2025-11-28

Breaking the long hiatus brought about by work travel, illness etc.

Oliver Burkeman on Interestingness

The Imperfectionist: Interest is everything

Perhaps the reason the idea of an “interesting” life feels like a cop-out – compared to, say, a wildly successful or influential or joyful one – is that it lacks any sense of domination or conquest. We want to feel as though we were handed the challenge of a human lifetime and that we nailed it, that we grappled with the problem and solved it. Whereas to follow the lead of interestingness is to accept that life isn’t a problem to be solved, but an experience to be had. And that engaging with it as fully as possible, connecting to the aliveness, is its ultimate point.

…“There’s a specific exhaustion,” observes the artist Dipa Halder, “that comes from constantly shape-shifting to fit what you think people want. I call it type 2 burnout. You’re not overworked, you’re just working against your own grain.”…

This is a very insightful point about AI

And by the way: I don’t think it’s a coincidence that interestingness is the very thing I feel falling away whenever I discover, or begin to suspect, that something I’m reading or watching was generated by artificial intelligence. It might continue to be impressive, or informative, but the flame that kept me fascinated sputters and dies. Which speaks to my point about the pursuit of your interests sparking the interest of others: once I realize the person who created the work wasn’t sufficiently interested to engage with it every step of the way, I can’t summon interest in the result, either. (And the AI certainly wasn’t interested in what it was producing; if there’s one human quality definitively lacking in an LLM, it’s the capacity to be interested in anything at all.)

2025-11-29

Train Dreams

This was a visually stunning movie, with occasional thought-provoking dialogue from its wide cast of interesting character.

Some interesting dialogue (from the transcript):

Ain’t there any place in this world a man can get some peace?

[narrator] Those were the only words Grainier ever heard the man say. They remained with him always.

The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit.

This valley is special. Used to all be under a glacier, you know? Three thousand feet of ice. When it broke, it just flooded the whole region. Carved out all these valleys. That’s where all those lakes come from. Can you imagine if you were back here then? This big block of ice, thousands of feet tall, and just the cracks and the freezing-cold water. It must have felt like the world was coming to an end. [Robert] Hmm. That’s where all those myths come from, you know? All those flood stories. All those different religions all over the world. It’s just the same story, different slants. Hey, I didn’t mean to be disrespectful to anything you believe or anything like that. I just, you know… No, no, no. I just find it fascinating. Can’t help it when I’m in a place like this. It’s just… [tender music playing] The world’s an old place. Yeah. Probably nothing it hasn’t seen by now.

Yeah. I lost my husband too, a little over a year ago. It took him a long time. And when it was over, it was like there was a… a hole in the world. I had more questions than answers, like no human had ever died before. [scoffs] When you go through something like that, nothing you do is crazy. You just go through what you go through.

In the forest, every least thing’s important. It’s all threaded together, so you can’t tell where one thing ends and another begins if you really look at it. The little insects you can’t even see, they play a role as vital as the river. [exhales sharply] The dead tree is as important as the living one. There must be something for us to learn from that. What if you got nothing left to give? Hmm? What then? Mmm… The world needs a hermit in the woods as much as a preacher in the pulpit. [Robert chuckles] [breathing shakily] [voice breaking] Yeah. Yeah. Is that what I am? A hermit? Well, I mean, I believe we both are, in our own ways. Just waiting to see what we’ve been left here for.

"no shoes" startups

I feel like I should put this as one of the criteria for companies I would love to work for, Might even turn out to be a good filter otherwise 🤷🏽‍♂️