Thomas

Many activists on both the Left and Right now hope to bring about their ideal world the same way a spoiled brat acquires a toy they’ve been denied: by being as loud and hysterical as possible. This is neotoddlerism: the view that utopia can be achieved by acting like a three-year old.

“If life is a novel, big bets are the chapter titles and tiny choices are the words on the page”

In taming the world, we have tamed ourselves

Instead, I stopped trying to fit myself and Every into an old model of what a founder, software startup, or media company needs to look like. Those are all old ideas, from an older context. They can be useful when needed. But they’re dry and dead.

I’ve just tried to be honest about who I am, what I want, and what I believe to be true about the... See more

And so I think when young people talk about what’s plaguing them— situationships, not getting on the housing ladder, even the climate crisis—what they are often getting at is the transience of everything. Everything uprooted. Everything unstable. They don’t feel attached to anything, anyone, anywhere. They don’t even feel like the Earth will stick... See more

What is included in a narrative, what is left out and the values it embodies are determined by what cognitive scientist and linguist George Lakoff refers to as ‘frames’. These cognitive structures are shaped by our personal and collective histories and allow us to conceptualize and organize what we see (and fail to see) and how we see it. The... See more

Still others argue that the circular-economy idea merely reframes rather than rejects the corporate and capitalist assumptions that got us into this mess in the first place. Instead of challenging the goal of growth, circular economies create a new form of growth that is still in the hands of industrial corporations. The accusation is that the... See more