legible vs. meaningful

If you build a society that worships at the legibility altar then you eventually find yourself surrounded by people and products that are easily understood but impossible to love or that don’t evoke any kind of emotion.

Everything is technically better and yet somehow feels less alive.

I think this collective numbness a lot of people are feeling lately is because the world is becoming louder, faster, shinier but much more hollow. This is the cost of legibility . When we turn human life into something that can be evaluated at scale we start to live in narrower... See more

Novelty, almost by definition, is illegible. It shouldn’t necessarily surprise us that the weirdest thinkers, who historically play an important role in birthing new categories, are usually obsessed with something that doesn’t even have a market yet and have little evidence beyond some sort of untranslatable conviction.

When you remove enough of this over time, you slowly scrub the soul from it. We’re better than ever at building things and yet it feels as if we’re losing the unexplainable wonder from them because we’re so obsessed with optimizing the soul out of everything.