Life

Every phase of life can be shopped for at Costco. Where else can you purchase a wedding ring, a baby carrier, and a casket? It follows your own life story—one does not experience Costco the same way before and after owning a home, or before and after having a child.

I say please and thank you, not because I believe it matters to him, but because it matters to me. If I am going to use natural English to communicate for much of my working day, I do not want to bark orders meanly. It makes me feel like a jerk.

The hyperreal doesn’t mimic or imitate reality. It replaces reality altogether, making it nearly impossible for us to determine what is real, what isn’t.

The ability to enter into Bookworld is murdered by saying your account number out loud. I don’t know why that’s so, it just is.

When you save the book for after the movie, it’s like getting an extended director’s cut that includes so much more material, and lets you dive into that world even deeper with characters and details that weren’t captured on screen.

AI is a fad, but not merely a fad. You can’t merely wait for it to blow over, and imagine that things will be as they were. A lot of it will blow over, but also a lot of things will be blown flat by it. Important matters, customs, infrastructures, cherished ways of life, gone with the wind and never replaced.

But we’re living in an era when all the old rules seem to be changing, and when the most powerful people on earth ignore all the rules anyway. So might it be worth reassessing your lifelong strategy of following the rules as dutifully as possible?

What begins as personalization can quietly become entrapment, not through control, but through familiarity. And in that familiarity, we begin to lose something essential: not just variety, but the very conditions that make change possible.