Americanism

Cognitive load is like playing an iterated game of diminishing returns. Every choice—every click, every scroll—saps a little more of your mental energy. By the time you’re 20 decisions deep, your ability to make intentional choices is shot. It’s not that you’ve lost the game; you’ve been worn down by it.

In behavioral economics, this is known as... See more

Risk is expensive, and it does not figure into P&L. When the pressure is to show YoY growth on the quarterly basis, as is the case of the publicly traded companies, or when expectation is to deliver wild returns in case of PE-backed ones, no one wants to make anything remotely surprising or different. Prada is able to put forward fearless... See more

Studies have found that when people spend more time on social-media platforms, they are more likely to buy more things and to do so impulsively—especially when they feel emotionally connected to the content they watch. This is, perhaps, one of the more insidious effects of McVulnerability: It helps encourage a self-perpetuating cycle of materialism... See more

Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.

“The growing speed of daily life, of news and work and play was a fetish of artists and industrialists alike,” Blom writes. “Never before had so much social change occurred so quickly.” As daily life sped up, people in the west started to break down.

Around the turn of the century, a nervous disorder first diagnosed in the U.S. gradually made its... See more