Daily Log Digest – Week 30, 2025
2025-07-27
Why are we all so weird about cheating?
Why are we all so weird about cheating? | Dazed #relationships #cheating #infidelity
Writer Amanda Montei highlighted the nonsensical ways we attempt to punish and scold those who have cheated in her essay on the film Babygirl for her Substack newsletter, Mad Woman. She mentions that when Romy (Nicole Kidman) reveals her affair with Samuel (Harris Dickinson) to her husband, played by Antonio Banderas, he yells at her and asserts that she has jeopardised their children and kicks her out. Montei simply asks, “How exactly has she hurt her children?” By having the kind of sex she actually wants to have? By acting and living for herself and not her children or husband? These are very different situations, obviously, and I am not here to cast moral judgement on these behaviours. But why should someone be stripped of everything for behaving the “wrong” way?
Overtourism in Japan
Overtourism in Japan, and How it Hurts Small Businesses — Ridgeline issue 210 #japan #tourism
A great city is typified by character and the character of great cities is often built on the bedrock of small businesses. Conversely: Chain shops smooth over the character of cities into anodyne nothingness. Think about a city you love — it’s likely because of walkability, greenery, great architecture, and fun local shops and restaurants. Only psychopaths love Manhattan because of Duane Reade. If you’ve ever wondered why overtourism can be a kind of death for parts of a city (the parts that involve: living there, commuting there, creating a life there) it’s because it paradoxically disincentivizes building small businesses.1 Nobody opens a tiny restaurant or café to be popular on a grand, viral scale. Nor do they open them to become rich.2
So why do people open small shops? For any number of reasons, but my favorite is: They have a strong opinion about how some aspect of a business should be run, and they want to double down on it. For example, forty years ago Terui-san, the owner of jazz kissa Kaiunbashi-no-Johnny’s up in Morioka, was like: Hmm, nobody is spinning wa-jyazu (Japanese jazz),3 so I’m only going to rock it. That led to a bunch of cool knock-on connections, not the least of which was a lifelong friendship with the incredible Akiyoshi Toshiko. That singular thing can drive an initial impulse, but small business purpose quickly shifts into: Being a community hub for a core group of regulars. That — community — is probably the biggest asset of small business ownership. And the quickest way to kill community (perhaps the most valuable gift for running a small business) is to go viral in a damaging way.
At risk of oversimplifying: Most “problems” in the world today boil down to scale and abstraction. As scale increases, individuals become more abstract, and humanity and empathy are lost. This happens acutely when the algorithm decides to laser-beam a small shop with a hundred-million views. If you cast a net to that many people, a vast chunk of them will not engage in good faith, let alone take a second to consider the feelings of residents or owners or why the place was built to begin with. Hence: The crush, the selfish crush.
Overtourism brings with it a corollary effect, what I call the “Disneyland flipflop.”8 This happens when visitors fail to see (willfully or not) the place they’re visiting as an actual city with humans living and working and building lives there, but rather as a place flipflopped through the lens of social media into a Disneyland, one to be pillaged commercially, assumed to reset each night for their pleasure, welcoming their transient deluge with open arms. This is most readily evident in, say, the Mario Kart scourge of Tokyo — perhaps one of the most breathtakingly universally-hated tourist activities. I dare you to find a resident who supports these idiots disrupting traffic as the megalopolis attempts to function around them.9
This overtourism is happening mostly because of algorithms collimating the attention of the masses towards very specific activities / places. There’s also a slightly nutty narcissism / selfish component to it, too — fueling that impulse to, at all costs, “get” a photo at a specific spot to share on a specific social media service. (See: Fushimi Inari.) If the algorithm is the gas, cheapness is the spark. Because, damn, is it cheap to travel these days. Combined with the fact that there have never been more “middle class” people in the world, and you get overtourism. In a way, overtourism complications and disruptions are what happens when “humanity wins” and more people have more time and money to go “do things.”
Because! Here’s the heartening bit: More people than ever are traveling, and while, sure, the majority of those travelers are just following trends and lists, there is another group, a small cohort of self-aware travelers who are genuinely, deeply curious about the places they’re visiting, who desire to engage directly without being disruptive, who want to engage fully and “authentically” (that is: visiting people and places that haven’t twisted themselves for the sake of transient visitors (i.e., no renaming things “samurai spice”)). And that “small cohort” (let’s say 15% of global travelers) is larger than the total number of travelers the world saw twenty years ago. Omotesando? Gion? They’re lost, like villages washed away by a tsunami. Much like I don’t understand the heart of a wave, I do not understand the hearts of those who come to Japan to buy a Rimowa suitcase. (Quite frankly, it really freaks me out!) And it is not our job to understand.
…
These kinds of folks buoy the chest, elevate the soul (like witnessing a person stand on an escalator and just stare into the distance, refusing the Siren call of their smartphone). I don’t know if there’s some Platonic or deontic mode of travel, but in my opinion, the most rewarding point of travelling is: to sit with, and spend time with The Other (even if the place / people aren’t all that different). To go off the beaten track a bit, just a bit, to challenge yourself, to find a nook of quietude, and to try to take home some goodness (a feeling, a moment) you might observe off in the wilds of Iwate or Aomori. That little bundle of goodness, filtered through your own cultural ideals — that’s good globalism at work. With an ultimate goal of doing all this without imposing on or overloading the locals. To being an additive part of the economy (financially and culturally), to commingling with regulars without displacing them.
algorithmic performativity
algorithmic performativity - by Adam Aleksic #social-media #algorithms
Chat, we all act differently when we’re being watched. There’s a pressure to avoid embarrassment, to present “authentically,” to put others at ease.
Sociologist Erving Goffman calls this performance—the idea that all public interactions are a kind of theatrical act. You’ll put on a different performance for your college friends and your grandmother; TV broadcasters will put on a different performance when on air and behind the scenes.
In the same way, social media algorithms are uniquely changing how we present ourselves online, since they come with a completely new type of spectator: the algorithm itself.
how social media subjugates us
how social media subjugates us - by Adam Aleksic #social-media #dominance
Throughout this parasocial interaction, we’ve both adopted social roles that come with an imbued set of norms and behaviors. You, the viewer, are in an assigned role of docility. I, the influencer, am in an assigned role of dominance. With each repetition of this dance, we internalize our roles a little bit more. Even though I started out as some random guy yapping on the internet, my role over time is mutually legitimized and I begin to take on greater credibility in your mind.
To be clear, I as an influencer also submit myself to the platform, much like a supplicant to a ruler. I need to replicate “viral-looking” mannerisms and expressions; I need to perform for the algorithm by submitting to its constraints. My studio lighting and “influencer accent” are forms of aesthetic labor validating the platform’s priorities. Then you perceive my message on the toilet and do the same, and we both give more power to the technology mediating our interaction.
what i'm looking for in my marriage
What I'm looking for in my marriage - by Sasha Chapin #marriage #relationships
- Relationship as crucible that allows both people to confront their central insecurities and grow through them together
- Goal of relationship is to create a space for both people to have full range of emotions and be cared for, not to manage each other into having nice feelings all the time
- Openness about sexuality and ongoing care in giving everyone what they actually want in that department
- Both partners taking accountability for having an outside support network (no attempt to make each other everything)
- Both partners taking accountability for their reactions, you understand how to soothe yourself when triggered rather than taking it out on each other
- Ongoing see-saw balance is struck between togetherness and separation, don’t smother and don’t abandon
- Conflict is a non-problem, an expected occurrence that is handled ASAP skillfully
- Both partners try to give 100%, accept that there are imbalances, keep scorekeeping to a minimum
- Self-disclosure is very frank but not completely uninhibited or thoughtless
The complications of measuring things
The Luxury of Fudged Numbers - by Josh Zlatkus #numbers #money #measurement
The drawback to money as a concrete and concentrated form of value is that it crowds out other valuations. At many a cocktail party, wealth is the lowest common denominator of worth. Another downside is that many people are tempted to pursue money well beyond what would represent the best use of their time. Golden handcuffs have imprisoned many in the most productive years of their lives.
Now here’s the thing: even after reading this, you’ll be tempted to filter by height. Why? Because height is a preference, after all, and when accurate information is available, why not use it? The problem is that when something is easy to measure, it tends to crowd out better—but fuzzier—metrics. For example, is weight the best proxy for health? Absolutely not. But it’s easier to capture than VO₂ max. Similarly, is bench press the best determinant of overall strength? No, but it’s more concrete than core strength. So we run with it.
One overlooked consequence of numbers is that they enable the quantification of things that were never meant to be that precise. Without numbers, you can’t specify height. You can’t reduce a person’s value to how much money they make. You can’t compare thoughts, jokes, or creative projects by how much attention they receive. Essentially, much of the harm this essay talks about loses its razor-sharp edge.
Many small-scale societies developed additional ways to blunt the edge of social competition. In Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots, James Suzman describes how the Ju/’hoansi assign credit not to the person who shoots the animal, but to the maker of the arrow that brings it down. The purpose of this and related practices is to “cool young men’s hearts”—to temper pride and prevent vanity.
Other examples include the many games of chance that foraging peoples play—often for hours on end. As Sahlins said of the Hazda: “[The] men seem much more concerned with games of chance than with chances of game.” By minimizing the role of skill, these games ensure that every dog has its day. I find something very wise in these old and various ways of softening a loser’s pain, given that most of the time, most people are losing.
Modern metrics give unnatural precision to inherently fuzzy social dynamics. When social life remains loose and informal, and advantages remain imprecise, emotions soften. But the more we quantify, the sharper the comparisons become—and the more those comparisons hurt.
Gaza
Chartbook 400: Murder not crisis - Why Israel's starvation of Gaza is exceptional in a global context. #gaza #palestine #israel #genocide
For many months, it has been beyond reasonable doubt that the Israeli government, the Israeli military, sections of Israeli politics and society as well as their aiders and abetters abroad, have been deliberately starving the population of Gaza with a view to forcing the population either to flee or to face intensifying misery and ultimately an agonizing death. There is clear evidence of deliberate intent going back to 2023. This clearly warrants charges of genocide.
Those who style themselves “defenders of Israel” will be quick to insist that, in fact, there is a feeding operation in Gaza. But, as the famine historian and aid expert Alex de Waal demonstrates in powerful piece in the Guardian, “Israel’s food points are not just death traps – they’re an alibi … The Gaza Humanitarian Foundation system is like standing at the edge of a big pond and feeding the (starving) fish by throwing breadcrumbs. Who gets to eat its rations?” Air drops of food, are simply more of the same.
Ethnic cleansing by means of starvation is the actual policy.
Death by starvation in Gaza is not the collateral, unintended consequence of an obscure, anonymous, amorphous crisis. It is the results of deliberate policy on the part of the Israeli government, bent on using the resources of a highly sophisticated state to render Palestinian life in Gaza impossible.
GenZ
Why everyone hates Gen Z workers - by Ellen Scott #genz #workplace
far back as the fourth century BC there’s evidence of Aristotle criticising the generation below him for the way they approach hard graft: “They are high-minded, for they have not yet been humbled by life, nor have they experienced the force of necessity”. In the first century BC, “the beardless youth” are described as not knowing how to manage their money. There’s no hard evidence of younger-generation-bashing in the years of children working in factories, but I’d confidently bet it happened, especially when young people dared to ask for better working conditions. In 1894, the Rooks County Record in Stockton, Kansas, published a reader’s letter that accused ‘nobody wants to work these hard times’.
In 1990, Gen X were referred to as the slacker generation, with Time magazine stating that workers born between 1965 and 1980 “would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder” and have attention spans “as short as one zap of a TV dial”. In 2017, it was millennials who were called “spoilt, full of themselves [and] averse to hard work”. Now it’s Gen Z’s turn in the firing line.
But why does this happen? Why do we keep viewing the generation below us as bad at work? Why did everyone hate Gen X, then millennials, and why do we now hate Gen Z?
Why does everyone hate Gen Z workers? Because we’ve all been told to. Because an ‘us’ and ‘them’ mentality, with Gen Z workers as ‘them’ is far better for bosses than one in which it’s all workers versus those at the top. It’s better that we keep squabbling at each other like crabs in a big bucket, rather than us pausing and questioning the very structure of the bucket, or deciding to group together and attack the crab fisherman. And if that squabbling can be monetised, even greater news!
I urge you, the next time you’re lured in by Gen Z sniping, pause and consider what’s going on behind the take you’re being served up by your algorithm. Are Gen Z workers really lazy, entitled, or rude? Or is your own outrage being manufactured and weaponised against you? Who’s benefitting when we see work/life boundaries and those who ask for them negatively? And who’s losing out? Spoiler: It’s not just Gen Z.
Ageing accelerates at 50
Ageing accelerates around age 50 ― some organs faster than others #ageing
It is a warning that middle-aged people have long offered the young: ageing is not a smooth process. Now, an exhaustive analysis of how proteins change over time in different organs backs up that idea, finding that people experience an inflection point at around 50 years old, after which ageing seems to accelerate.
2025-07-28
People who dislike agentic AI coding
HN: on Claude Code is a Slot Machine
Spotted an interesting comment on HN.
I've been noticing the pattern among the kind of people who like/dislike AI/agentic coding: 1) people who haven't programmed in a while for whatever reason (became executives, took a break from the industry, etc)
2) people who started programming in the last 15 or so years, which also corresponds with the time when programming became a desirable career for money/lifestyle/prestige (chosen out of not knowing what they want, rather than knowing)
3) people who never cared for programming itself, more into product-building
To make the distinction clear, here are example groups unlikely to like AI dev:
4) people who programmed for ~25 years (to this day)
5) people who genuinely enjoy the process of programming (regardless of when they started)
I'm not sure if I'm correct in this observation, and I'm not impugning anyone in the first groups.
2025-07-29
Monk Mode
The growing allure of running away to a monastery | Dazed #wellness #spirituality
As a growing number of young people embark on spiritual journeys, including those attending church and turning to prayer, the idea of ‘disappearing into the woods’ is becoming more compelling. “Given the political climate, technology and expenses, it’s a very romanticised ideal that I think people are drawn to,” says MC. Where once crunchy yoga and meditation retreats may have appeased the crowds, some people are turning their attention to traditional religions like catholicism. Across social media, people are using the term #MonkMode with wellness connotations similar to a 75-day challenge, promoting disappearing as a new way to “level up” and come back as a “completely unrecognisable version of yourself”. Somewhat ironically, instead of focusing on the faith, there’s a certain level of wellness culture embedded in the discussion. There are “monk schedules” for building your work routine and #MonkMode inspo pics for bare-bones living.
2025-07-30
Hope admist the climate crisis
Less rain, more wheat: How Australian farmers defied climate doom #farming #climate
A great Reuters investigation on how Australian farmers overcame climate change to get record wheat harvests. Normally climate news is always doom and gloom, with this being a rare exception.
2025-07-31
Slop as a way of life
Slop as a Way of Life - by Drew Austin - Kneeling Bus #slop #ai #enshittification
Yesterday morning, I walked past the small grocery store on my block and heard REM’s “It’s the End of the World as We Know It” emanating from inside. I’d usually ignore that kind of thing but here it suddenly struck me as absurd—it was 9:30 am on a weekday and there was absolutely no reason for that song to be coming out of an empty grocery store. Not even annoying or dissonant, it was just the least appropriate accompaniment for the moment, in its own subtle way. And of course there was no reason for it—no person had chosen the song and the process that led to it playing then had no audience in mind.
…
The popularity of “slop” as a concept points to something significant about how we experience digital culture in 2025, just as “algorithms” did last decade. In each case, the term’s usage gets less precise as it’s overloaded with everything we hate about the internet. And while the word itself becomes less meaningful, it reveals more about how we feel. It’s tempting to define slop as Potter Stewart did pornography (“I know it when I see it”) but that would just further obfuscate an already murky concept. Today, “slop” implies AI more than anything else, and primarily refers to the AI-generated content that is flooding the internet. The subtext is that slop is being dumped on us against our will—that it’s something that happens to us—but that lets us off the hook far too easily. Most of the slop we see is still made and distributed by real people, often with no AI assistance. If AI is able to suddenly pump slop into our environment it’s only because we already turned on the faucets ourselves. Just think about all the garbage content that people you actually know send you via text, or the DMs that feel like they’re from bots but are actually from real people driven by platform incentives (Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc). The arrival of AI slop is simply the culmination of a long process of cultural slopification, and one of AI’s unexpected functions has been to launder the human slop so we can pretend we didn’t create it.
I call the REM song I heard slop because it’s a good example of this process: The automation of personal music listening, a process accelerated by Spotify but long underway in places like the supermarket aisles, is ultimately a process of “learning to care less about details and perceive distinct things as interchangeable,” as I wrote last year. In slop utopia, there is no right or wrong place or time for anything to happen, because context has been eliminated. The end result of this process, as Liz Pelly has described, is an opportunity for AI content creation, which barely registers because the human-made content with which it coexists has already become fungible. The appearance of AI slop is not something new, just a sign that an ongoing slopification process has been completed.
The Living Fossils Compendium
The Fossil Record So Far - by The Living Fossils #evo-psych #psychology #mentalhealth #evolution
The Living Fossils blog is one of the most high-value blogs I have discovered in the last year or so. They just posted a recap of their posts under the most common thematic categories. This is a great set of links!
- Emotions Measure & Motivate: Thesis: Emotions can be understood as adaptations designed to help humans measure important information and motivate action that would have been adaptive over the course of human evolution.
- Evolutionary Mismatch: Thesis: Much of modern psychological suffering stems from the mismatch between the environments we evolved for and the ones we live in—far more than clinical psychology tends to acknowledge.
- Bashing the Academy: Thesis: Academic psychology, clinical psychology, and psychiatry—not to mention academia more broadly—are overdue for reform. Clinical psychology, in particular, needs a genuinely scientific framework. And no, we don’t mean CBT—we mean evolution.
2025-08-01
High Agency and Owning the Outcome
Impact, agency, and taste | benkuhn.net
I think of finding high-leverage work as having two interrelated components:
- Agency: i.e. some combination of the initiative/proactiveness to try to make things happen, and relentlessness and resourcefulness to make sure you’ll succeed.
- Taste: you need a good intuition for what things will and won’t work well to try. Taste is important both “in the large” (picking important problems) and “in the small” (picking approaches to solving those problems that will work well); I usually see people first become great at the latter, then the former.
A common trait of high-agency people is that they take accountability for achieving a goal, not just doing some work.
There’s a huge difference between the following two operating modes:
- My goal is to ship this project by the end of the month, so I’m going to get people started working on it ASAP.
- My goal is to ship this project by the end of the month, so I’m going to list out everything that needs to get done by then, draw up a schedule working backwards from the ship date, make sure the critical path is short enough, make sure we have enough staffing to do anything, figure out what we’ll cut if the schedule slips, be honest about how much slop we need, track progress against the schedule and surface any slippage as soon as I see it, pull in people from elsewhere if I need them…
Found this on another blog which has some good commentary on the original essay
Striving for “inevitability”, as Kuhn frames it, isn’t about achieving perfection or eliminating all risk. That’s clearly impossible in most nontrivial areas of human endeavor. Instead, I think the real value lies in cultivating the mindset itself.
Adopting this agentic mindset takes conscious effort, especially initially. It means spending more time up-front planning, anticipating, and communicating, which can sometimes feel less immediately productive than jumping into writing code, or whatever the immediate “work” may be. However, investing time in up-front strategic thinking consistently pays off later. Having a strategy results in less frantic firefighting, fewer deadline slips, and a generally calmer, more predictable process for delivering impact.
The benefits of cultivating personal agency are beyond “merely” delivering reliable outcomes to achieve some abstract team/company/personal OKR. There’s a certain confidence and personal satisfaction that comes from knowing you’ve done the work to truly understand the problem, anticipate hurdles, and steer yourself toward success, rather than hoping things work out or leaning on someone else to keep the project unblocked. Agency also generalizes well across different domains of life. Developing agency in a professional context usually results in a higher ability1 to exercise agency in other contexts (e.g. personal, social, relational). Professional contexts are a good environment for developing agency too: in healthy workplaces, there is a clear feedback loop and ample opportunity to exercise agency.
Newsletters and RSS
Curate your own newspaper with RSS #rss
RSS solved the distribution problem a long time ago. It is really sad that it's been sidelined now, and we have to depend on email to bypass the enshittification of distribution platforms. But at least these outlets are realising the issue with giving up control over their own distribution.
These intermediary platforms between news organizations and readers are undergoing a type of predictable decay Cory Doctorow calls “enshittification”: rip off others’ work while expecting high-quality journalism to magically continue to appear, even as journalists are starved of audience and revenue.
The newsletter strategy aims to bypass these rapidly enshittifying intermediaries and instead establish more direct relationships with subscribers. “I don’t intend to ever rely on someone else’s distribution ever again,” wrote Verge editor-in-chief Nilay Patel on Bluesky.3 Although email has undergone some enshittification of its own,b its fundamental nature as a protocol rather than a platform has provided one essential prophylactic to enshittification: the escape hatch. If your email provider suddenly inserted ads two sentences into every email, you could easily switch providersc and still receive emails from everyone you previously emailed. As a result, email has become a go-to refuge for news outlets fleeing their abusive relationships with deeply enshittified platforms they grew reliant upon.
But the surge in newsletters has been overwhelming. Whether it’s writers like me who’ve never worked in a traditional newsroom, journalists who’ve left or been laid off from traditional jobs, or established newsrooms entering the newsletter business, there’s a newsletter around every corner. Instead of subscribing to a single newspaper for columns and articles by a dozen journalists, now you have a dozen separate newsletter subscriptions, with articles appearing haphazardly in your email inbox amid bills, business communications, marketing spam, order confirmations, and two-factor authentication codes.
Male Anxiety and the morning routine
How male anxiety built the hyper-optimised morning routine | British GQ
This article has a hilarious beginning.
It’s 3.30 a.m. Besides a few night-shift workers, insomniacs and ravers, the world is unconscious. Not Mark Wahlberg. His alarm has just gone off, jolting him into life for a long morning of eating, praying, working out, and sitting in his cryo recovery chamber. Not far behind him is Apple CEO Tim Cook, whose eyelids flicker open at 3.45, so he can tackle some of the hundreds of customer feedback emails in his inbox before starting the meat of his day. At 3.52 exactly, the fitness coach and influencer Ashton Hall – whose elaborate, Patrick Bateman-esque morning routine has recently gone obscenely viral – is up and at it, ready for several hours of fitness, dunking his face in iced Saratoga mineral water, and rubbing said face with banana peel.
Now it’s 4 a.m., and the ranks of the successful and productive are really getting going. Robin Sharma, the self-help guru and author of The 5 a.m. Club, is up — “4 a.m. is the new 5 a.m.”, he told GQ recently — for a “victory hour” of “meditation, visualisation and prayer”. Disney CEO Bob Iger is ready to begin his morning workout. At 5, Snapchat CEO Evan Spiegel is centring himself for 45 minutes of meditation, JP Morgan boss Jamie Dimon is flicking through the first of five newspapers, and Bryan Johnson, the tech entrepreneur turned longevity obsessive, is checking his inner ear temperature “to assess if anything is amiss” heath-wise.
This is funny, given how, historically, a marker of male success was being able to afford to do as little as possible, especially before noon. Glamorous aristocrats and playboys were more likely to be in the casino than the gym in the early hours of the morning. Sprezzatura, the Italian concept of effortless, nonchalant grace, was coined in the 16th century and has been invoked ever since. So why has one masculine ideal, of effortlessness and indulgence, been overtaken another, of ceaseless hustle culture?
but the reason cited doesn't seem like a good diagnosis
In a word: anxiety. Anxiety hums in the background of all these morning routine videos. Even the hyper-precise time stamps and jerky editing instil a baseline level of tension. This new age of male anxiety comes from male success being a rarer beast than it once was.
Arguably, all those popular morning videos are put up by folks who are arguably successful by most metrics. What exactly is making them anxious? I can understand the urge to consume this kind of content and aspiring to an ambitious and elaborate early morning routine, and that stemming from anxiety. But that doesn't seem to be the argument the author is making.
AI is a Floor Raiser, not a Ceiling Raiser
AI is a Floor Raiser, not a Ceiling Raiser - Elroy #ai #programming
Learning:
AI Assisted Learning:
Is fitness culture making us sad and boring?
Is fitness culture making us sad and boring? | Dazed #exercise #fitness #culture
Ethan was over-exercising before today’s social media fitness challenges, like 75 Hard, existed. Still, he exhibited a similarly regimented discipline: working out multiple times a day, sticking to a restrictive diet and swapping social events for “self-improvement” activities. While the broad consensus is that 150 minutes of moderate exercise a week (or half as much if it is intense) – which can equate to about 8,000 steps a day – is enough to lower the risk of premature death and many diseases, this is rarely the message we see plastered across gym inspiration posts online. As fitness influencers proudly proclaim their gym “addiction” causes them to work out twice a day every day and high schoolers gloat about skipping prom for a workout, getting sucked into extreme gym culture can pull your goals and aspirations away from being well-rounded, interesting and socially connected. So, is over-exercise culture making us sad and boring?
Over-exercising can also look like using the gym for mood modification, or even emotional avoidance. We see this when people talk about post-breakup “glow-ups” or post about fighting off “sad girl” season by going to the gym twice a day. “I live such a lonely and boring life that I just spend hours at the gym and go twice a day because I have nothing else better to do and no one to go home to. The gym is one of the only things that can distract me from this void,” exercise influencer @liftwithspooky wrote on TikTok. In the comments, there are hundreds of people who share the same routines, and perhaps even go to the same gyms, but never speak to each other. A large part of this has to do with many treating exercise as a means to an end, instead of a potentially enjoyable and connecting experience itself, downplaying rest days and the importance of rest and leisure.
The mainstream aesthetic-driven approach to going to the gym is, unfortunately, inextricably tied to wellness and diet culture. We often talk about what exercise can do for our bodies, before how it’s enriching our lives and energising us for other things. For this reason, over-exercising tendencies can easily slip through the cracks. “When you talk to a doctor, nobody complains to you about exercising, even though you're overexercising,” says Ethan. “You can hide the brutal reality of it in a self-serving way so that you get to have the aesthetic appeal that you want to develop.” In the midst of a beauty backslide, where we’re seeing a broader return to conservative, skinny ideals, there’s currently a hyper-focus on gaining and maintaining muscle. “This can lead people to make exercise have this really giant role in their life,” says Dr Ertl. “Poor body image continues to be a factor that's linked with exercise addiction and disordered eating generally.”
Competitive Exams in India
Would you pass the world’s toughest exam? | The Economist #exams #india #unemployment
This article explores the intense and highly competitive railway entrance exams in India, one of the many such exams in India for public sector jobs. The breadth of coverage is very extensive, and the stories are moving. It just left me sad and the desperation and absurdity of the situation.
Since India started liberalising its economy in the 1990s, its GDP per head has increased eightfold. The country now has the world’s fastest-growing large economy.
Yet many Indian graduates struggle to find work. According to the International Labour Organisation (ILO) nearly a third of them are jobless. Walk-in interviews draw massive crowds. At the start of this year a video went viral showing thousands of engineers queuing to apply for open positions at a firm in the western city of Pune (local media reported that only 100 were available).
This is partly an indictment of the education system, which has been criticised for its outdated curriculum and tendency to prioritise rote learning over critical thinking. But it also reflects the fact that the private sector is simply not creating enough jobs for the growing number of graduates, while public-sector jobs continue to be cut.
For all the buzz around India’s unleashed entrepreneurial spirit, government jobs remain stubbornly popular. They promise a position for life, regardless of competence – a sharp contrast with the precariousness of the private sector. They come with pensions and other benefits. Some offer the chance to augment income through corruption.
Indian society accords public-sector jobs a special respect. Grooms who have them are able to ask for higher dowries from their brides’ families. “If you are at a wedding and say you have a government job, people will look at you differently,” said Abhishek Singh, an exam tutor in Musallahpur.
The worldwide nursing crisis
The shocking hit film about overworked nurses that’s causing alarm across Europe | Film | The Guardian #nursing #unemployment #caregiving
This is ostensibly a movie review but I learned more about the nursing crisis than the movie itself.
The world could face a shortage of 13 million nurses by the end of this decade. For her new film, Swiss director Petra Volpe imagined the consequences of just one missed shift on a busy night at a hospital, and found herself making a disaster movie.
With Late Shift, Volpe aimed to shine a light on the frontlines of the looming healthcare catastrophe through the eyes of the dedicated, exhausted Floria. Played by German actor Leonie Benesch, the young nurse shows an initially acrobatic grace in her workday, whose first half resembles a particularly hectic episode of the restaurant kitchen series The Bear, but with life-and-death stakes.
Agentic AI and the new "semantic web"
Pluralistic: Delta's AI-based price-gouging (30 Jul 2025) #agents #ai #semantic #website
As an aside, this reminds me of one of the AI industry's most egregious hoaxes-du-jour: the pretense that "agentic AI" is just around the corner, and soon we will be able to ask a chatbot to (e.g.) comparison shop across multiple website for the best airfare and book us a ticket:
This absolutely totally does not work. You should not give your credit-card number to a chatbot and ask it to go out an buy you anything, lest you end up paying $30 for a dozen eggs and buying tickets to a baseball stadium in the middle of the ocean:
https://futurism.com/openai-new-ai-agent-food-stadium
AI agent demos are so dismal that AI companies are no longer claiming that "agentic AI" will involve chatbots that nagivate the web as is. Rather, they're claiming that every website will eventually re-tool so that it can be reliably and predictably addressed by an AI agent, with all of its user interface elements well-labeled and/or addressable programatically, via an API.
This is a remarkable sleight of hand! First of all, re-engineering every website to embrace a common set of labels and API fields is a gigantic engineering feat – formally called "the semantic web" – that has been attempted since 1999 without any meaningful progress:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semantic_Web
In fact, the first viral article I ever published online was "Metacrap," a critique of semantic web efforts. That essay is now 24 years old: