culture
mostly of the internet kind
culture
Philosophy is bad because you think thoughts that you think are your own thoughts, and you think you’re in charge of those thoughts, and you’re figuring things out.
But the reality is, our thoughts are almost entirely drawn from the soup in our culture of thoughts that people have had before. And all we’re doing is repeating them. We think we’re... See more
But the reality is, our thoughts are almost entirely drawn from the soup in our culture of thoughts that people have had before. And all we’re doing is repeating them. We think we’re... See more
David Chapman • Myth, adult developmental stages, and entrepreneurship
I’ve said this many times before. Most people don’t actually know what thinking is. Instead they have thoughts. Thoughts occur to them. What David adds here is the perspective of where thoughts come from, which is basically our environment, our culture, all of our conditioning. Everything is a remix, as Visa likes to say. What does recognizing this do for us?
Anywhere from 90 percent to 97 percent of vanilla-flavored products are made with vanillin , a substance found in small quantities in natural vanilla but made synthetically for processed commercial foods. Real vanilla contains hundreds of different components that contribute to its nuanced taste and aroma. It is as different from vanillin as sugar... See more
Amanda Fortini • How Vanilla Became Shorthand for Bland
On the richness and complexity of real vanilla. Vanilla is not vanilla.
Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
Omar F. Najjarine • Why modern life feels meaningless
What gives multinational corporations the right to pollute the air we breathe, drain our groundwater and exhaust our planet’s dwindling resources – and deprives us of the right to stop them? One powerful idea: private property. Because the rich own things, and the poor do not, it is legal for the rich to destroy Earth and illegal for the poor to... See more
Sally Rooney • Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis?
Literature allows us to name the world by giving us new phrases, new characters, new words. Poets like Chaucer and Shakespeare coined hundreds of new words. So many of their phrases are still used in common speech. They named all sorts of things for us. And by using those names, we expand what we can understand about the world.
Henry Oliver • Notes Towards an Applied Literature
How many of us actually identify the public good with our own good? For most of us, the outside world exists for our income and our enjoyment. We have a using-based relationship with the world, not a caring one. Again, this is not entirely our fault.
Omar F. Najjarine • Why modern life feels meaningless
Historically, work looked very different. In the 1700s, approximately 90% of Americans were self-employed or engaged in family-owned trades or agriculture. Even by the early to mid-1800s, around 80-85% were independent artisans or farmers, continuing the tradition of self-employment. This dynamic began to shift dramatically with industrialization,... See more
Omar F. Najjarine • Why modern life feels meaningless
Here’s some extremely obvious advice for anyone living in San Francisco (or any city, really) that feels lonely: go outside, strike up conversations with strangers, and accept every invitation someone extends to you until you become BFFs and/or your social calendar is full for the next 3 months.
Celine Nguyen • In Defense of San Francisco
A lot has been written about how the internet radicalizes people. But the same dynamics that turn a slightly lonely young man into a seething misogynist—recommendation algorithms; social contexts that concentrate and intensify discourse—are also the dynamics that turn a young person who “likes reading” into someone who spends a year reading Proust,... See more