hyperreality

We need to replace irony, sarcasm, and cynicism—which have contributed to our self-debasement—with softer, gentler attitudes. Cynicism is useful in criticizing, but is impotent when we need to build something better. Irony only destroys, never builds.

That’s why the age of irony (in TV, comedy, etc.) coincided with decline and degradation. The... See more

What disappeared along the way was not just trust, but also the micro-doses of potency that came from navigating everyday risk. Choosing a restaurant without a thousand reviews, booking a room in an unfamiliar city - these were small but vital leaps of faith. They required us to extend ourselves beyond certainty, and in doing so they injected... See more

When you can pay someone else to deal with the grocery store rush, when you can buy access to a highway lane without traffic, when you can skip urgent care and book a concierge doctor, you’re probably not going to invest in improving our broken systems. You’ve, “found a way to route around collapse. Life still works, but only in zones that are... See more

What people really want is permission to feel and act in ways that ordinary life doesn't allow, and this is the right time to start pushing your experiences into uncomfortable territory.

What we’re starving for is intensity, and that’s hard to admit because it means the ease we’re so precious about has also made us numb.

a larger movement toward real-time, highly textured, human person-driven interaction

This urge might be semi-subconscious, a drift toward the real-time (or the appearance of such) and a slow dismissal of the pre-made. Livestreamed video is hard to fake, and a live interview is, on some baseline level, authentic. The spoken language of a three-hour podcast episode is messy, meandering, and often internally inconsistent, but it has... See more

These things are the opposite of scalable and replicable. Live culture is finite. It exists in the moment and then it’s gone, except perhaps for the artifacts of digital content it leaves behind, spun off into TikTok, relied on to advertise what already happened and convey the aura of realness, building hype for next time. (Substack held a reading... See more