Thomas

Measuring wealth from zero is a different way to think about it than normal. What makes you wealthy, in the way the word is typically used, isn’t what you have, but what you have compared to the people near you in time, space, and culture.

An equanimous subject is ready to meet the world on its own terms.

To be platform-pilled means that one’s conception of truth is the version that best serves the platforms' goals.1 What we think of as popular, trustworthy, engaging, or even virtuous is filtered through the platforms' logic.

These days, we digest sadness alone with our phones. This is so thoroughly the case that sometimes even speaking out loud to your spouse or your mother or your close friend about a recent disaster or tragedy can feel like doubling down. They probably already know about it, so why endure the awkwardness and despair of feeling it together? And if... See more

Intelligence is not central to the success of most life on Earth. Consider the grasses: they’ve flourished across incredibly diverse global environments, without planning or debating a single step. Planarian worms regrow any part of their body and are functionally immortal, a trick we can manage only in science fiction. And a microscopic virus... See more

Soon after I first posted this essay in a blog some 15 years ago, a young man approached me to ask if I minded him reposting it. I asked him where that would be. He and some others had launched a site called ‘Generation’. Its aim was to prepare for the coming war between the generations by assembling useful documents and providing a forum for... See more

Our around-the-clock overexposure to global human suffering, our daily feed of what we once considered catastrophic events — political, ecological, cultural — when combined with diminished attention spans, smaller and smaller chunks of content, and baked-in cross-platform imperatives to remain emotionally removed from any given person, place, or... See more