lives are filled with all the painful problems of finitude, from overfilled inboxes to death, and confronting them doesn’t stop them from feeling like problems—or... See more