6 things I wouldn’t be caught doing in my 40s

Kelton Wright | Shangrilogs | Jan 04, 2026

Generally against listicles, but this is a pretty good exception to the rule. Worth reading whether you’re in your 20s or 70s.

So much of virtuous adulthood is measured by how much a person can withhold from themselves. Eat less, want less, spend less, sleep less, ask less. Shrinking the surface area of my desire can certainly make life more manageable, and likely made me more palatable to people I never cared for. At the very least, it made me someone easier to manage.

But I am not a problematic employee on a probation plan.

Self-denial is small-minded. It’s the energy of a woman who thinks she can punish herself into becoming who she wants to be. Perhaps if masochism is your thing, but I prefer magic.

Self-discipline, though—real discipline—is expansive. It’s the version of me who works on her book first, rather than her clients (just kidding if you’re reading this). It’s the version who moves how she’s called, not how will sculpt her drooping but capable butt.

Self-denial says, you don’t deserve this. Self-discipline says, you deserve better than this.

No self-loving woman should be caught dead confusing austerity for strength.

When answers get cheap, good questions are the new scarcity

Sangeet Paul Choudary | Platforms, AI and the Economics of Big Tech | Apr 06, 2025

Shannon’s original question, posed in the late 1940s with no particular commercial urgency, turned into a seed for an entirely new way of engaging with complexity. His work introduced a new logic for understanding systems under uncertainty.

The first-order impact was immediate. Shannon made information measurable - quantified in bits. With that, engineers had instruments to calculate uncertainty, allocate bandwidth, and measure how much information could safely be transmitted through noise.

The second-order effects were more transformative. Shannon’s framework allowed communication systems to be built not just to carry information, but to protect and compress it. Compression algorithms, cryptographic protocols, memory storage - all grounded in Shannon’s ideas - gave us the internet and digital media.

But the third-order effects were far greater, and cultural. Biologists began to describe DNA as a code. Cognitive scientists framed thought as an information process. Economists spoke of information asymmetries. Physicists speculated that the universe might be, at some level, made of information.

The question had escaped beyond the bounds of engineering.

All of this began with a single reframing: What is information?