weekly Go Flip Yourself

In the 1860s, Charles Baudelaire bemoaned what we might now call doomscrolling:

Every newspaper, from the first line to the last, is nothing but a tissue of horrors. Wars, crimes, thefts, licentiousness, torture, crimes of princes, crimes of nations, individual crimes, an intoxicating spree of universal atrocity.

And it’s this disgusting aperitif that the civilised man consumes at breakfast each morning … I do not understand how a pure hand can touch a newspaper without a convulsion of disgust.

If we want to revitalize our neighborhood communities, we should ask: which factors explain why so many have declined in the face of technological change? I see four: changes in the physical landscape, decline in local institutions, individualization of religion, and shifts in our education and aspirations. Where these four factors have changed the least, community remains the strongest.

Constraints incentivize care.

With productivity tools, there’s always a trade-off. In this case, as we delegate more of our memory-making behaviors to technology, we risk weakening our sense of perception & judgment.

The objects you wear—whether wired earphones or AirPods—say something about the tribes you belong to, the belief systems you hold, and how you identify with a group.

When the corporate executive and the college student struck up a conversation in the 1980s, they weren’t just sharing space. They were engaging in a moment engineered by circumstance. The stakes were low; the expected return on breaking social norms was just high enough. With nowhere else to be, curiosity got its chance.