From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
A lot of that feeling of alienation that you see in The Office, Dilbert, and so-forth is driven by people feeling that they don't understand context, and ultimately decisions don't make sense.
No regrets culture is a terrible blueprint for living. The idea that you should always be positive and never look backwards is not an effective blueprint for living a decent, meaningful, happy life. It runs against everything we know about the science of emotion!
The efficiency trap is very modern, but it's now become a holdover from the Industrial Revolution. If you only relate to time, as if it were a certain kind of 'thing', like a natural resource… something that you could maximise, then you're going to be in a perpetual state of psychological struggle because you won't be using the right conceptual tools to live in time.
My father arrived in this country with just $16 in his pocket, and my mother, also an immigrant from Congo, instilled in me that the notion of life being too difficult was not an excuse, especially in the United States or any developed Western country where one is inherently blessed.
It's conceivable that survival odds were higher for ancestors who embraced false information endorsed by their tribe, compared to those who acknowledged empirically accurate information but were thereby alienated from their group.
When I first began, the word 'miscarriage' was so heavy on my tongue that I couldn't utter it. The sense of shame was so overwhelming. There's this societal expectation that women's bodies are designed for childbearing, yet there's a deafening silence around what to do when things don't go as planned.
We live in a society where our pursuit of authenticity is more important to us than ever, but we've created a society which is also extraordinarily fake. I want to understand this and understand how we can fight back.
I noticed trolling because I was a troll when I was a teenager. I was one of those guys who spent a lot of time on forums at the weekend – trolling people. Back then, it was more like pranking; sending people a dud-link that would send them to a weird cartoon or porn site.
The idea of time as something distinct from us, which we are then having to fight and struggle with all the time would simply not have existed to the mediaeval English peasant, who would have existed much more in what anthropologists call 'task orientation'.
Every soldier who enters the military knows what makes the grass grow. Civilians are like, 'okay… sun? Water? Photosynthesis?…' for us? Its blood, we say the bright red blood makes the green grass grow.
We characterise our ideal 'Substacker' in affectionate terms – we call them outsider nerds – they're outsiders insofar as they don't fit comfortably in the dominant media structure for whatever reason – perhaps they feel they can do better work outside of it.
So much of silence is about perpetuating the status quo, reinforcing what someone or dominant groups within an entity or organization have deemed appropriate, good, polite. Being different inherently exposes you to vulnerability; you're pushing against everything that the forces of mimicry urge you to do, which is to conform.