juliana ong
@julianaong
juliana ong
This is choice paralysis. Previous generations didn’t have many options so they stuck together through hard times and made it work. Now, abundance (or its illusion) has led people to feel less satisfied. People are now more anxious about making a choice and less certain that the one they made was correct.
From Irony to Earnestness: The Cultural Death of Cringe
Post-Culture by Sibling Studiopostculture.substack.com
The hard problem is earning the right to hold people’s memory. The best way to preserve agency and fight technological fascism is by making the alternative so culturally compelling that people choose it because it serves them better and is more fun.
“So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard.”
instagram.com • Psalm 27:1-2 Except the Lord build the house, they labour in vain that build it: except the Lord keep the city, the
a powerful thread on the utility of faith.
Most of the intellectual energy around faith and people of faith is focused on the institutions of faith. And it’s pretty negative. Rightly so as the institutions are riddled with bigotry, abuse and hypocrisy. So little else gets said.
Beyond that though, it’s hard to overstate the positive impact faith has
... See morea lot of celebrated qualities are incompatible with each other. Ambition often comes with discontent; focus with rigidity; contentment with complacency. A couple that does everything together probably has fewer close friends. A social butterfly might have a messy house. These are crude examples, but it’s worth remembering that we all have to assess... See more
Optimization alone can't get you novelty or interestingness.
This is maybe the single most important core of human psychology - people want to reinforce narratives about themselves. If you’re marketing, don’t sell them a thing, sell them a self image that your thing happens to reinforce.
And it dawned on me that I might have to change my inner thought patterns… that I would have to start believing in possibilities that I wouldn’t have allowed before, that I had been closing my creativity down to a very narrow, controllable scale… that things had become too familiar and I might have to disorient myself.
-Bob Dylan