2026-07-15

Love Island

Why the smartest person you know is watching Love Island #tv

I am getting Love Island FOMO now

Danielle J Lindemann, a professor of Sociology at Lehigh University and the author of True Story: What Reality TV Says About Us, describes the genre as a funhouse mirror of our culture. “By tracing its exaggerated contours, we can come to a better understanding of ourselves. Almost everything that’s happening in real life is reflected somewhere on reality TV, from the small group interactions that happen at work and in families to the broad social constructs — race, class, gender, sexuality — that dominate our lives.”

While it’s often assumed to be consumed passively, people who truly love the genre engage with it through a far more analytical lense. With a whole online ecosystem formed around this fascination, the real fun happens after the credits roll. Online, people dissect every episode, analyse cast members’ social media posts, track timelines, compare stories, debate motivations and sometimes even uncover participants’ political affiliations.

2026-07-16

The ‘unquantified self’ movement

‘I trust my own body’: The rise of the unquantified self #fitness

Mainstream wellness is predicated on the belief that the more data, the better. More and more of us are tracking glucose, monitoring sleep quality and logging every run on Strava. It’s no longer enough to wake up in the morning and know whether we’ve had a good night’s sleep based on how tired we feel; now we’re encouraged to rely on a device-calculated sleep score. And yet, a revolt is underway: a growing cohort is rebelling against optimisation and moving towards something more intuitive, embodied and carefree.

Where the industry largely sees data as king, the “unquantified self” movement deems feeling the ultimate metric. Its adherents still train in gyms and live in chaotic cities, but want to align themselves as closely with nature as possible. It’s why you might see them barefoot and grounding in London Fields, or flowing through the streets of Silver Lake and Williamsburg in a pair of Hart Workshop or Vivobarefoot sneakers (they desire to be as close to barefoot as possible, naturally). They opt for beef liver supplements and organic cotton over synthetic gels and high-performance apparel.

It all comes down to the belief that not everything that contributes to wellbeing can be tracked. Expanding the category of wellness to include the subjective and intangible, they consider energy, consciousness and what “feels true.” With this comes an interest in books by self-help guru Eckhart Tolle and Rumi, the Sufi mystic poet, as well as curiosity about topics like non-dualism, ego-death and manifestation. They don’t want to quantify their wellness or themselves.

2026-07-17

Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy

Surrender as a non-stupid life strategy #life

After getting everything I wanted in my 20s, and discovering that I was still miserable, I decided that I should no longer be in charge of choosing what I want, and I slowly settled into a frame of, “I’ll do whatever God seems to want from me.”

Some years after making that decision, I’m much happier. My life is richer, and I’m doing more for others. Regularly, I react with positive disbelief when I look at what my life has become. It looks like I’ve been executing a genius strategy. But in reality, I am living in a state of ongoing confusion, just seeing what happens.

If you’ve achieved a bunch of your goals, and you’re still not happy with your life, consider giving up on self-chosen plans. Instead, listen to your life, inner and outer, and see if you can feel a current. Then fall into it, especially if it has nothing to do with the story you had about where you were supposed to be going.

This choice is known as surrender. As with most cliches, I don’t think I can explain the profound experiential content of surrender—what it feels like, why it works. But perhaps I can lay out a constellation of propositions1 that will, together, illuminate a worldview very different from the one I once inhabited.

1.2 A large percentage of human suffering is anticipatory tension, or dreading a future experience such that you actualize its potential suffering in the now. Anticipatory tension is using the illusion of knowledge to generate the illusion of control. Much of what people call planning is this.

1.6 You know that person who had important ripple effects in your life, based on a brief meeting or a kind gesture they extended to you, which meant nothing to them, but everything to you? Or that interesting stranger whose manner cast a brief spell on you, lingering in your memory disproportionately? That’s you also, you’re that person. Most of your impact on others, you will never fully apprehend or appreciate. Thus, it’s not important to know what you’re doing.

3.5 It’s nice to enjoy what you’re doing. But there is a greater liberation available: accepting that the Work in front of you is your Work, and that has little to do with how you feel.

5.2 When I insist that a relationship must survive, I begin to resent it—I become burdened by all of the little moments of inauthenticity engaged in to shield the other person. The person becomes an obstacle, someone to navigate around. When I accept that any relationship could end, and surrender to the reality of people finding their own level, I become free to relate openly, and then actual closeness happens.