John Stuart Mill, writing in 1861, made a claim that drove the more egalitarian philosophers of his time slightly mad. He argued that not all pleasures are created equal. Some pleasures, he said, are higher. Others are lower. And no amount of intensity in the lower ones could ever match the quieter, deeper satisfaction of […]
Why AI-Generated Art is a “Lower Pleasure” (And Why It Matters) Read More »
Imagine you are the worst person on your team. Not in one thing. In everything. You write slower than the intern, you code worse than the new hire, you sell with all the charm of a damp napkin. By every reasonable measure, your colleagues should fire you, replace you with a houseplant, and enjoy the
You opened the app to check one notification. Forty minutes later, you are watching a stranger in Norway restore an antique clock while another part of your brain composes a witty reply to a comment someone left on your vacation photo from three weeks ago. You did not plan any of this. And yet, here
Beyond Likes: The Four Reasons You Post on Social Media Read More »
There is a strange comedy playing out in modern wellness. People will spend three hundred dollars on a continuous glucose monitor before they will spend three dollars on a bag of lentils. They will research the optimal time to take magnesium glycinate but cannot remember the last time they walked somewhere instead of driving. They
Pareto’s Diet: Why 80% of Your Health is Decided by Two Simple Habits Read More »
There is a comforting story being told about artificial intelligence. The story goes like this. AI will help us think more clearly. It will save us time. It will free us from boring work so we can focus on the meaningful parts of life. It will make us smarter, fitter, more productive, more creative. We
Why AI Will Reinforce Our Worst Habits, Not Break Them Read More »
There is a particular kind of dread that arrives when you watch a machine do your job in three seconds. It is not anger exactly. It is something closer to embarrassment, the way you might feel watching someone fold a fitted sheet correctly for the first time in your life. You realize you have been
Don’t Compete with Robots on Speed; Compete with Them on Awareness Read More »
In 1850, a dying French economist named Frédéric Bastiat sat down and wrote a short book called The Law. He had tuberculosis. He had months to live. And he was furious. He was not furious about taxes, exactly. He was not furious about politicians, exactly. He was furious about something much weirder and much more
I Read “The Law” So You Do Not Have To: Here Is Why You Are Being Robbed (Bastiat) Read More »
There is an old joke from the Soviet era that goes like this. A worker says to his boss, “They pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work.” Everyone laughs. Then everyone goes home to an empty fridge. That joke is not really a joke. It is an economic theory wearing a clown nose.
Zero Profit, Zero Effort: The Marxist Incentive Death Read More »
John Locke wrote his Two Treatises of Government in 1689, a time when the idea of a nation receiving millions of newcomers in a single decade would have struck him as somewhere between unthinkable and absurd. England in his day had a population of about five million people. The notion of a state absorbing that
Is Mass Migration a Lockean Dissolution of Government? Read More »
Somewhere in a coffee shop right now, a person is telling another person how slammed they are. Their week is insane. They have not had a proper weekend in months. They are running on four hours of sleep and three espressos. They say all of this while sitting still, drinking a latte, with absolutely no