I want to look a category of weird mental tricks that we sometimes play on ourselves—you may be familiar with them individually, but when considered together they reveal a pattern that I think deserves more discussion. Continue reading
This post is about a certain kind of procrastination; I call it “over-managing.” It’s when you know what you should be working on at a given time, but instead of doing the work, you continue to deliberate over big-picture / planning decisions. As productive individuals, we have to be good Managers, but we also need to be able to call the plan “good enough” and be the Employee. Continue reading
At this time of year, everyone either writes a “How to set and keep your New Year’s resolution” article, or a “Why you shouldn’t set a New Year’s resolution” article. This is the latter. Continue reading
On paper, the Internet looks like something that would drastically change humanity for the better. But, while capable of delivering just about any information that our greatest aspirations could demand, it is mostly delivering information perfectly tuned to our lowest aspirations. The Good Internet is the subset of the Internet that actually makes your life better. It is hidden in plain sight. Continue reading
Remember that language exists as a mechanism for conveying ideas. If the ideas themselves have been effectively shared, you have no honest reason to continue dwelling on the particular words. If you find yourself failing to share the ideas, you should try using different words. And finally, if you’re using words to cleverly obscure ideas in a way that feels advantageous to you, you’re committing deception and should be called out for it. Continue reading
You should stop committing surrogation whenever and wherever you notice it, but there’s more than one way to do this. Continue reading
(If you haven’t read the Introduction and are wondering what I mean by “symbols,” I recommend you read that first.) Part 1: Surrogation Because we deal in symbols every day, and the substances behind those symbols are often agreed upon … Continue reading
In my last post, I aimed to show that even if advertisements don’t cause us to spend excessively or unwisely, they are still costly in ways that we don’t often talk about. In this post, I’ll explain why targeted ads … Continue reading
I think about ads a lot. That may be because I work in consumer technology, the medium through which most advertisements are delivered nowadays. Or it may be because I have strong feelings about consumerism, which is really the spirit … Continue reading
The other day, at a conference for work, I overheard a conversation of a kind that I’d heard many times before. It involved three people: the main speaker (whom we’ll call Gossiper), an acquaintance (Listener) and a third person, not … Continue reading
In Part 1, I explained why I believe we can understand consumerism—habitual and ever-increasing consumption—more completely by looking at it in the general sense of value consumption rather than the specific sense of monetary spending. In this post, I’ll describe … Continue reading
Introduction In my generation, there’s been a lot of talk about consumerism—the cultural trend of acquiring goods and services habitually and in ever-increasing amounts. In college I learned a little bit about why it this trend came about and how … Continue reading
