Economics of Human Energy

Thoughts about how money and human energy relate

Collapsed states are simpler states, so anyone working towards a simpler state — and anyone telling an intelligible tale is doing precisely that — is working towards a collapse. The failure of a world begins with a failure of the imagination to comprehend increased complexity, and an urge to retreat to greater simplicity.

every story is a degrowth story

I don’t think this is necessarily degrowth, it’s compression. This feels like simplicity is a return to understanding of what’s valuable after building on top of it. It’s the flower budding, blooming, wilting, and blooming again. It’s cyclical and growth oriented, because uncapped growth is deadly to the environment and will be rejected.

This state the importance of unread books in a library. They're the reflection of the things we don't know. Just like Empty notes are better than no notes at all, it's a very socratic approach, considering his famous quote:

What I know is that I know nothing

Knowing this, we should not expect the proportion of unread books in our library to decrease.... See more

Antilibrary - My second-brain

Unread is important.

Keeping a good thing going is hard, and if you have the skills to do it, it kinda makes sense to focus your use of those skills in domains that are more rewarding. This creates “missing markets” that are only served by thankless volunteers who are suckers for pain.

writing a facebook status in 2024

This feels extremely profound. We end up creating broken systems sustained by masochists.

Cost effective is the wrong way to think about value

Creativity is not a process. creativity is not scripted.

One of the most salient traits of creative visionaries like Walt Disney and Steve jobs is the absence of process.

Process is an organized way of doing things. But they didn’t have a process. They just did the work. No strict adherence to budget or timelines. Just figure things out on the fly.

Creativity timelines aren’t predictable, so why do we try to put creative professions into timelines?

High-quality access to information : social technologies that help people form high-quality opinions about important topics in an adversarial environment. I personally am bullish on prediction markets and Community Notes; you may have a different take on the solutions, but the point is that this topic is important.

Vitalik Buterin • Against Choosing Your Political Allegiances Based on Who Is "Pro-Crypto"

We need ways to filter, validate, and value large amounts of information. Traditionally, this has been limited to the wealthy in the form of “experts”

I like the term economism . It describes how economic thinking and practice have become ingrained into all sorts of aspects of our lives, even non-economic ones. In today’s world governed by economism , everything seems to need to be measured by economic logic: am I using my time efficiently?

Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #78

Haven’t heard this term before, but I think it follows from the collapse of things into measurements. We started with measuring money as a collapse of information, and that led to collapses of other aspects of the world as a proxy for money where money isn’t available to measure value.

Money is an important heuristic for groups to measure their capacity to support their work properly and not burn people out. Money is not the be all end all, but people get really put off by how it's been so co-opted by the capitalist, extractive system that we're trying to escape. My theory of change is, instead of running away from it, we need to... See more

Divya Siddarth • Building Capacity for Exit to Community

And more than anything, it feels particularly, uncomfortably, acutely uncertain.

Our Centaur Future - A RADAR Report

The biggest thing we can do is give people a sense of a secure present from which to explore potential abundant futures.