Weekly Reading list: 6/12/2025

Things I Read This Week That Made Me Think

There’s a genre of advice that’s become impossible to avoid: how to think better, read deeper, become dangerously articulate, access flow states, cultivate agency. The vocabulary shifts every eighteen months- neurohacking, second brain, founder mode- but the pitch is always the same: there’s a cheat code, and the people who know it are pulling ahead.

I read a lot of this stuff this week. Some of it was good. Some of it was the usual: frameworks dressed up as insight, repetition branded as ritual. What struck me wasn’t the content but the sheer volume of it. The appetite for being told, again and again, that you can optimise your way out of confusion.

Meanwhile, Adam Mastroianni published a piece called “The Decline of Deviance.” His argument: by almost every measure (crime, sex, drugs, risk-taking, cults, subcultures, art) people are getting less weird. Not because we’ve become moral, but because life got safer and richer, and when you have more to lose, you take fewer chances. The chart on teens drinking is startling. So is the one on serial killing.

What does it mean that we’re drowning in content about how to think originally while simultaneously becoming less capable of actually doing so? That the loudest conversations are about agency and flow and rebellion while the behavioural data shows us retreating into increasingly narrow corridors of acceptable action?

Maybe the frameworks aren’t causing the retreat. Maybe they’re a symptom of it. A way to feel like you’re doing something transgressive while staying perfectly safe. Reading about flow state at 6 a.m. with your black coffee and your blocked notifications. Rebelling on schedule.

This week’s reading is about that gap: between the performance of depth and the thing itself. Between the carousel and the cupboard. Between the story we tell about how insight happens and the infrastructure that actually makes it possible.

Let’s go.

1. The Decline of Deviance Experimental History — Adam Mastroianni

The standout piece of the week, and the one everything else kept circling back to.

Mastroianni’s argument: society has become dramatically, measurably less weird. The data is comprehensive. High school students are half as likely to drink alcohol as they were in the 1990s. Teen pregnancy has plummeted. Crime rates have halved. Serial killing is in decline. Even bringing a gun to school is down (counterintuitive, given the headlines, but the survey data is clear). Kids use their seatbelts. They’re less likely to have sex, do drugs, or get in fights.

The decline extends beyond adolescence: adults are committing fewer crimes, exhibiting less antisocial behaviour, and joining fewer cults (?!) Cult formation peaked in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. The data shows a steep drop-off after 2000. (Before you object: no, Hyrox is not a cult. When your training rally requires you to sell all your possessions and marry the instructor, we can revisit.)

Culture, too, has flattened. 75% of top-grossing movies are now prequels, sequels, or spinoffs, compared to 25% before 2000. Popular music is more homogenous and lyrically repetitive. Novel covers all look the same. Website aesthetics converged in the 2010s and haven’t moved since. Architecture is beige. Car colours are greyscale. Brand logos are sans-serif. The internet, once gloriously weird, now looks like a design system.

Even science is stuck. New ideas are less likely to displace old ones. Papers are formatted identically. The “flight of the weird nerd from academia” is real.

Mastroianni’s explanation: life has gotten safer and richer. We have more to lose. When you’re not worried about dying of polio or being shipped off to war, the risky parts of your day start looking disproportionately dangerous. So you buckle up. You play it safe. You adopt what ecologists call a “slow life history strategy”- Pilates and 401(k)s instead of unprotected sex and drunk driving.

The twist is that this shift isn’t fully conscious. It operates in the background, nudging every decision toward the safer option. Eventually, rule-breaking doesn’t just get rarer, you simply forget that breaking rules is possible.

The essay ends with Arturo di Modica, the sculptor who created the Charging Bull on Wall Street. He ran away from home to study art, immigrated with nothing, illegally built his own studio (including two sub-basements, by hand), and dropped the bull on Wall Street without permission. The statue was impounded and then reinstated after public outcry. Di Modica didn’t mean it as an avatar of capitalism; he meant it as resilience and self-reliance.

“Fearless Girl,” the statue installed in front of the bull in 2017, was commissioned by an investment company to promote an index fund.

Who would live Di Modica’s life now?

What I got out of it: The most useful reframe I’ve read in months. “Be yourself” and “take risks” have become slogans precisely because we’ve lost the capacity to do either. The decline of deviance isn’t moral progress; it’s risk-aversion. And the irony of endless content about “thinking differently” is that it’s all formatted identically, delivered to an audience too careful to act on any of it.

2. Everyone Is Numbing Out Catherine Shannon

A companion piece to the Mastroianni, though written two years earlier.

Shannon’s argument: we’re not just less weird, we’re checking out entirely. Life got chaotic fast. People started coping with the lack of meaning through ironic detachment, and that’s matured into a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness.

She walks through the litany: college is a waste of money, work is a waste of life, marriage is just a piece of paper, kids are a nightmare, hobbies are quaint, earnestly expressing yourself is cringe, leaving the house is exhausting, religion is for idiots. If you internalise this, eventually everything becomes a dumb joke.

The essay uses a flower metaphor that I found surprisingly sticky: if your boyfriend never brings you flowers, you cope by telling yourself you don’t care about flowers. Maybe you decide flowers are basic and lame. If this goes on long enough, even when you are presented with flowers, you’ll see them as a bit. The gesture won’t land anymore because you’ve dulled the receptors.

This is what’s happening at scale. People are dulling their receptors for meaning. And the ironic-detachment pose, while feeling like protection, is actually hollowing you out from the inside. Eventually, there’s nothing left for the wall to defend.

Shannon’s proposed antidote isn’t sincerity exactly. She’s wary of the “how are you, really?” guy at the bar, but not of basic honesty. Stop hiding from the sad truths and start seeking the transcendent truths that address the sadness. Embrace reality, not the abstract idea of how life should be. Take responsibility for beliefs. Be prepared to fail.

What I got out of it: The connection to Mastroianni is direct- ironic detachment is one mechanism by which deviance declines. You can’t be weird if you’ve already decided nothing matters. The numbing isn’t nihilism (nihilists at least believe something); it’s something worse: a refusal to engage at all. And the flower image lingers: how many receptors have I dulled without noticing?

3. How Culture Survives the Internet net good+ — Charli Cohen

If Shannon and Mastroianni diagnose the death of weirdness, Cohen asks: where does it survive? And what keeps it alive?

Her answer: the “cozy web.” Small rooms with strong signals. Group chats, side Discords, niche Substacks, locked Pinterest boards, paywalled communities. Spaces where virality is irrelevant and the friction of entry is the whole point.

The old internet rewarded specificity. Early Vine was an art form. Memes were born of deep, niche context. The new internet rewards quantity. Saying the right thing about the right 24-hour trend. We doomscroll this “thin culture” and crave the opposite: inside jokes, shared history, the inexplicable you had to be there.

Cohen’s framework: thick culture needs friction. Not arbitrary elitism, but mechanisms that filter for shared purpose, literacy, or care. When friction disappears, like when Reddit’s WallStreetBets went from 2 million members to 10 million overnight during the GameStop saga, the culture dilutes. The jokes and memes survive but the deep shared context that made them matter is gone. The new majority may have learned about the subculture, but they never lived it.

Her most interesting point: distributed cozy webs are more resilient than single rooms. If culture lives in the relationships between spaces rather than inside any one container, it can route around collapse. A Discord gets too crowded or the moderation fails, the network adapts.

But scale still requires skin in the game. Emotional, practical, and material investment. This is why BTS’s ARMY has held up at phenomenal scale: fans didn’t just feel things, they did things. Crowdfunded billboards, charity drives, group orders large enough to affect supply chains. Money didn’t replace culture; it reinforced it. The ROI was a shared sense of ownership.

And culture needs curators. The “human algorithm.” The ones with judgment, memory, and taste who decide what strengthens the culture and what weakens it. Platforms don’t recognise curators the way they recognise creators. No curator funds. This is why we’re drowning in slop.

What I got out of it: The essay is optimistic in a way the Shannon and Mastroianni pieces aren’t. It acknowledges that thick culture still exists, just not where we’re looking. The insight that keeps surfacing: friction is feature, not bug. The things we optimised away (barriers to entry, slow accumulation of status, the grind of proving you belong) were load-bearing.

4. The Neuroscience of Flow State: The Ultimate Productivity Cheat Code The Forbidden Files — ixcarus

After three pieces about the decline of depth, here’s a piece promising the cheat code to access it.

The essay is written in that lowercase internet-bro voice “lungs burning, heart pounding,” “black coffee sits next to me, steam rising” but the content is solid. Flow state, neurologically, is when your prefrontal cortex partially deactivates (transient hypofrontality). The inner critic quiets. You stop thinking about the task and just do the task. Time distorts. The gap between thought and action disappears.

The practical mechanics: you need a ritual (an “on-ramp” that signals to your brain what’s coming), an environment with zero friction (phone in another room, not just silent), and a challenge-skill balance right at the edge of your ability. Too easy and you’re bored; too hard and you’re anxious.

The most useful claim: the first 10-15 minutes are the hardest. Your brain creates resistance “maybe I should plan more,” “maybe I’m not in the right headspace” and you have to push through knowing it’s temporary. Action creates motivation, not the other way around. Start messy. Start confused. Just start.

What I got out of it: The tension with the earlier pieces is obvious. This is exactly the kind of optimisation content Mastroianni’s essay implicates: rituals, triggers, controlled rebellion. And yet the practical advice is useful. The question isn’t whether flow state is real (it is), but whether we’ve made accessing it into another form of safe, legible self-improvement. Building the perfect 6 a.m. routine so you can feel transgressive without taking any actual risks.

5. The Most Important Skill to Learn in the Next 10 Years future/proof — Dan Koe

Speaking of safe transgressions: this piece argues that “agency” is the meta-skill that will make you irreplaceable in the AI age.

Koe’s definition: agency is the ability to iterate without permission. To set your own direction, act on it, and course-correct without waiting for external validation. Low-agency people have their minds still connected to society by an umbilical cord; they judge truth based on popularity and acceptance rather than direct experience.

The essay uses the learned helplessness dog experiment: dogs exposed to unavoidable shocks eventually stop trying to escape even when escaping becomes possible. They bear the shocks because they’ve been trained to believe there’s no way out. Society does this to people via the Prussian education model: mandatory attendance, standardised testing, grade levels, all designed to create compliant workers, not independent thinkers.

His argument about AI: it won’t replace high-agency people because tools need someone to orchestrate them. You can ask AI to generate a viral post, but without vision, context, and personality, there’s no throughline. AI generations are the same as thin culture- meaningless without someone providing meaning.

The generalist vs. specialist debate gets rehashed here. Specialists are attached to skills; skills get replaced. Generalists focus on goals and adapt. Shakespeare wasn’t a specialist playwright, he was a synthesiser who used diverse knowledge as his edge.

What I got out of it: The framework is useful even if the execution is familiar. But I kept thinking about the Mastroianni piece: if we’re all becoming less weird, less willing to take risks, less capable of genuine deviance, then how exactly are we supposed to develop agency? Reading about agency isn’t agency. The essay describes the symptom without quite acknowledging that the cure requires something it can’t provide.

6. How to Become Dangerously Articulate Profound Ideas — Craig Perry

Another entry in the “how to think” genre, this one focused on articulation as rebellion.

Perry’s argument: articulation has nothing to do with sounding smart. It’s about embracing uncertainty, thinking out loud without fear of making mistakes, and discovering thoughts through expression rather than reciting pre-existing ones. True articulation is a creative act of discovery.

He uses Jordan Peterson as an example, not for the politics, but for the speaking style. Peterson starts with a problem and thinks in real time. He pauses. He evaluates. The deliberate pauses are where he develops his voice. This is different from performing certainty.

The Camus connection: the universe is absurd; humans crave meaning that reality doesn’t provide. If you can embrace uncertainty rather than fight it, every word becomes a step into the unknown. Articulation becomes exploration rather than recitation.

The practical steps: read to discover (not to know), think out loud (Feynman technique), write to vomit words onto the page, angle your interests toward solving problems others have.

What I got out of it: The meta-irony is that this is itself a framework for how to seem thoughtful, and Perry is 22, which means he’s been alive for approximately one Mastroianni data-trend. The advice isn’t wrong, but I kept wondering: is reading about articulation actually making anyone more articulate? Or is it another form of preparation-as-procrastination?

7. How to Become a Profound Thinker Profound Ideas — Craig Perry

A companion piece from the same author, same thesis: profound thinking is about synthesis, not memorisation. Choose a problem you genuinely care about, research it from multiple sources, write to discover connections, then hold your perspective lightly.

The useful reframe: your perspective is an offer, not law. The goal isn’t to be certain but to be genuinely curious, to angle your interests toward other people’s problems, and to find joy in the endless practice.

What I got out of it: The Sisyphean framing is nice. The struggle itself is the source of joy, no endpoint, no final goal. But the same caveat applies: the proliferation of “how to think” content exists in inverse proportion to actual original thinking. At some point, the preparation has to stop, and the unmarketable work has to begin.

8. The Subtle but Radical Difference Between Worrying and Caring Gentle Reminders — Jovanny Varela

A piece about the distinction most people haven’t made: worrying and caring are not the same thing.

Worrying = monitoring the leak. Staring at the bucket, watching the water drain, panicking about what happens when it runs out.

Caring = repairing the leak. Kneeling down, pressing your finger against the hole, getting a patch.

Worry is valuable as a threat-detection system. It’s how you perceive danger before it arrives. But we’ve been conditioned to use worry as a substitute for action. We measure how much we care by the weight of our worry. This gets things backwards: your worry serves nobody, especially the thing you’re worrying about, when it just stays as worry.

The mantra: “Care but don’t carry.” It’s possible to care about something without carrying it as a burden.

What I got out of it: A useful diagnostic for the difference between productive and unproductive anxiety. Also, a nice complement to the earlier pieces: if we’re numbing out, maybe it’s because we confused caring with carrying and burned out on the weight.

9. The 23 Principles Every Investor Needs to Master AI Compound With AI

A practitioner’s guide to using AI for investment research. Less philosophical than the other pieces, more practical.

The key claim: AI can help you understand 80% of any business fast- the moment you go from “what’s this stock?” to “I get the business model.” That used to take days; now it takes hours. The value isn’t in making AI do the analysis for you, but in using it to compress the learning curve so you can focus on the 20% that requires judgment.

Specific tool recommendations: Gemini Pro (DeepResearch Mode) for structured multi-source research, NotebookLM for grounded zero-hallucination work from your own documents, ChatGPT for speed and clarity.

The meta-point: prompting is a thinking skill. Clear thinking in = clear output out. Build a prompt library. Your best prompts are long-term assets.

What I got out of it: Useful if you’re doing investment research. The framework also applies more broadly: AI is a tool that amplifies whatever you bring to it. If you bring confusion, you get faster confusion. If you bring clear questions, you get faster answers.

10. Evolution of a Value Investor Anshul Saigal’s Substack

A presentation writeup from a PPFAS event, tracing one investor’s journey from reading Graham and Buffett to building his own process over 20+ years.

The essay is Indian-market specific. Case studies include Polycab, RVNL, Bank of Baroda, Century Ply, but the frameworks generalise.

Key concepts:

Expectations investing: The stock price embeds the market’s expectations about future cash flows. Your variant perception is your thesis on why those expectations are wrong.

Base rates: Instead of just asking “what do I think will happen?”, also ask “what happened when this situation occurred before?” This keeps your own biases in check.

Patterns that predict: Certain communities dominate the Indian business landscape (Gujarati and Marwari families own ~40% of Nifty 500); frugality in personal life correlates with capital discipline in business; managements with chequered pasts tend to continue the pattern.

The institutional imperative: Investment managers are incentivised to minimise errors rather than maximise insights, because deviations from benchmarks risk losing client confidence. Individual investors, without those constraints, can afford to be differentiated.

The essay ends with Bill Perkins’s Die With Zero: “People are more afraid of running out of money than wasting their lives.”

What I got out of it: A useful reminder that the preparation is the thing. Saigal has been doing this for two decades; the pattern recognition comes from reps, not from reading. Also: the individual investor’s advantage isn’t information (institutional investors have more), it’s behavioural. You can hold positions that require patience because you’re not managing someone else’s expectations.

11. The Cassandra Protocol: Why Michael Burry’s Silent Exit Should Terrify Every Investor Shanaka Anslem Perera

Michael Burry (of The Big Short fame) filed paperwork to deregister Scion Asset Management, then launched a $39/month Substack called “Cassandra Unchained.” Within a week, 117,000 subscribers. Estimated annual revenue run rate: $8-10 million.

The trade that preceded the exit: 50,000 put option contracts on Palantir, betting on a 73% collapse by January 2027. Palantir’s up 173% in 2025; Burry’s positioned for the reversal.

The analysis: Burry is betting against AI infrastructure. Hyperscalers — Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Meta — are projected to spend $200 billion annually on AI through 2028. If the return on that investment doesn’t materialise, profitability collapses. Burry sees a parallel to the dot-com bubble: everyone’s building picks-and-shovels infrastructure for a gold rush that may not arrive.

The structural move: by deregistering, Burry can now publish thesis-driven analysis without the regulatory and psychological burden of managing other people’s money. He can broadcast frameworks without disclosing actual positions. The prophet’s value is in his methodology, not his portfolio.

What I got out of it: The piece is a bit purple, but the structure is interesting. Burry’s exit from public markets isn’t retirement, it’s repositioning. He’s converting a track record into a media business while maintaining optionality on his actual trades. The Cassandra framing is deliberate: he’s been right too early before and paid the price in investor redemptions. This time, he’s not waiting around to watch.

12. Things I Wish Everyone Understood About Journalism The Heart Work & The Hard Work — Anandita Mehrotra

A former journalist’s explainer on how news actually works.

The core distinction: journalism is not content. It’s an expensive, rigorous, painfully slow method of arriving at the truth by verifying facts others would rather hide. Content is designed to keep you watching; journalism tries to tell you what actually happened, even if you don’t like the answer.

The newsroom breakdown: Breaking news reporters are the paramedics (first on scene, working with half-information). Reporters are the surgeons (interviews, documents, cross-checks). Editors are the bouncers of reality (deciding what gets in, how loudly, whether naming someone is responsible or a legal suicide mission). Camera crews provide visual proof. Stringers report from places national media would otherwise miss.

The money problem: journalism is ruinously expensive. When readers refuse to pay because “it should be free,” someone else steps in. Billionaires, political allies, industrial lobbies. Media ownership isn’t decorative; it’s directional. One newsroom sounds like the country is burning; another insists we’re on the brink of a golden age. Neither is telling you everything.

On pastel carousels: they give you just enough to feel informed, not enough to be informed. The intellectual equivalent of a ready-to-eat meal. Looks complete, nothing nourishes.

What I got out of it: The newsroom-as-hospital analogy is useful. So is the reminder that “the media is biased” is usually a complaint about the circus on TV, not the actual reporting. And the hardest truth: if you’re getting news for free, you’re consuming someone’s agenda. You just don’t know whose.

13. Fashion Twitter Is Mad Daniel Roseberry Dressed a MAGA Heiress DISCOURSTED — Louis Pisano

Reagan Sacks (daughter of David Sacks, Trump’s “AI and Crypto Czar”) wore Schiaparelli haute couture to Le Bal des Débutantes. Fashion Twitter lost its mind. Pisano’s response: couture has always dressed the families of authoritarians.

The historical ledger:

• Empress Farah Pahlavi (Iran) continued commissioning haute couture from Marc Bohan at Dior until December 1978, three weeks before the Shah fled.

• Asma al-Assad placed orders for Louboutin shoes on 3 February 2012, during the siege of Homs.

• Mehriban Aliyeva (Azerbaijan’s First Lady and Vice-President) has hosted Stéphane Rolland for private fittings two to three times per year, including during crackdowns on journalists and civil society.

• Elie Saab and Zuhair Murad dressed Saudi and Emirati royals throughout the Yemen war without public comment.

The argument: couture is not a meritocracy; it’s a closed economy built on inherited wealth, discreet conservatism, and the polite fictions of taste. The fantasy that designers will take principled public stands is an online wish, not how the industry survives.

What I got out of it: The piece cuts through the outrage cycle with receipts. When you see a couture house dressing someone questionable, it’s not a betrayal, it’s business as usual. We just prefer the story where fashion is rebellious.

14. Get In Loser, We’re Reclaiming Our Brains Arcane Sensibility — Daniela Pardo

On brain rot, anti-intellectualism, and the cost of optimising the humanities out of education.

“Brain rot”, Oxford’s 2024 word of the year, is the supposed deterioration of mental state from overconsumption of trivial content. A recent MIT study found that using AI creates “cognitive debt”: lower brain engagement, worse recall, shallower processing.

The political stakes: Trump signed an executive order to dismantle the Department of Education. Books like The Handmaid’s Tale are being banned from schools. Humanities enrolments in the UK have collapsed from 28% in 1961 to 8% in 2019. English Literature A-level entries fell from 83,000 in 2013 to 54,000 in 2023.

The argument: the humanities teach the questions that STEM can’t answer. What should be built? What are the ethical consequences? Who benefits and who suffers? Without these, we create a generation that’s technically skilled but morally lost. We won’t read critically, write persuasively, empathise with others, or recognise propaganda even when it’s in front of our faces.

The proposed antidote: self-education. Read more (variety, not just one genre). Write more (by hand too). Converse more (debate ideas, not just gossip). Do puzzles and pottery and chess.

What I got out of it: Another angle on the Mastroianni thesis. The decline of deviance isn’t just behavioural; it’s intellectual. If the humanities teach you to question, and the humanities are being defunded, what remains is compliance dressed up as efficiency.

15. Maybe You Cannot Wear Whatever You Want? Lines and Shapes Part 1 Fit Happens — Asta

A design-theory approach to personal style: clothes communicate through lines, and different lines create different moods.

Vertical lines: elongating, commanding (think Jessica Pearson in Suits). Horizontal lines: grounding, stable (Daphne in The White Lotus). Diagonal lines: movement, drama (Maddy in Euphoria). Curves: playfulness, softness (Bridgerton).

The essay isn’t really about fashion rules; it’s about intention. You can wear whatever you want, but if you care about what you communicate, understanding the visual language helps. The old “fruit shapes” framework (pear, apple, hourglass) was about flattening everyone toward one ideal. Line theory is about understanding the tools so you can use them deliberately.

What I got out of it: Useful for anyone who’s ever put on an outfit and felt “off” without knowing why. Also a nice example of frameworks that clarify without constraining. The opposite of the flattering-for-your-body-type prescriptions.

16. The Map With Missing Streets hk’s newsletter — Harnidh Kaur

(My piece this week.)

The argument: there’s a version of every city that only exists in women’s heads. Streets that disappear after dark. Cafés safe only in groups. Shortcuts you never take. The map on your phone doesn’t match the mental map, and the difference is a tax paid in rent, in cab fares, in job opportunities foregone, in cognitive load.

I try to trace what this actually costs: housing premiums for “safe” buildings (which really means buildings with surveillance and an implicit contract about who belongs). Mobility costs (the 2 a.m. Uber instead of the metro). Work opportunities declined because the commute felt wrong. The jobs that never even enter the consideration set because the first question isn’t “is it interesting?” but “can I get home?”

The current solutions are mostly containment: gated communities, ladies’ compartments, pepper sprays, SOS apps. They assume danger is the default and carve out protected zones within it. The business model depends on public space remaining dangerous enough that people will pay for private protection.

My argument: safety is mispriced. VCs love mispriced risk, but the most obvious mispricing, women’s fear, gets filed under “culture” rather than “total addressable market.” If you treated it as an investment thesis, you’d see pipelines that never form, founders who self-select out, growth that never happens because the founder can’t be in the room at 11 p.m.

The analogy I keep returning to: electricity. In the early days, factories generated their own power. Rich households had private generators. Over time, we built a grid. Safety hasn’t gotten a grid. Women are still expected to be their own generators.

What I got out of writing it: Clarity on the difference between the story (”be careful, beta”) and the scaffolding (an entire economy of cabs, rents, and foregone opportunity that nobody prices correctly). The cost of becoming a person, as I wrote a few weeks ago, is a subscription. So is the cost of moving through the world while female. The question isn’t whether to pay, it’s whether anyone’s building infrastructure that would bring the price down.

There’s a line in the Mastroianni piece I keep thinking about: “Who would live Di Modica’s life now?”

Run away from home to study art. Immigrate with nothing. Illegally build your own studio, including two sub-basements, by hand. Drop your sculpture on Wall Street without permission. Get impounded. Fight for it. Win.

It’s not that people can’t do this anymore. Technically, everything he did is still possible. But the cost-benefit calculation has shifted. There’s too much to lose. The path is illegible. The downside is measurable and the upside is not.

I spent this week reading about how to think clearly, access flow, develop agency, become dangerously articulate. And then I read Mastroianni’s data showing that teenagers are having less sex, joining fewer cults, and committing fewer crimes than any generation in memory. We’re consuming unprecedented volumes of content about how to be bold while becoming, in practice, less capable of boldness than our grandparents.

Maybe this is fine. Maybe the world needed fewer cults and less drunk driving and if the price is cultural stagnation and 75% sequels at the multiplex, so be it. Safe is not nothing.

But I don’t think that’s the whole story. Because the safety we’ve bought isn’t evenly distributed. Women are still generating their own power. Working-class kids still can’t afford the risk of an unconventional path. The “agency” that gets discussed in all those frameworks is available mainly to people with enough cushion to absorb the downside.

And the content about rebellion, the flow-state rituals, the articulation frameworks, the founder-mode manifestos, is mostly consumed by people (like me?) who will never actually use it to do anything dangerous. It’s a way to feel transgressive while staying perfectly within the lines. The cheat code that produces no cheating.

I don’t have a tidy conclusion. Maybe the proliferation of “how to think” content is a symptom of a culture that’s forgotten how to act. Maybe it’s preparation for a future breakout. Maybe it’s just what we do now instead of doing.

But I keep coming back to the cupboard image from the Jagat Murari piece from last week. The Godrej cupboards packed with decades of preparatory notes, the infrastructure of a life’s work sitting in storage. That’s what accumulation looks like: unglamorous, illegible, waiting.

The things that matter don’t announce themselves. They accumulate. They sit in cupboards. They wait. And then, maybe, they become something, or they don’t, and someone else sorts through them later, trying to make sense of what was being built.

The story will come. It always does. Someone will write it, and it will be shorter and cleaner than what actually happened.

Just don’t mistake the story for the work. And don’t let anyone else’s clean narrative make you feel like your own messy, unmarketable, cupboard-filling process is somehow wrong.

Until next week.