Brian Wiesner

I spoke about how I didn’t agree with James Dean when he famously said Dream as if you’ll live forever, Live as if you’ll die today . I prefer to contemplate life as if you’ll live forever . To follow desires free from the conscious limitations of time.

This is the backdrop of the whole phone as an extension of arm thing. The way that we experience time is completely warped now. Time has been compressed to the past and present and future all at once as we interact with everything all of the time across every time period, as Douglas Rushkoff discusses in his (very good book!) Present Shock .

People choose places; places shape people; people go on to shape other people. We should be thoughtful about the kind of transformation we opt into.

You might divide everything in life into two categories: utility and beauty. These aren’t mutually exclusive, of course—nearly anything could be both: a shirt, a building, a relationship—the difference comes down to intention.

A Time We Never Knew

"Phones? No. We had each other."

In studies of peer groups, Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor who is the director of the Stanford Center on Longevity in California, observed that people tended to interact with fewer people as they moved toward midlife, but that they grew closer to the friends they already had.

Fundamentally, marketing must refocus away from selling product and toward creating relationship. Relationship buffers the shock of change. To be sure, the specific product or service provided remains the fundamental basis for economic exchange, but it must not be treated as the main event. There is simply too much change in this domain for anyone

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The challenge, or opportunity, for companies like Substack is to figure out how to help creators reach new audiences and grow without having to compromise on ownership. The aggregators of the early internet unlocked great power for creators through building central gathering places. We are doing the same with the Substack app and features—like Reco... See more