Abundance

in a world of abundance, the real question is not what we can do but rather what we should. What if the aperture of what was available was then, and instead, narrowed down and limited? Imagine a service that offered only one item within your desired category.

It’s all very paradoxical: that the ability to constantly communicate has made us bad communicators, that instant access to all forms of entertainment would leave us with so few touchstones, that surveilling kids doesn’t necessarily make them safer, that the absence of limitations also often means the absence of creativity — and that the particular... See more

Seishin, a teacher at Willow, describes how the growing capacity to access the ever-present abundance and fulfillment in our own bodies means that it becomes easier to let go of what is harmful to us and the planet . We rely less on the numbing and addictive pleasures of late Capitalist society – a beef burger, carbon-intensive vacation travel – th... See more

What happens when something remarkable becomes abundant? When our favorite restaurant or coffee house becomes a chain, or a new social product becomes ubiquitous, we tend to crave something new...something more scarce. Why? It’s a natural desire to immerse ourselves in stories that move us and express identity through uniqueness. When something see... See more

“A man with a watch knows what time it is. A man with 2 watches is never sure.”

Ancient societies followed a single narrative. Modern societies are cacophonies of competing narratives. Without trust, more data doesn’t make us more informed but more confused.

Situational overload is not the problem. When we complain about information overload, what we’re usually complaining about is ambient overload. This is an altogether different beast. Ambient overload doesn’t involve needles in haystacks. It involves haystack-sized piles of needles. We experience ambient overload when we’re surrounded by so much inf... See more

Bottom line: When the amount of information available to be filtered is effectively unlimited, as is the case on the Net, then every improvement in the quality of filters will make information overload worse.

Second, I’m reflecting on a point former Netscape CEO Jim Barksdale famously made in 1995: “There are only two ways to make money in business: bundling and unbundling.” I think we’re burnt out by the fragmentation that the D2C era brought to everything. After subscribing to tons of hyper-niche content over the years, the idea of a couple brands we ... See more

For the past year or more, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about how the primary challenge we face, as people living in a modern western society, is not surviving in a resource scarce environment, but is instead managing to not gorge ourselves to death, literally/physically or figuratively/spiritually.