"Social media ruined empathy" I think it did something worse: it gave us shallow empathy for complete strangers + reduced our actual empathy for the actual people in our actual lives. Our grandparents: deep bonds with 10 people Us: parasocial connections to 10,000 strangers

Theory: We replaced "experiencing art" with "having opinions about art" and this explains why everyone has takes on movies they haven't seen. You don't need to read the book anymore, you just need to know which side you're on.

Dungeons & Dragons alignment charts are Myers-Briggs for cool people. They are also more accurate + more useful than Myers-Briggs.

Online discourse is just the Investiture Controversy of 1076, except instead of the Pope and the Emperor fighting over who appoints bishops, it's people with PhDs and people with podcasts fighting over who gets to define "expert"

Pretty much every YouTube thumbnail is now: 😱👉💰 And I hate it.

"I specifically can't relate to that character" has become the dominant form of art criticism and it's bloody tragic. Imagine telling Kafka "I'm not a giant bug so this story doesn't resonate with me." The whole damn point is the empathy bridge across the impossible.

"I'm depressed" Your options: Therapist: $200/session Philosopher: Free, but you have to read Religion: Free, but there are rules Internet: Free, but now everything is 100x worse

You're here. You're here, and you're probably not going to be a billionaire. You're probably not going to be a rock star or a movie star or any kind of star at all. Your Wikipedia page may never exist. And that's okay. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/you-are-i...

Increasingly convinced that the internet's entire understanding of the concept of "irony" is based on Alanis Morissette

I'm demonetizing my YouTube channel. Permanently. Why? Because you can't give a lecture on intentional living and then serve it wrapped in the most sophisticated distraction-delivery system ever created. Or at least - I can't. youtu.be/y7SSUDgsz_w

guy who's really into stoicism but only the "control your emotions" part and not the "also you should probably accept death calmly and live virtuously" part and also sucks at controlling his emotions

Paid members' post for the week: my 2025 productivity update. Some notes on how I do what I do. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/2025-prod...

Reading old sci-fi. They guessed: flying cars, moon colonies, AI They missed: everyone would have infinite access to information and use it primarily to argue about one incredibly dumb thing every 24 hours.

I remember when this was a Spanish study group

Every 5 years we rediscover that writing morning pages works, give it a new name (journaling, 750 words, daily practice), charge $15/month for an app version, then forget about it when we realize the problem was never the notebook

PSA. If you've sent out a mass email blast to several thousand people, it's not actually a "personal note" or a "personal invitation." It's just a marketing email.

'Do what you love' is decent advice but 'love what you do' is better advice

Fun fact: 100% of life advice that starts with 'just' is given by people who have never tried to 'just' do the thing they're recommending. 'Just stop caring what people think' 'Just be yourself' Maybe just stop simplifying everything according to your priors.

Half the emails I get about my YouTube channel: "Love that your channel has no intro, no CTAs, no editing - please never change" The other half: "I noticed your channel has no intro, no CTAs, no editing - our agency can fix this for $2,000/month"

The best Black Flag record is Who’s Got the 10 1/2? and it’s not even close.

Drug development costs $1-3 billion and takes 10-15 years to prove a drug is safe // effective, then 30% of Americans immediately decide it's poison because a guy in Macedonia pretending to be from Massachusetts said so on X...

The fact that you need elaborate behavioral interventions to use your phone productively suggests the phone isn't actually a productivity tool. It's an attention-extraction device with productivity features that are antithetical to its entire purpose. www.youtube.com/watch?v=P25...

Keeping all your options open sounds smart until you realize the person with infinite optionality often does nothing memorable with it. Meanwhile someone who commits to one thing goes deep. Different costs, different returns. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/every-dec...

The QWERTY keyboard was designed to reduce mechanical jamming in early typewriters. We kept it for computers. Which don't jam. How many of our systems are just preserved solutions to problems that no longer exist? And how would we even know?

In every dystopian novel: the government bans books. In reality: we gave up reading voluntarily.

Information wants to be free. Humans want to be confidently incorrect in groups.

When the code bot says "I see the issue now" I cannot emphasise enough how much it has not and will not see the issue now or at any point in the future, in any future, in any universe, across all space and time

The funniest thing about "digital nomads" is they all end up in the exact same 5 cities doing the exact same remote work they could do anywhere, but now they're doing it in a coworking space in Bali "work from anywhere" = "work from places other digital nomads have already approved on Instagram"

Everyone talks about "hustle culture" vs "quiet quitting" but nobody mentions the third option which is what like 80% of knowledge workers actually do: appearing frantically busy while accomplishing approximately one good hour of work per day, spread across 47 browser tabs and 6 Slack channels

The people preaching 'move fast and break things' are the same folks whose entire economic livelihood depends on the system moving very, very slowly and protecting their accumulated equity and I just think that’s beautiful (stupid)

The biggest insight into human nature I've gained from social media is that 90% of arguments are just elaborate ways for people to say, 'I'm not like those other people.'

If a psychological study has a catchy name like "The Marshmallow Test" or "Power Posing," the probability of it replicating is inversely proportional to the number of TED Talks given about it.

Just a quick tip for those trying to get ahead: the key is to constantly look directly into the sun for short bursts. this blinds you to the failures of the present and allows you to walk straight toward an imagined, better future. it works, trust me.

Your 80 year old self would give anything to have the day you're having. Some days genuinely suck. Some problems really matter. But most days contain at least a few elements that future you would miss. www.joanwestenberg.com/p/your-80-y...

I know exactly why my life is going wrong. it is because i keep going to the grocery store and buying "Food" then bringing it home and eating it. this is the cycle i must break, but the store keeps making more "Food"

I see a lot of people saying "We need to have a serious conversation about this." This means they want to spend 4 hours arguing about it, then all agree that absolutely nothing can or will be done about it. This is optimal.

I've been writing a weekly essay for a while now. Tech, culture, the stuff that keeps me up at night. People seem to like it. It's free to subscribe: www.joanwestenberg.com

Most people don’t make bad decisions. They make good bets that lose, then rewrite history to protect their ego... www.joanwestenberg.com/p/life-isn-...

Look, I love this app, but I'd love it a whole lot more if the icon didn't look like xenomorph bussy

A good decision that leads to a bad outcome gets reclassified in our memory as a bad decision. A terrible decision that happens to work out becomes evidence of brilliant judgment... youtu.be/qQ63GBdm_Q8

"Am I the only person who..." yes, you are the sole human being across all of history and geography and space and time to ever experience this incredibly mundane thing, you should call the Smithsonian

This is one of the best things I've ever read. www.are.na/editorial/p...

Every week, I try to make sense of how we build, create, and connect. If you're looking for thoughtful writing about technology, culture, and what it means to do meaningful work, I'd love to have you as a reader. www.joanwestenberg.com

The existentialists had a word for this kind of life. They called it bad faith. We have a different word for it now. We call it hustle. youtu.be/mFWzoeZTbHY

“We don’t talk enough about” sir let me stop you there we talk enough about everything, all we do is talk on the internet 24 hours a day 7 days a week we don’t shut the fuck up enough

I'm not usually given to envy or jealousy but I've never wanted to be a human-made object so much in my life

New post for paid members - why every family has these intractable disagreements about what really happened during Thanksgiving dinner in 1998... www.joanwestenberg.com/p/we-re-all...

When you're inside a moment of change, you can't see its full shape. The entrepreneurs of 1985 didn't know they were living through a golden age because they were too busy wrestling with 300 baud modems. (Via Kevin Kelly) www.joanwestenberg.com/p/you-are-n...

Good enough, consistently applied over time, beats brilliant but fragile. Every. Single. Time. youtu.be/v_o_V0tPKvI

At 13, I joined a Wolfenstein 3d modding forum. 22 years later, my posts are still there - and still searchable. The discussion I had in Discord 2 years ago? Not so much. We chose this. We can choose better. blog.discourse.org/2025/11/the...