In our daily lives, we are constantly inundated with spam, ads, and a barrage of content we never asked for. Whether it's scrolling YouTube and hitting a wall of ads, or opening an inbox full of junk mail from mailing lists that automatically checked the "subscribe" box for us, the core issue is the same: the internet is constantly pus...

I spend a lot of my time in the digital world. Most of the sites and activities I participate in are mediated by private companies with profit incentives, designed to make me buy products or purchase subscriptions. This marketing permeates nearly all the media I consume; very little of it comes from public or government sources. We oft...

I'm about six-months out from needing my own health care insurance and I keep thinking about how crazy it is that we rely on a job for this. For companies, it's a great strategy. They get to offset lower wages by providing healthcare benefits, while still having their workers pay part of the cost. But looking at today's job market—wher...

Where our identity lies has been an essential question since the beginning of human existence. We want to understand who we are, because that defines what we do. Often, this leads people to define identity through their ideas. John Locke famously argued something similar, centering personal identity on our memories and consciousness. H...

In Frank Herbert's Dune series, there is a powerful faction known as the Spacing Guild. Their pilots navigate interstellar space through extreme hyper-specialization, relying entirely on a mind-altering substance called "spice". Because the spice is only produced on the desert planet Arrakis, whoever controls that planet controls the b...

There's this concept in Buddhism called the Sangha. It is defined as the reservoir of support around a person who they lean on and who lean on them. It is seen as the grounding force behind the peace and harmony in someone's life. Because these communities are built around people, they can support those people in many different ways. F...

With the advent of computer networking, a new kind of company has emerged that is exempt from the physical limits of the past. Underlying this emergence is what Scott Galloway calls the technological flywheel. Because computer networks are based on a server-side architecture, a single "storefront" can serve millions of people all over ...

There is a future in which we are able to fully decouple resource production from the natural environment. Rather than extracting from fragile ecosystems, we can engineer "artificial" environments that can sustain us while allowing nature to heal. In Whole Earth Discipline, Stewart Brand envisions exactly this: "I want commercial wood ...

I recently had to buy some cleaning supplies for my road bike. During this simple task, for a bike I don't ride too often, I went through an overwhelming spiral. I checked at least 20 websites comparing and contrasting all their different products. I went through Amazon reviews and cross-referenced them with various review websites. Th...

After reading a book, I've always had the feeling that I've simultaneously learned a ton of information and immediately forgotten just as much. I wanted a way to actually retain and use the information I was gathering. I started highlighting, collecting quotes and taking notes. Initially, I just stored these inside the book itself, wri...