The New Romantics

how can my creative superpowers as an artist be channeled into giving extraordinary value and service to others, while sharing my ethos & philosophy along the way?

So this is what’s happened to the world: optimization trumps human preference. The people who want to win the argument are effectively prepared to ignore human truths to preserve the integrity of the artificial model.

The solution to the atomization curse that both gives us significantly more time back, and makes us much happier, is to seek to reintegrate these various foci of life as much as possible .

. As author Leah Price put it in her book How to Do Things with Nooks in Victorian Britain: “Once a sign of economic power, reading is now the province of those whose time lacks market value.”

The point Klinenberg wanted to make was this: If there was no such thing as a library, and someone proposed it today, there's a 99.9% chance they and their “radical and crazy idea” would be laughed out of the room.

But, as we know, it’s not a crazy idea.

She wrote on Hollywood and Washington, New York and Sacramento, Terri Schiavo and Martha Stewart, grief and hypocrisy and Latin American politics, and somehow it all drove toward the same point: Narratives are coping mechanisms. If we want to truly understand ourselves, we have to understand not just the stories we make up together, but the tales... See more

This obsession with the immediate “unburdening” of a thing you created is common in non-Japanese contexts, but I posit: The Japanese way is the correct way. Be an adult. Own your garbage. Garbage responsibility is something we’ve long since abdicated not only to faceless cans on street corners (or just all over the street, as seems to be the case... See more

Myles helped me avoid an easy error:

Putting the tool before the craft.