Ideas I want to write about

“Limit everything to the essential but do not remove the poetry.”

— Dieter Rams, quoted in Less and More: The Design Ethos of Dieter Rams

“Like the ants, we relate to strangers based on whether they share our identity,” Moffett writes. But whereas ants use odour to identify one another, “for Homo sapiens just about anything will do... Humans evolved to be living billboards for their identities.” We are deeply concerned about the story-of-self that we broadcast to others.... See more

If you want to understand a society, don’t listen to what they say about themselves. Look at what they make. So, who are we then? Obsessed with scale, productivity, and the bottom line with little regard for the soul of what’s being made or the souls that’ll be shaped by it. Don’t get me... See more

“I have used all my life a wonderfully simple heuristic: charlatans are recognisable in that they will give you positive advice, and only positive advice, exploiting our gullibility and sucker-proneness for recipes that hit you in a flash as just obvious, then evaporate later as you forget them.”

— Nassim Nicholas Taleb, Antifragile

Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don't get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.