2025-12-02

The Cost of Living

I was sitting in a Copenhagen cafe (Original Coffee Istegade to be exact) and they had a stack of Kinfolk magazines. I wanted to stay off any screens so I just started reading all the back issues one by one and stayed for the entire day.

This article especially caught my attention: The Cost of Living - Kinfolk

It's paywalled online and not availble in full. But here is a lovely quote from it.

The essential problem is much the same now as it was then: What we think we want, and what actually makes us happy are, in the end, not the same things. Thoreau’s solution is surprisingly practical and has the tone of an economics lecture rather than the pulpit. “The cost of a thing,” he writes, “is the amount of what I will call life which is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run.” 

When we devote ourselves to our jobs and push ourselves to acquire the outward signs of success, we often vastly under-estimate the amount of “life-cost” we will pay to attain our goals. Once awoken to this cost, Thoreau saw it everywhere: the effort made to dress elegantly, curry favor among neighbors and business associates, the fear of insolvency. At one point he notes that most of his neighbors would rather appear in public with a broken leg than with patched trousers (“distressed” garments had yet to come into fashion).

"life-cost" is such an amazing concept.

The Philosophical Stance Against Having Children

The Growing Anti-Natalist Movement in Japan – SAPIENS

Many critics paint anti-natalism as a movement rejecting generational continuity and its followers as selfish, short-sighted, and nihilistic. Critiques of childlessness in general have only grown in tandem with rising pronatalist policies across the globe. Current U.S. Vice President J.D. Vance, in a 2019 speech at a The American Conservative gala, implied the childless are “sociopaths” unmoored from the well-being of their “communities,” “families,” and “country.” Others have described them as “hedonists” chasing a life of pleasure. Philosopher Ben Ware compared anti-natalism to the folly of techno-utopianism for believing that it has found the solution to worldly suffering.

These critiques are unfair and either wholly inaccurate or overly simplified. Anti-natalists have a wide range of motivations, often related to the broader social, political, and economic circumstances that shape their understandings of reproductive choice, parenthood, and the future. Anti-natalist movements around the globe do not always agree with one another or share the same concerns.

2025-12-04

The 2025 archetype gift guide

Dazed has a very interesting set of gift guides - broken down by archetypes. Here are my personal favorites

• The 2025 archetype gift guide: The Performative Male | Dazed (their Matcha starter kit and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind stickers make this my top pick! 🙃)
• The 2025 archetype gift guide: The Offline Luddite | Dazed
• The 2025 archetype gift guide: The Protein Guerilla | Dazed