Tom White

The time to be absurd is now . Not later. Not maybe. We get about 168 hours in a week. 112 if you subtract sleep. And most people are almost people .

Almost made the jump. Almost wrote that book. Almost called the girl. Almost did the thing.

How absurd to be alive and not really live.

A 2024 neuroscience study published in Frontiers in Human Neuroscience found that heavy short-form video use is associated with reduced executive control and weaker attention performance —measured not just behaviorally, but neurologically using EEG brain scans.

Let that sink in.

The study does not just focus on “feeling distracted” but more... See more

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi was troubled by a paradox of progress. People alive today have more sophisticated machines, medicines, and systems for organizing the world. So why haven’t these advances made us happier? “The gods of the Greeks were like helpless children compared to humankind today and the powers we now wield,” he wrote. And yet “we do not... See more

And unless we keep the human costs of warfare front and center in our minds, we may be tempted to take just-war theory as merely a political or intellectual exercise.

Writing is work I need to keep doing. It’s the part I most want to outsource, and that’s exactly why I can’t. I won’t automate it, because it’s a critical ingredient in who I want to be—someone who notices patterns, asks questions, thinks about the future, and shares what I find. Those are the things that make me a writer rather than someone who... See more

These songs speak in a language of inspiration and hope, telling us that we can overcome the many troubles and disillusions we face. Through their very existence, they show us that beauty and goodness can prevail.

The principle generalizes beyond uranium. The businesses that can compound wealth over long periods, the ones Titan looks for across every strategy, tend to share one structural trait: they find ways to make future demand visible before the market prices it in. Think of Microsoft's shift to Azure subscriptions, or Apple's services revenue. The... See more

Boris Cherny, creator of Claude Code, ships 20-30 pull requests per day. Major code changes, not typo fixes. He runs five parallel AI instances, each on a separate branch.1

Compare that to a traditional engineer : 3 PRs per week.2 Cherny isn’t 10% more productive. He’s 30x more productive.

That productivity gap compounds at the company level.... See more

when technologies take the form of capital that replaces workers, they are more likely to be resisted.