June 22, 2025

Daily Log Digest – Week 24, 2025

2025-06-14

The West has stopped losing its religion

The West has stopped losing its religion #religion #genz

“I’ve tried alcohol, I’ve tried parties, I’ve tried sex...none of these work,” says Eric Curry at Pace University, recounting what his peers say about trying to overcome depression, ennui and loneliness. “Young people are looking and searching deeply for the truth.” Mr Curry says his recent baptism was the best decision of his life.

The long rise of secularism, which Ryan Burge of Eastern Illinois University calls “a dominant trend in demography of recent decades” has shaped many aspects of Western society. These range from more liberal attitudes towards gay marriage and abortion to prospects for economic growth. Its sudden stall—and possible reversal in some places—is unexpected.

The most plausible explanation for the changing trend is the covid-19 pandemic. Lockdowns, social isolation and economic shocks affected almost all countries and age cohorts at about the time that the data on religious belief hit an inflection point. This is especially the case for Gen Z, whose years of early adulthood were disrupted, leaving many young people lonely or depressed and looking for meaning.

“The pandemic really was a catalyst” for becoming religious, says Sarah, a 20-year-old student at Liberty University, who grew up outside the Church but converted after joining a Bible-study group on Zoom during the lockdowns. “Probably over 75% of my friends who are Christians became Christian since the pandemic.”

Young men are becoming particularly keen on God, overturning a norm that spans cultures and time: that women are the more devout sex. In America Gen Z women are now more likely to have no religious affiliation than their male peers, according to a study by the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank.

Instead, wider cultural changes appear to be playing a role. For most of the past two decades, God was on the receiving end of bad publicity, while atheism found pop-culture swagger. Books such as “The God Delusion” by Richard Dawkins, an Oxford don who in 1996 compared religion to the smallpox virus, or “God is Not Great” by the late Christopher Hitchens, a journalist, became bestsellers. Now, however, it is sales of the Bible that are booming (up by 22% in America last year).

The most important driver of secularisation in the West in recent decades has been people abandoning their religion, says Stephanie Kramer, also of Pew. Loss of faith has had a far bigger effect on the numbers than ageing, migration or fertility. So if the net outflow of the devout were to end, as now appears to be happening, then Christians would retain their majority in America for at least the next 50 years, Ms Kramer predicts, rather than falling below 45% as previously expected. Hardly anyone saw this coming, just as hardly anyone predicted the pandemic. God moves in mysterious ways—and so do people.

How much protein do we need

How much protein do you really need? #protein

Fats and carbohydrates, eat your hearts out—protein is the macronutrient of the moment. Rich people love the stuff. They treat it like ambrosia. Are they onto something?

Having protein on your plate is important. It is made up of amino acids, of which the body needs 20 types in order to grow, produce hormones and stay healthy. Nine of these amino acids must come from food. The World Health Organisation recommends 0.83 grams of protein a day per kilogram of body weight (g/kg) for healthy adults to maintain muscle and tissue health.

Elderly folk may be better off eating more, since muscles wither with age and older bodies are less efficient at absorbing protein. A review published in Nutrients in 2021 suggested that a ratio closer to 1.2g/kg, together with resistance training, could help limit muscle shrinkage in older people. Children and teenagers, who are still growing, may also want more than the minimum, depending on how active they are. A paper from 2020 suggested that pregnant and breastfeeding women need double the recommended amount to maintain muscle mass and feed their child.

Notes for Managing ADHD

Notes on Managing ADHD

Skimmed it, archiving it for later reading…

Fixing My Broken Attention Span

How to Fix a Low Attention Span #distractions #attention

In a sea of content about how the attention crisis is making life worse, Daniel Immerwahr, a history professor at Northwestern University, is a rare dissenting voice. The people who claim that there is a crisis of attention — “attentionistas,” he calls them jokingly — often come from legacy media, a field made up of people uniquely prone to becoming distracted by social media, partly because their jobs require long, unsupervised stretches of concentration. “To blame something on an ‘attention crisis’ is to blame it on the public: ‘We’re producing the good stuff; you guys just don’t appreciate it.’ And that’s exactly what every person in a dying medium has said,” he tells me, comparing the phenomenon to the fear felt by Anglican priests in the 18th century who worried that the popular new medium of the day — the novel — was distracting women from prayerful obedience. That the culture is potentially moving away from longform writing and toward audio and visual content isn’t necessarily a sign of intellectual deterioration, he argues: Who’s to say these formats aren’t simply better at transmitting ideas?

“Everyone says that the internet is polarizing our politics and shredding our attention, but actually it can’t be both,” he says. Rather, we’re in an age of “obsessional politics,” where people are factious and often misinformed but not apathetic. They’re watching multi-hour livestreams and plunging down rabbit holes and “doing their own research” — all activities that require massive amounts of sustained attention. And in doing so, they’re finding community.

Fetch YouTube Transcripts

Something broke with my ytt tool, so I had to go around looking for a way to extract YouTube transcripts quickly from the CLI. With the magic of youtube-transcript-api, uv and bash, I was able to cook up this one-liner.

This is a great example of how uv is a gamechanger for the Python ecosystem. Before this, I would have never considered using Python because of all the package and version management hell I would have to go through to make this seamless.

2025-06-16

ytt-mcp - MCP Server to fetch YouTube Transcripts

I built an MCP server today!! - GitHub - deepakjois/ytt-mcp: MCP server to get YouTube transcripts #youtube #mcp #transcription

I love how seamlessly I can integrate this with Raycast (see demo video in README page on Github).

The bonus was I really got deep into how uv and Python packaging works.

URL Shortening System - Excalidraw Diagram

I really loved this dense Excalidraw diagram. Adding it here because I wanna come back to it for inspiration

Found it in this tweet

2025-06-17

Adults TV Show

What can we learn from TV shows about friendship? | Dazed #tv #adults #friendship

In the last episode of FX’s new comedy series Adults, which follows a group of friends in their twenties, Paul Baker (Jack Innanen) gets a letter from the US government notifying him that his visa is expiring and that he must leave the US and go back to Canada. His friends, Samir (Malik Elassal), Billie (Lucy Freyer), Anton (Owen Thiele) and his girlfriend Issa (Amita Rao), who he lives with, are devastated. To ensure he can stay in the country, Issa asks him to marry her, to which he gratefully, but also begrudgingly, agrees. 

While the journey to get there is incredibly convoluted, they eventually arrive at the courthouse to wed. However, before they’re about to get married, Issa gets cold feet, telling Billie that marrying Paul is different from when she jokingly married her ex-friend Zack-Carlos because her marriage to Paul would be real. To Paul’s surprise, Billie walks down the aisle in Issa’s place, telling Paul that Issa isn’t ready to marry him but that they do not want to lose him and that she will marry him instead. This results in the entire friendship group arguing as they all volunteer to marry their Canadian friend. To end the bickering, Issa rejoins the group at the altar, apologising and professing to Paul: “We all love you. We just want you to stay. So, literally, any of us would marry you. Paul Baker, you choose. What do you want?”

Manifest Cheating

Can you really ‘manifest cheating’ in a relationship? | Dazed #dating #cheating #manifest

At the end of our five-year relationship, my ex suggested that it was my concerns around his loyalty that caused him to cheat in our relationship. In other words, I thought his infidelity into existence (or manifested it). It’s a concept I initially rolled my eyes at, then forgot about entirely, until recently, when The Wizard Liz revealed online that she’d been cheated on while pregnant by YouTuber Landon Nickerson. As a lifestyle influencer and manifestation coach, The Wizard Liz, whose real name is Lize Dzjabrailova, being cheated on has since set the internet into a spin – even the women who dedicate their lives to embodying “divine femininity” aren’t spared from the deeply painful but unfortunately common experience of infidelity. So, what does the spiritually-charged message that you can “manifest cheating” in your relationship do for how we think about modern relationships? 

As more young people move away from traditional religions and, in turn, seek answers in alternative spirituality, it should come as little surprise that New Age practices like manifestation have found their way into dating culture. According to Todd Baratz, a certified sex therapist and relationship expert, concepts like twin flames, divine feminine and masculine energy and practices like astrology are now deeply shaping how many young people understand relationships. “These frameworks offer fresh, new and beneficial language, comfort, and a sense of control in uncertain emotional terrain, but they also can turn love into a performance or a projection,” he says. “Instead of building relational skills – like communication, conflict repair, or emotional availability – people are using spiritual frameworks to bypass hard conversations or justify toxic dynamics.”

How Societies Morph With the Seasons

What Foragers Teach Us about Seasons and Social Change

As an evolutionary anthropologist working with the BaYaka, I initially presumed people simply adjusted because of the seasonal availability of different foods. But their changes extended way beyond sustenance into the realms of politics, economics, rituals, and relationships.

These shifts starkly contrast with my own homes in the U.K. and Spain, countries seemingly locked into fixed sociopolitical and economic orders. BaYaka flexibility made me rethink my assumptions about what is “natural” for human societies, including gender roles, hierarchies, and social group sizes.

And the more expansively I looked, I realized BaYaka flexibility isn’t the anomaly: The rigidity of industrialized, capitalist societies is. Across history and geography, societies have restructured their sociopolitical and economic lives in response to seasonal shifts—and perhaps not solely due to fluctuating resources. People may also do so because they recognize the dangers of stagnation.

As I see it, regular restructuring keeps communities adaptable and resilient. Solving today’s greatest challenges—inequality, authoritarianism, the climate crisis—may require embracing this flexibility as part of the fabric of our societies.

And the BaYaka aren’t unique in their cyclical shifts. The 20th-century French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss documented seasonal transformations among the Nambikwara, an Indigenous Amazonian group whose territory today lies in central Brazil. For five months each year, according to Lévi-Strauss, they inhabited large villages, tending small gardens for food. When the dry season began, they dispersed into smaller, mobile foraging groups. These shifts also ushered a reversal of political authority. During the dry season, leaders became authoritative decision-makers, resolving conflicts directly. When the rains returned, the same leaders no longer held coercive power. They could only attempt to influence through tactics like gentle persuasion or caring for the sick.

Similarly, at the turn of the 20th century, anthropologist Franz Boas observed that inequality peaked during the winter among the Kwakiutl, or Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw, a First Nations people along the Pacific Coast of what is now Canada. Boas wrote about Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw winter villages with strict hierarchies and grand ceremonial events. In summer, these rigid structures dissolved as communities broke into smaller, more flexible groups. And rather than people doing this subconsciously solely to adapt to the weather, they were so aware of the political nature of their practices that individuals even changed names when they adopted new social positions for winter ceremonies.

Meanwhile, in my home countries and many others today, institutions seem immutable, changing only during revolutions, coups, or wars.

These cases flip the usual narrative. Instead of assuming that hierarchy is the prize of complexity, these sites suggest not all monumental architecture required a ruling class. For much of human history, societies didn’t follow a single political trajectory—they shifted between different modes of organization, much like the BaYaka do today.

Recognizing humanity’s long tradition of social fluidity puts the present into perspective: The “Western world” is not the culmination of a 10,000-year-long march but an anomaly in a 300,000-year-long history of Homo sapiens’ cultural adaptability.

2025-06-18

Authenticity is a mirage

Gen Z and gen Alpha brought a raw, messy aesthetic to social media. Why does it feel as inauthentic as ever? | Eugene Healey | The Guardian #authenticity

Authenticity is the great mirage of the modern age. Its promise – to live unmediated, in full accordance with our values and beliefs – feels like the ideal we’re always reaching for before it vanishes beyond the horizon. And ironically, the more we try to prove we’re authentic online, the more we seem to accelerate its disappearance.

As Generations Z and Alpha joined social media, they responded to the cultural demand for perfection with chaos – raw, unfiltered, deliberately messy content. The curated feed of flatlays gave way to the sloppy photo dump; the finstas; the bedrotting. Finally, our real lives represented on screen. Finally, something real.

Except that this quickly became another role to be performed, a generation-defining content genre that has itself become subject to more and more extreme performances – filming oneself bawling into the camera, extreme overshares, breakdowns in public. Vulnerability-as-aesthetic, where what began as a rejection of perfection has become its own form of perfectionism – the flawless execution of being flawed.

To understand why authenticity is impossible, first we need to understand what social media has done to us. It’s turned personal identity into performance art – and in doing so, has transformed us all into brands (I should know, I’m a brand consultant).

The internet has fundamentally altered the conditions under which genuine self-expression can exist. The solution isn’t to perform authenticity harder, but to recognise and jealously guard the remaining places where real authenticity might still be possible: in unrecorded conversations, in private moments, in closed networks that haven’t yet been colonised by the attention economy.

2025-06-19

Home-Centric vs City-Centric

Found this in a documentary about Tokyo public toilets and it resonated for me in a very different context - spending time in cafes (one of my favorite activities)