I’m happy to report that this year we welcomed a new little girl into the world, which led me to take a break from writing here. My goal for 2026 is to get back to writing in a more regular cadence, and I have a roadmap of what I want to cover, but more on that later.

Today, my goal is to write my annual year-end reading recap. I’ll give the list below, along with some annotations along the way.

If you only pick three books from my list for next year, here’s what I would suggest:

1. How to Think by Alan Jacobs

2. Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry

3. Superbloom by Nicholas Carr

Here’s my full list:

1. Never Split the Difference by Chris Voss — This is one of those business books that people have been telling me about for years. I really appreciated the practical steps in negotiation that it gave. The labeling technique he talks about — using descriptions to disarm people — has been particularly useful.

2. The Grim Years by John J. Navin — This is a history of the settling of the South Carolina Lowcountry in the late 1600s, and as the name implies, it wasn’t a great time to be there.

3. How to Think by Alan Jacobs — Alan Jacobs has been one of my favorite public thinkers for a few years running, and his little book here about thinking was no exception. Recognizing that there is no thinking for yourself in that we are all social creatures is one of many takeaways I have from this one.

4. Arbitrary Lines by M. Nolan Gray — This was a pretty technical overview of land planning and zoning from a planner who believes we should abolish zoning. As someone who has followed these topics for a few years, I was skeptical, but I came out of this read thinking, ya know, maybe we should just throw the whole process out.

5. A Short History of Greenville by Judith T. Bainbridge — This was a very approachable history of Greenville, SC. I’ve been on a local history kick since last year, and as a practitioner of local politics, I think the politics of a place should be locally rooted — so having more context about what has come before here is important.

6. The Undoing Project by Michael Lewis — This was a history of the work of Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky, whose collective work on cognitive psychology and science changed many of the ways we think about thinking. Great background on how that research came about.

7. The Order of Time by Carlo Rovelli — This was a beautifully written meditation on the nature of reality from a scientific perspective. It also helped that Benedict Cumberbatch was the narrator of that audiobook version I listened to.

8. Zero to One by Peter Thiel — This brief reflection on how progress happens and the work to go from nothing to something was great as a look into the psychology of one of the most important thinkers of our time. See also where Peter Thiel hesitates for a really long time when asked if the human race should survive.

9. The Abolition of Man by C.S. Lewis — Reading this book came out of reading The Year of Our Lord 1943, mainly because the work of Lewis in this book is such a clear distillation of the battle for the soul of the West that the thinkers of that time believed they were engaged in.

10. The Return of the King by J.R.R. Tolkien — The end of the series, which I started in 2024. What struck me in this one was the parallels between the way Tolkien concludes the War of the Ring and the ushering in of the end state of the World, and how slow and methodical it was. I don’t know if there’s something there about Tolkien’s views of our own world’s end, but it struck me.

11. The Year of Our Lord 1943 by Alan Jacobs — This was one of my favorite reads of the year, but also probably the one that someday I will need to go back through to catch the 80% of this book that went over my head. Jacobs is soaking in context about the rise of technocracy and what it does to our souls that is still as relevant in 2025 (and 2026!) as it was in 1943.

12. Sunrise on the Reaping by Suzanne Collins — I’m a sucker for the Hunger Games books. As someone from East Tennessee who currently lives in the Upstate, the Appalachian echoes in Collins’s world have always been compelling to me. The idea of District 12 and that type of world keeps pulling me back.

13. Challenger by Adam Higginbotham — This was a history of the Challenger shuttle disaster, and everything that went wrong along the way to make that happen. The big lesson is the way super complicated systems will fail. They will. It’s just a matter of whether we put in the right safeguards to stop those failures from cascading.

14. Stuck by Yoni Appelbaum — This was one of my favorite reads of the year. Appelbaum tells such a compelling story of the importance of people being able to move around. The information alone, contrasting the way towns were run in Virginia vs. New England, was helpful without any other commentary.

15. The Extinction of Experience by Christine Rosen — Rosen walks through several different activities in life and how the digitization of the processes (handwritten letters to keyboards, for example) has changed the nature of the work we are doing when we stop using our hands to write.

16. Everything Is Tuberculosis by John Green — I’ve been a big fan of John Green for years, so I honestly just read it because he wrote it. His reflections on the world feel truly genuine and kind, and this book was as thoughtful as ever about a disease that I honestly have thought very little about in my life. This book goes a long way at explaining why.

17. Revelation by G.K. Beale — Our church did a long study of Revelation that brought this one out, since it was the recommended companion commentary.

18. The Narnian by Alan Jacobs — After the intellectual haul that was Jacobs’s 1943 book, this one was a much more colorful picture of the life of one of the greatest thinkers about faith of our time.

19. The Fabric of Civilization by Virginia Postrel — This one was a bit of a deep dive into a subject I’ve not spent much time thinking about, but Postrel’s origins here in Greenville, SC along with her interview with Jonah Goldberg on his podcast about a year ago made me want to see a bit more about how she thinks. This was a good introduction to that world.

20. Confessions by Augustine — A classic I finally got to. Reading these classics, it is always interesting how the big thoughts that have redefined the Western world are just so subtly embedded in these works and seem almost unremarkable, unless you consider the time in which they were written. The way Augustine works out the concept of disordered desires — the idea that not everything we want conforms to God’s plan — is a pretty basic idea today in Christianity but was revolutionary at the time.

21. Mothers, Children, and the Body Politic by Nadya Williams — Williams was interviewed about her Cultural Christians book, and both were contrarian explorations from my perspective about some facet of Christianity. Her book here is looking at some throughlines between how the Roman world viewed people instrumentally and how our world does the same, with vastly different moral frameworks.

22. Jayber Crow by Wendell Berry — This was one of those classics that someone had loaned to me years back that I finally got around to, and it really hit home. His almost lyrical recounting of the way “the war” and “the economy” slowly ate away at the place Jayber called home was a much-needed reflection for me. The way growth and leverage are painted as these slow marching forces across the landscape is tantalizing to think about.

23. Project Hail Mary by Andy Weir — I love Andy Weir’s writing style, ever since I came across The Martian right when he had first published it. His technically accurate sci-fi really sticks with me.

24. Eastern Orthodoxy Through Western Eyes by Donald Fairbairn — This was a read inspired by my sister’s recent marriage into a Greek Orthodox family and my complete unfamiliarity with it. I found this extremely helpful, and the whole concept of the Western church as law-based vs. the Eastern church as community-based has stuck with me. The author walking through in almost a diagram fashion how the Western church’s account of creation, the fall, Christ’s work of justification that provided for our sanctification and toward our eventual glorification is transmuted in the Eastern church into something built on very different assumptions was fascinating.

25. Cultural Christians in the Early Church by Nadya Williams — This was the book that inspired the podcast I listened to, and her reflections on how in every age there are essentially people taking the faith “seriously” and others not as seriously is a good reminder that there is truly nothing new under the sun.

26. The Tech-Wise Family by Andy Crouch — Andy Crouch is such a good writer, and this was a very practical way to apply some of Crouch’s other works to a family.

27. My Fundamentalist Education by Christine Rosen — This one was more background reading for me, as I’ve found Christine Rosen to be a public thinker whose work I keep coming back to. Her wrestling with the way her fundamentalist education impacted her faith today was telling — she is clearly a person who is still deeply formed by this Christian and lowercase-c conservative upbringing, but has personally lost the faith because of it.

28. Start with Why by Simon Sinek — I read this one first years ago when it came out, but this was the first book in our reading for the Taylors Fellowship through Taylors TownSquare that I’m facilitating, so a re-read was necessary. This book felt very basic going in, but I do think Sinek’s focus on getting back to the core of ideas was helpful.

29. Superbloom by Nicholas Carr — This was a great read. Carr is one of those writers I’ve known I want to read more of, and this just confirmed it. His reflections on our current cultural state and how media have impacted it à la McLuhan are a great reframe of our current situation. A big focus of the book was the way the internet changes what we think should be private and what should be shared, and then the cost of airing out all our dirty laundry for everyone to read.

30. The Magician’s Nephew by C.S. Lewis — This was part of a deliberate Lewis deep-dive year. I intended to keep going into the rest of Narnia, but honestly, there were elements I was specifically interested in because of the other works of Lewis this year. The way the magician in the book exemplifies the technocratic practitioner that I’ve come to view as the boogeyman Lewis was working against was a good companion to those other reads.

31. Made to Stick by Chip Heath and Dan Heath — This was the second read for the Taylors Fellowship, a re-read of a book I’ve read before. I use their SUCCESs paradigm frequently and it was good to go back to the source.

32. Bowling Alone by Robert D. Putnam — This one is the next book for the Taylors Fellowship, but I needed to re-read to get the questions to our group members before they read it over December and January. The themes that Putnam is exploring here were vital to our thinking about the current collapse of civic discourse.

33. Difficult Men by Brett Martin — This was a bit of an outlier, but I like reading some random things, what can I say? The narrative around the transformation of the TV and movie worlds that took place during this time was fascinating — the creative risk-taking to revive TV as a place where art could be done, to the point where far more “prestige” TV comes out now than cinema, opposite how it used to be. The reversal there is an interesting cultural phenomenon.

34. The Art of Spending Money by Morgan Housel — Housel is another of these guys who writes a lot, and I finally got around to reading one of his books. The way he described money was not completely foreign to me, but his practical insight in this one was great. His notion of reducing future regret was a very succinct way to memorialize that big concept.

35. The Pursuit of Happiness by Jeffrey Rosen — This was Rosen’s book, walking through the virtues that make up the historic notion of the pursuit of happiness that the founders were referring to. I think his bigger point is that we take that phrase almost to mean everyone doing what they want, but the founders had more in mind the idea that they wanted to create a world where people could pursue what would ultimately make them happy, which in their minds were the classical virtues. To unpack what that meant, Rosen took one of those virtues at a time and looked at the life of a specific founding father and how that virtue played out in their life. I thought it was a very compelling way to make the case.

36. The Nineties by Chuck Klosterman — I love a good meandering cultural collection of essays, and this book provided a lot of thought-provoking context on the decade when I formed my first memories. Some essays I enjoyed more than others, but as a first draft of history, I thought this one had some interesting reflections.

37. The Demon Under the Microscope by Thomas Hager — I’ve always been fascinated with how when people say things are worse than they used to be, we seem to be forgetting that people used to die of paper cuts. But I had never done any real reading on this subject, so this was a read to color in some details there. The whole situation pre-antibiotic seems terrible. The particular story of Calvin Coolidge’s son getting a blister on his foot and dying in the White House was fascinating — just a few years later and he would have been saved. Some of my interest here was specifically prompted by the great Netflix miniseries “Death by Lightning” which recounts the death of James Garfield and how he was not killed by the bullet but by the doctors using unsanitary methods to try to remove it.

As I mentioned earlier, I hope to be back early next year with some new explorations, but for now, thanks for reading, and see you again soon.

On the timely topic of having kids, I have three of my own and I’ve noticed something you may have too: if you have kids or even a sibling, they’re all quite different, right? Raised in the same home, by the same people, with mainly the same ingredients and environment, it’s likely they turned out worlds apart.

Why is that?

One might say their unique mix of DNA is what separates them, but I think there are other factors at play as well.

Birth Order

You may have seen funny Reels or TikToks about stereotypical kids’ birth order, but I think there’s something to this. If you have an older sibling or a firstborn, more than likely you treated them (or were treated) with caution. Unsure what they were capable of in the beginning, and high expectations to be helpful as they grew up are pretty typical for firstborns. As kids grow, they either lean into this “I am depended upon” or grow weary of it and settle into a “I want to do what I want to do” mindset.

You might be thinking, “Well yes, everyone is aware of that.” But really think about it. If you were born with exact same DNA but in a different order in the lineup or even as an only child, do you think you would be a different person now as an adult?

Core Moments

If you’ve seen Pixar’s, Inside Out, you might be having a mental image of the memory orbs or “islands” of personality. If you haven’t, it might sound like I’m losing my mind. Watch this short clip to get caught up (and also you should go watch the whole movie—it’s great even if you aren’t watching with kids).

Think of something you really enjoy. Now start to trace it back. For me, it’s nature. My dad was a camp director until I was eight years old and I spent my days barefoot in the grass. To me, those were fun memories, things I enjoyed. What about a favorite sports team? I’d imagine you can trace that back to your childhood and memories watching games growing up.

On a more serious note, maybe you grew up in a large family and reading became your escape from the chaos. Where has that led you today? Maybe a teacher or coach made a statement that deeply impacted you—for better or worse—and altered your trajectory or at the very least shaped your personality.

Friend Choice

This last one, I think, as a parent worries me the most. It’s something I can’t necessarily change but something I can impact as they grow. We want our kids to have good friends, right? But how far do we go to affect that? Do we put them in private school so they’re surrounded by what we might consider “the more elite”? Of course the negatives of that, as we’ve gone over in previous Content & Context articles, if we only surround ourselves with like-minded, our minds will never change.

Consider your friends growing up and how they impacted you. What if you’d been zoned for a different school or decided to sit at a different lunch table that first week of school. How might your life be different now?

So why even contemplate all this? It sounds like half is left to the roll of the dice and half seems to be “playing God” if we intervene too much. Where does that leave us?

I think there’s a few key takeaways from all this:

• Have grace on other’s stories. You might know their upbringing or be familiar with their family but we don’t always know what’s going on under the surface.

• Cultivate good in your children (or your friends or even coworkers). If you see something positive in them, help them lean into that. Be that teacher that made an impactful comment. If you see something about them that could have negative affects later, support them however you can safely rather than trying to tell them what to do or not to do.

• Know there’s always time to change. Maybe your upbringing wasn’t the greatest. That cycle doesn’t have to continue. You really can be the change you want to see and all that jazz.

Thanks for listening and back to your regularly scheduled programming.

The irony is that many of the most important civic goods—trust, connection, shared purpose—depend on things too diffuse, too slow-moving, or too “obvious” for most people to champion. Who’s going to go to bat for neighborly small talk? For running into someone unexpectedly at the coffee shop and letting it derail your afternoon? For simply being available as we talked about last week?

These feel too minor to defend—until you realize what’s replacing them. If no one makes the case for attention, presence, and interstitial time, something else will fill the gap. And increasingly, that something is the screen.

It’s why I’ve started to think about attention as something that now requires evangelists—people willing to go first, to break the norm, to risk awkwardness for the sake of something better.

From Tracts to Presence

I grew up around a particular form of evangelism: memorized scripts, gospel tracts, and front porches. The kind of thing that now gets parodied or buried under layers of ironic distance. But here’s the thing—it took nerve. You had to step out of your routine and into someone else’s. You had to believe that there was something better on offer, and that you might be the one to offer it.

That’s how I feel about presence today.

In a world where disengagement is the norm, where everyone is “somewhere else” via headphones or screens, being truly attentive—really showing up—feels strange. Maybe even disruptive. But it’s also powerful.

When we are disengaged, we’re signaling that we don’t care about where we are. That this moment, this place, these people aren’t quite worth our attention. We are, in effect, teleporting—mentally relocating to a curated feed, a news cycle, a podcast, a game. None of these are bad in themselves. But they all come at a cost: the subtle but steady erosion of our availability to each other.

And in a culture so shaped by what’s memetic—what’s shared, imitated, amplified—it’s not surprising that attention, too, has to be modeled. Evangelized. Lived out in ways that help others see its value again.

We often talk about attention as a personal discipline. A way to manage our time, increase focus, or improve productivity. But I’m increasingly convinced that attention is also a public good—something we all benefit from when it’s practiced, and something we lose when it’s neglected.

When someone is fully present with us, we notice. It’s not neutral—it’s arresting. It affirms that we matter. And in turn, it invites us to do the same.

That’s why I think of this as a kind of evangelism—not a message shouted, but a posture lived. Not coercion, but invitation. Not a pitch, but a presence.

The problem, of course, is that being the only person looking up in a sea of people looking down can feel lonely. And there’s a collective action trap baked in: if no one else is paying attention, what does my attention accomplish?

The answer is: a lot. And also, not much.

A lot—because it always takes a first mover. A noticer. A person who risks being interruptible. And not much—because if we stop there, if we assume our individual posture is enough, we miss the larger call. If we believe this is worthwhile, we’ll have to become something more like evangelists for it. Witnesses to a way of life that feels increasingly strange, but deeply needed.

Scripts and the Loss of Spontaneity

We’ve lost a lot of the basic social scripts that used to guide ordinary interaction. Things like: how to greet someone you don’t know. How to make small talk with the person behind the counter. How to be just bored enough to notice someone else nearby and ask them a question.

These scripts are like protocols—little pieces of social code we don’t think about until they disappear. And while they can’t be taught centrally or enforced top-down, they can be practiced. Re-learned. Modeled.

We recover them by doing them.

I think of my friend Andy. I ran into him at a coffee shop a few months ago. He was there working but was still alert, engaged. We talked for nearly an hour. I walked away not just grateful for the conversation, but for the way he paid attention. That interaction reminded me how rare—and how restorative—it is to be truly seen in the ordinary course of a day.

That’s the kind of moment I want to create more often. And that starts with me.

Now that I have a son, I see how much he watches me. Not just in the big moments, but in the micro-habits: the hand motions, the attention shifts, the way I interact with the world when we’re just sitting around.

And I know—if I’m not intentional, he’ll pick up the same fragmented attention that’s been trained into me by two decades of digital convenience. He’ll learn to check out by default. To fill every gap. To turn away from the people closest to him because something else might be more interesting.

That’s not what I want for him.

So I’m trying to go first. Not because I’m especially good at this—but because someone has to go first. Someone has to make presence visible again.

A Quiet Invitation

This isn’t a pitch for some high-minded purity test. It’s not even a critique of technology, really. It’s just a reminder that presence is not the default anymore—and that choosing it might feel awkward at first.

But here’s where you can start:

• Put the phone down during the in-between moments.

• Take the headphones out when you walk through your neighborhood.

• Say hello to someone who might not expect it.

• Engage the barista, the cashier, the neighbor in their yard.

You don’t have to be loud about it. Just willing.

We can’t rebuild public life all at once. But we can become first movers in our own daily spaces.

And in a world built to distract us, that’s a form of evangelism worth practicing.

Drawing from her book The Extinction of Experience, Rosen explores what happens when we lose interstitial time—those little in-between moments in a day when we used to let our minds wander, strike up a casual conversation, or simply look around. Moments when we were open to interruption. Available to the world. Human, in the most ordinary way.

She’s right to say we’ve trained ourselves to fill every gap. Our boredom is no longer tolerated, much less valued. We’ve got an optimization machine in our pockets, always ready to help us "make the most" of our time. But I keep wondering: Are we making the most of our lives if we’re never available to the people actually in front of us?

We’ve been sold the idea that attention is a private matter—something we manage for our own productivity or pleasure. But attention is also a civic practice. It’s a form of presence. And increasingly, it’s a public good we’re failing to steward.

I don’t think, on the whole, that talking to my neighbor is going to be more stimulating than listening to a podcast that genuinely excites me. But the neighbor is in my path. And the point isn’t about which is more interesting—it’s about which one makes a place feel like home. Most of community life doesn’t happen in scheduled blocks or curated experiences. It comes from happenstance. From people bumping into each other and being interruptible.

We now have the tools to tame time—to squeeze value out of every sliver of it. But I think that skips the more human question: Does this actually make for a better life? I'm not convinced it does. Because once you start slicing time into finer and finer segments, you also start believing that every segment needs to be justified. Even the one where you’re just sitting at a red light, or standing behind someone at the deli counter, or watching your child turn a plastic cup over in his hands for the fifth time that day.

Neil Postman called this a technopoly—a culture where technology doesn’t just serve our values but defines them. In a technopoly, efficiency becomes moral. Idleness becomes a defect. Even silence feels irresponsible.

And the result? We get better at managing our calendars but worse at noticing each other.

The Vanishing “Between”

One of the things I’m realizing is that you can’t have public life if no one is available in public. If everyone is privately entertained in a public space, there’s no longer anything shared. There’s just a bunch of adjacent solitudes.

That has consequences.

There's a civic loneliness that sets in when you're the only person looking up. You notice it in coffee shops, on sidewalks, in lobbies—everyone staring down or zoning out with AirPods in. That used to be the space where small talk happened. Where you ran into someone you hadn’t seen in a while. Where your kid waved at an older neighbor and started a whole unexpected conversation.

If no one is interruptible, nothing spontaneous can happen. And if nothing spontaneous can happen, the public square dies by inches.

There’s a collective action problem here, too. If everyone else is distracted, what does my individual attention accomplish? The answer is: a lot, and not much. A lot, in that it takes a first mover. Every movement needs people willing to be anti-memetic, to live against the grain and make something visible again. Not much, in that one person looking up in a sea of distraction won’t reverse the tide. That’s why we need not just quiet resistance but a kind of evangelism for presence. I know that word comes with baggage—especially for those of us who come from door-to-door evangelism world—but the point stands: we need more people who are willing to show that a life of greater attentiveness is worth it.

And if attention is a public good, like clean air or quiet streets, then we should treat it that way. As something that can be depleted—or cultivated.

What We Lose

I think the most profound loss might not even be that we’re less curious about strangers. It’s that we become less attentive to the people closest to us. Our attentiveness starts to form a kind of bell curve: we ignore those at the farthest edges, sure, but also those right next to us. They become background noise. Their presence feels ambient. And if our default posture is distraction, then even the ones we love most are competing with whatever’s buzzing in our pocket.

Is that really the life we want?

I don’t want to romanticize empty time. Not all idleness is virtuous, and not every pause is profound. But I do think we need more active empty time—moments where we choose not to fill the gap, but to stay present in it. Not to withdraw from the world, but to be available to it. And to each other.

We’ve lost the scripts for how to be interruptible. The small talk. The eye contact. The willingness to loiter a bit in a conversation. And like all scripts, if you don’t use them, you forget them. Eventually, we lose not just our habits of interaction, but the instincts behind them—curiosity, patience, empathy. We start needing instructions for things we once knew how to do intuitively.

That’s why I think Rosen’s piece matters. Because it’s not just about boredom. It’s about relational availability. It’s about recovering the conditions where public life can still happen.

A Personal Note

I’ve been thinking about this a lot as a parent.

When I’m watching my son Landon play—endlessly throwing a ball, chasing an ant on the playground—I often feel the pull to pick up my phone. Not to scroll endlessly, but to “do something useful.” Maybe I’ll listen to a podcast or knock out an email while keeping an eye on him. Something efficient.

But the moment I do that, something quiet disappears.

If I can’t sit still in the presence of my own child, what else am I missing? Who else?

Maybe presence isn’t the absence of productivity. Maybe it’s the beginning of participation. Of community. Of public life.

And maybe the first step to rebuilding that life is learning to look up.

There was a certain lo-fi beats playlist I started listening to—late nights, headphones on, feeling like I was tapping into something niche, maybe even a little avant-garde. It felt personal, curated by mood and instinct rather than popularity. It felt like taste.

Then I realized everyone else had found it, too. Or rather, it had found us.

That same sound was everywhere—from YouTube study mixes to TikTok backdrops to startup office speakers. It turns out I wasn’t off the beaten path. I was on the algorithm’s express lane. What I’d experienced as self-discovery was, in retrospect, more like exposure fatigue. I’d heard it enough times that it became comforting, familiar. It passed the “I like this” test, not because it challenged me, but because it fit.

I don’t even use Spotify, by the way. I’ve been on Apple Music for years—which has had its own Replay feature for a while now, though it always felt like a quieter, less flashy cousin to Spotify Wrapped. For the first few years, I mostly watched from the sidelines as friends posted their Spotify stats with faux surprise and genuine delight. But even without participating, I still felt the pull. I was part of the same culture, swimming in the same streams—even if I wasn’t posting the receipts.

Now, Apple’s Replay has caught up in both presentation and promotion. And I get it: there’s something delightful about seeing your year distilled into clean lines and colorful charts. You feel seen. Your taste, your moods, your obsessions: all accounted for. And there’s a social joy in that too—swapping discoveries with friends, catching unexpected overlaps, sharing a little window into someone’s internal world. It’s part of the fun.

But there’s also something worth interrogating.

Kate Lindsay put her finger on it in an Embedded essay. After realizing Bleachers had somehow ended up as her #3 artist of the year, she traced the culprit—not to her own listening habits, but to Spotify’s tendency to start auto-playing Bleachers once her preferred band (The 1975) ran out of tracks. She didn’t choose Bleachers. They just happened. And they happened enough to make it into her Top 5.

Spotify wasn’t lying—but it also wasn’t neutral. It had quietly positioned certain artists, certain songs, in places where they were nearly impossible to avoid. Like a vending machine that nudges you toward the chips at eye-level, the algorithm creates the conditions in which your “preferences” can be gently guided—until they start to feel like your own.

None of this is limited to music, of course. PJ Vogt explored a similar tension in a recent Search Engine episode titled “How am I supposed to find new music?” The real question, though, isn’t just about music discovery—it’s about how all discovery is changing. When we outsource exploration to algorithms, we lose the friction. We don’t stumble. We don’t wander. We just… consume.

The illusion of choice is comforting. It tells us we’re curating our lives, when we’re really being handed options from a pre-sorted buffet. We think we’re selecting; we’re actually being sorted.

That’s not inherently dystopian. There’s real value in these tools. But they come with a subtle cost: the erosion of intentionality. Over time, our playlists, our viewing habits, even our reading lists, can become less a reflection of who we are and more a reflection of what’s been most effectively placed in front of us.

And here’s the kicker: we like it that way. We get a little hit of validation when the machine tells us who we are and gets it “right.” But if “what I like” becomes indistinguishable from “what I’ve been shown”—if my sense of self is continually shaped by the system—I lose the ability to tell where I end and the algorithm begins.

That’s the deeper tension behind Spotify Wrapped (or Apple Replay, or TikTok’s For You Page, or Netflix’s Top Picks): it’s not just about what we enjoy—it’s about what we become. The more we let convenience guide us, the harder it becomes to distinguish between taste and inertia.

Maybe the antidote isn’t to ditch the platforms entirely. But it might be to recover a sense of curiosity that resists the algorithm’s path of least resistance. To pursue things off the beaten track. To dig, to wander, to be surprised again.

Real taste isn’t just about what you like. It’s about how you found it—and whether you were awake for the journey.

So if you’re feeling the tug of algorithmic sameness, here are a few ways to push back:

1. Make one playlist by hand. Not based on what you’ve “liked,” but on a theme, a season, a memory, or a feeling. Pull from older albums, local artists, or songs you haven’t heard in years.
   
   

2. Follow a friend’s recommendation—really. Not the algorithm’s “people also like,” but a real human’s suggestion. Ask why they like it. Listen more than once.
   
   

3. Set aside one hour a week to explore without prompts. No autoplay, no “because you listened to...”—just intentional browsing. A record store, a music blog, Bandcamp, even CDs from your local library.
   
   

These aren’t revolutionary moves, but that’s kind of the point. Rediscovering taste—your taste—starts with small acts of attention.

When the iPhone launched, it sold itself as freedom in your pocket. Slack claimed to kill email. AI tools now promise to write our emails and summarize our meetings. Each tool whispers the same quiet promise: "This will make life easier."

And in a sense, they do. Messages arrive instantly. Scheduling is seamless. Workflows compress into tappable blocks and slash commands. But something odd happens after we save all that time: we don’t feel freer. We feel tethered.

The irony is hard to miss. Efficiency tools often become their own undoing—not because they fail, but because they work too well. They raise expectations. What once felt like convenience becomes obligation. What once counted as overachievement becomes table stakes.

This is the efficiency trap.

Slack was supposed to make work communication more fluid. And it did—sort of. But most knowledge workers will tell you it also created a new kind of anxiety. When your name gets mentioned in a channel at 9:47 p.m., the expectation isn’t just that you can respond—it’s that you should. The boundary between work and life hasn’t just blurred; it’s dissolved.

The iPhone did something similar. It made us reachable anywhere. But that meant we became reachable everywhere. No one schedules phone calls anymore because the default assumption is always-on availability.

These tools made things faster. But they didn’t shrink our workload. They expanded the container in which work happens. We now expect ourselves—and others—to be more productive, more responsive, and more available, all the time.

Economists have a name for this: the Jevons Paradox. In the 19th century, William Stanley Jevons observed that making coal-burning engines more efficient didn’t reduce coal consumption. It increased it. The more useful something becomes, the more we use it.

The same applies to communication. Faster tools don’t lead to fewer messages. They lead to more of them. Email didn’t replace the memo; it multiplied the size of the inbox. Slack didn’t kill email; it added another layer. And AI, promising to take on our "low-value" tasks, risks only creating space to assign more tasks.

The result? Our time savings get swallowed by rising expectations.

This is where we need older wisdom—voices that spoke of limits not as constraints to overcome, but as conditions for flourishing.

Wendell Berry, in his essays and fiction, reminds us that true efficiency isn’t about speed but about fit. Machines, he argued, should fit within the rhythm of a place and the limits of a people. Technology, when scaled without reference to the human, becomes disorienting.

The Sabbath is another powerful protest against the cult of optimization. It says: stop. Not because you're done, but because you're human. In You're Only Human, Kelly Kapic builds on this, arguing that limits are not sins to overcome but gifts to embrace. We were never meant to be infinite, always-on beings. The pressure to act like it is a distortion of who we are.

So why do we fall for this every time?

Partly, it's because efficiency offers the illusion of control. In a chaotic world, it feels empowering to tame your inbox or schedule. But it's also because our cultural scripts about work are broken. We valorize hustle. We equate busyness with importance. We treat slowness as weakness.

But the deeper problem might be epistemological: we confuse speed with clarity, quantity with value, and availability with commitment. We've internalized a metric-driven way of thinking about ourselves, where "enough" is always just out of reach.

What Resistance Looks Like

I don’t think the answer is going off-grid. I still use my iPhone. I still reply on Slack. But I’m learning that resistance doesn't have to be rejection. It can look like:

• Turning off notifications by default.

• Defining communication hours and holding that boundary.

• Valuing slow thinking over instant reaction.

• Making room for unoptimized time—for things that form us rather than "produce" something.

And maybe most importantly: telling a better story. One where time isn’t just a container to be filled, but a gift to be stewarded. One where being finite isn't a flaw, but part of being fully human.

The lie is that efficiency leads to freedom. But often, it just changes the shape of our captivity.

We don’t need more tools to save time. We need better stories about what time is for.

I mean, I watch TikTok—I just do it on Instagram Reels, like a self-respecting millennial. You know the drill: one video to decompress, and suddenly it’s forty-five minutes later and I’m somehow invested in the life of a guy who builds tiny houses out of shipping containers in his backyard.

It feels harmless. Entertaining, even. But sometimes I pause long enough to realize: I didn’t choose any of this. I didn’t seek it out. An algorithm handed it to me. I passively consumed what it served.

And if I’m honest, that’s increasingly true of my media, my mood, and my mental state.

That’s not just a quirk of modern life—it’s a warning flag.

Alan Jacobs, in The Year of Our Lord 1943, tells the story of several Christian intellectuals—Lewis, Eliot, Maritain, Weil, Auden—who were trying to reckon with the cultural conditions that gave rise to fascism, communism, and technocratic rule. But what strikes me most is the brief epilogue, where Jacobs nods to Jacques Ellul—a French theologian and sociologist who wrote just a few years later and diagnosed a problem even deeper than ideology.

Ellul’s concern? Technique. Not just tools, but systems of efficiency, optimization, and control that become ends in themselves.

“Technique has taken over the whole of civilization. Death, procreation, birth all submit to technical efficiency and systemization.”
—Jacques Ellul

Ellul warned that the real danger wasn’t that machines would enslave us. It’s that we would willingly shape our entire lives around what machines—and their logic—demand.

And in 2025, that’s not hypothetical. That’s Tuesday.

The New Technocracy Isn’t a Government—It’s a Feed

The Christian humanists Jacobs profiles were already wary of a future where culture was no longer shaped by tradition, imagination, or virtue—but by systems.

Back then, the system was bureaucratic and industrial. Today, it’s algorithmic and invisible.

Instead of party propaganda, we get personalized media. Instead of state-run ideology, we get curated feeds built from our behavior. The result is the same: a passive population, shaped not by reflection or community, but by the quiet hum of convenience.

And that convenience is not neutral.

• It conditions how we spend our time.

• It shapes what we believe is normal, desirable, or controversial.

• It determines what stories rise and what truths disappear.

And most of all, it trains us to be passive—scrolling through life rather than stepping into it.

Ellul’s critique—and Jacobs’ framing of it—isn’t just about how we consume. It’s about how we’re being formed.

Christian humanists like Eliot and Lewis weren’t fighting technology per se—they were resisting the loss of human judgment, character, and imagination. They believed that once we outsource those things to systems (whether political or technological), we lose something essential: the ability to live meaningful lives rooted in virtue.

Today, that fight is even harder to notice. After all, no one forced me to scroll Reels for 45 minutes. But no one helped me form the resistance not to, either.

When culture is mediated entirely by algorithmic platforms—designed to keep us scrolling, clicking, reacting—what chance does reflection have? What chance does formation have?

Three Acts of Resistance

If Ellul is right, and Jacobs is right to recover him, then our moment demands more than media literacy or screen time tips. It calls for deliberate acts of resistance—not just to the platforms themselves, but to the logic that governs them. Here are three small but subversive ways to begin:

1. Disrupt Your Algorithm: Search for things you don’t agree with. Watch content that challenges your assumptions. Step out of the loop. Not because it’s virtuous—but because it’s freeing. Make the machine work harder to find you.

2. Recover Slowness: Read a book. Not a summary. Not a Twitter thread. A book. Watch a film that doesn’t resolve in 90 minutes. Talk to someone in person with no agenda. These aren’t aesthetic choices—they’re cultural defiance.

3. Choose Formation Over Optimization: Don’t just ask: “What’s the best tool?” Ask: “What kind of person does this make me?” That’s the Ellul question. That’s the Jacobs question. That’s the Christian humanist question.

We’ve become used to saying things like “social media is just a tool” or “it depends how you use it.” But what if the tool is using you?

Ellul wasn’t issuing a doomsday prophecy. He was calling for freedom. Not freedom from devices, but freedom from the lie that efficiency is always good, that convenience is always neutral, that culture can be managed by code.

The Christian humanists saw what happens when people abandon the slow, difficult work of cultivating culture in favor of systems that promise results without reflection. And in a world where most people’s culture is handed to them in a feed, we’re there.

The question isn’t whether the algorithm is shaping your life. It is.

The question is whether you’ll let it keep doing so—or start choosing something different.

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A climate activist in Portland wants to decarbonize the economy. A homeschooling mom in Tennessee wants to raise goats and teach her kids Latin. They don’t vote the same way, but they might tell you the same thing: The American Dream is not a single vision.

It’s easy to miss just how weird this moment is—ideologically, morally, even spiritually. Across the spectrum, people are disillusioned. Growth feels hollow. Technology feels predatory. Progress, as it’s currently defined, often feels like drift.

Yet the proposed solutions couldn’t be more different.

Some say we need abundance: more housing, energy, and freedom to build. Others say we need degrowth: less ambition, less consumption, fewer illusions.

And that tension—between abundance and restraint—is starting to rearrange our culture in ways that don’t fit neatly on a left-right axis. If you squint, you’ll notice something striking:

The actual fault lines today aren’t just political. They’re philosophical. And they aren’t just about what we have. They’re about who we’re becoming.

At bottom, we’re not just debating policy—we’re debating whether the good life requires more… or less.

We’ve been trained to imagine political debate as a line: progressives on one end, conservatives on the other. Redistribution vs. hierarchy. Change vs. tradition. Techno-optimism vs. techno-panic.

But that old map is increasingly useless.

Instead, we’re seeing a grid—or maybe a moral compass with different groups navigating different questions entirely. A few examples:

None of these are simple binaries, but they shape how we argue (and avoid arguing) about everything from housing policy to artificial intelligence to the very question of whether people should have more children.

Four Corners of the Conversation

To make this more concrete, imagine four archetypes—composites of real people shaping public thought today:

The Builder

Meet Taylor, a city planner in Raleigh. Taylor wants to build more homes, transit, and nuclear power. Think Ezra Klein meets Strong Towns. Believes justice means expanding capacity. Growth isn’t the enemy—exclusion is.

The Simplicity Radical

Reads degrowth theory and Wendell Berry in the same breath. Advocates shrinking the economy to restore ecological sanity. Believes the planet, not the market, should set the limits.

The Techno-Futurist

Quotes Peter Thiel, worries about “The Great Stagnation,” and funds moonshot projects. Believes that if we don’t innovate boldly, we die slowly. Thinks moral clarity is essential—but so is Mars.

The Moral Traditionalist

Wants to live in a way that honors limits, roots, and a sense of the sacred. Deeply skeptical of both tech elites and progressive abundance. Not trying to maximize outcomes—trying to live minimally.

If you’re like me, you might find yourself nodding to something in each of them—and also cringing at times. That’s okay. The point isn’t to pick a team. The point is to realize that these are wildly different viewpoints and what we’re called to do with finding our place within—or rather outside—of them.

What's Forming Us?

As someone shaped by a conservative tradition that values order, stewardship, and moral clarity, I keep coming back to formation. Not just what we believe or build—but what kind of people we’re becoming.

Are our tools shaping us toward humility, stewardship, and self-giving love? Or toward optimization, acceleration, and anxiety?

Are our stories about the future training us to hope—or to hustle?

It’s no coincidence these debates are escalating in a media environment that rewards outrage, moral certainty, and acceleration. When every trend is a feed-scroll away, the future feels urgent and impossible.

Still, if we pursue abundance without attention to formation, we’ll end up with more of what’s deforming us.

Here’s a better question than “What is driving your viewpoint?”:

What vision of the good life is shaping your desires?

• Do you long for more because you hope to include others or fear being left behind?

• Do you embrace limits because you believe they’re life-giving or because the world feels like too much?

Every movement in this conversation—abundance, degrowth, tradition, acceleration—contains both virtues and temptations. And all of them are wrestling with the same thing: how to live well in a world that feels like it’s coming unmoored.

A Closing Invitation

You don’t have to resolve this today. I won’t be either.

But I do think we need more spaces—not fewer—where people can ask questions like:

• What kind of future are we being formed to desire?

• What kind of sacrifices will that future demand?

• And what if the answer isn’t more or less, but something more like rightly ordered?

As always, I welcome your thoughts. We may be living through collapse. Or we may just be choosing the shape of the next world.

Let’s do it carefully, together.

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It’s a phrase we hear all the time—“This will be good for the community.” It’s said in board meetings and Facebook comments, printed on campaign mailers and whispered at church potlucks. But I’ve noticed lately that the word community is doing a lot of heavy lifting in those conversations. It gestures toward a collective we all supposedly understand. But when you look closer, the referent often dissolves. Who is this community we’re talking about? Who defines what’s good for it?

We assume some shared sense of “us,” but that assumption often masks a deeper confusion—both about who we are and about how we know what we know.

Fragmented Authority and Inflated Awareness

This is something I’ve felt especially sharply in the age of social media, where platforms blur the line between observer and spokesperson. I’ll scroll through LinkedIn and see people speaking with authority about what should happen in a city or a school district, often in places they don’t live and with credentials they’ve never claimed. And I don’t mean that dismissively—sometimes they’re right. But what strikes me is the ease with which we all now slide into the role of representative.

The very structure of these platforms invites it. You’re encouraged to comment on everything, react quickly, post publicly. And that habitual engagement creates a kind of inflated awareness. Because when we see more, we feel we understand more. When we understand more (or think we do), we feel entitled to speak as if we represent something larger.

But we don’t always. At least, not in the way we think.

This isn’t just about individuals, either. The traditional sources of moral and communal authority—pastors, civic leaders, elected officials, long-tenured local business owners—once held a kind of slow-earned influence. It was rooted in presence, in repetition, in embedded trust. Today, that influence has been diffused, displaced, sometimes discarded. In its place, we often elevate people whose credibility is based on attention, volume, or aesthetic. If someone can perform influence—can “go viral,” can gather likes and shares—we tend to treat them as influential. But that’s not always the same thing.

What we’re left with is a sense that everyone can speak for the community, even as the actual conditions of community—mutual trust, thick belonging, shared rhythms—erode beneath our feet.

Temporary Coalitions, Permanent Confusion

I've watched this dynamic play out in local issues. A controversial school decision, a zoning fight, a new development—it’s like lighting a match. People rally online, a Facebook group gains momentum, signs go up in yards. For a brief moment, it feels like a wave is rising. And sometimes it is. But often, when the issue resolves—or is delayed or fades—the wave disappears. The urgency passes, and people return to their separate orbits.

This is what social media does best: it catalyzes moments of outrage, then collapses back into noise. It offers temporary coalitions, not lasting communities.

The danger is not just that these coalitions are short-lived. It’s that they can convince us we’ve done the work of community when really, we’ve only glimpsed its outline. When we mistake an algorithmically-assembled flash mob for a shared civic life, we’re liable to overestimate both our authority and our alignment.

The Deeper Philosophical Tension

Underneath all of this is a deeper philosophical problem—what we think “good” even means.

When someone says something is “good for the community,” they’re making a claim not just about outcomes, but about values. They’re pointing to some vision of the good life and saying: this helps us get there.

But that’s exactly where we’ve become conflicted. Our culture, for all its public appeals to “the common good,” has largely embraced a kind of technical libertarianism: everyone defines the good life for themselves. The moral consensus has thinned out. The shared stories that once bound a community—whether religious, civic, or familial—have become contested, compartmentalized, or abandoned.

So we’re left in a strange place: we speak in the language of shared moral vision (“good for the community”) while living in a framework that insists such shared visions are either dangerous or impossible. It’s an unstable contradiction.

C.S. Lewis, writing in The Abolition of Man, warned about this very thing. He saw that the loss of shared moral formation—what he called “men without chests”—would produce people with strong feelings and sharp intellects, but no cultivated sense of virtue to guide them. And perhaps even more relevant today, he foresaw the rise of a managerial class who would claim to be value-neutral, but would inevitably impose their preferences under the guise of efficiency, safety, or progress.

It’s not hard to see that dynamic at play now. In place of a shared pursuit of the good, we have personalized algorithms, polarized coalitions, and technocratic justifications. And yet we still want to claim moral clarity. We want to say: this is good for the community—without being able to say who the community is, or how we know what good looks like.

So What Do We Do?

If this sounds bleak, it’s not meant to be. But it is meant to be clarifying. We can’t fix the whole ecosystem. But we can choose to act differently within it. We can resist the temptation to speak for everyone, and instead commit to speaking with someone. We can step back from performance and step toward presence.

Here are a few ways to start:

1. Trade influence for embeddedness.

Find one local place where your presence—not your opinion—matters. Maybe it’s a neighborhood group, a school, a civic meeting, a church. Show up. Keep showing up. That’s where real authority begins.

2. Interrogate the “we.”

The next time you hear “we as a community,” ask yourself: who’s included in that we? Who’s left out? What kinds of people or perspectives are missing? Asking the question doesn’t undermine the community—it honors it.

3. Recover shared goods.

Not everything is subjective. We can still point to goods that are broadly, deeply beneficial: beauty, hospitality, safety, stewardship, truthfulness. Instead of defaulting to “this is my opinion,” try rooting your claims in goods that others can recognize—even if they don’t always agree on the details.

The community isn’t a monolith, and it isn’t a myth. But it’s also not something we can summon by assertion. It’s something we practice into being—slowly, quietly, with others. And that might be the most countercultural kind of influence we can offer.

Scroll through Facebook, and you’d think everyone had a PhD in urban planning and child psychology. Take, for instance, the way new apartment developments are often discussed online. People rush to criticize them as cheaply built and unsightly, despite having done no research on the units or considering why someone might choose to live there. Similarly, parenting choices—whether to homeschool, vaccinate, sleep train, or use screens—have become public battlegrounds, with strangers offering unsolicited opinions on deeply personal decisions.

This isn't just about housing or parenting. It's a broader social shift, one that has turned everyday choices into moral and political battlegrounds. Why do people feel so entitled to weigh in on the lives of others? And why does social media seem to be the accelerant?

The Collapse of the Private Sphere

Before social media, much of life was lived in relative privacy. Sure, people had opinions, but they were limited to family discussions, neighborhood gossip, or the occasional letter to the editor. Now, nearly everything is public. A parent posts a picture of their child eating fast food, and suddenly it's a debate about childhood obesity and corporate exploitation. A city announces a new apartment complex, and the Facebook comments fill with people who wouldn’t live there but feel the need to dictate how others should.

Social media encourages both personal sharing and public feedback, creating an environment where everyone feels compelled to weigh in on choices that were never meant for them. We were perhaps not all meant to be shouting into the same sphere together like this.

Marshall McLuhan famously said, "The medium is the message." If you’ve been with me long enough, that is precisely where we started this journey together. Social media is not just a neutral space where opinions happen to be shared; it actively reshapes how we form and express them. Platforms thrive on outrage and strong opinions because they generate engagement. A measured, "I see the benefits of apartments, but they’re not for me" doesn’t go viral. "These new apartments will destroy our town!" might.

The same dynamic plays out in parenting debates. A reasonable, "I chose to homeschool because it works for our family" is drowned out by more extreme claims that public schools are indoctrination centers or that homeschooling is child neglect. The structure of social media rewards certainty over curiosity, performance over dialogue.

The Irony of Over-Involvement

The irony is that this intense scrutiny often comes from people who are not actually affected by the thing they are debating. The homeowner who fights a new apartment complex will never live in it. The person ranting about another family's parenting will never meet them. Yet the performative aspect of online opinion-sharing makes these issues feel personal, even when they are not.

This is particularly true with local development. The rise of hyper-local Facebook groups has given people a permanent forum to complain about projects that, in the past, they might have ignored. A new grocery store, a bike lane, or an apartment complex isn’t just a change in the neighborhood—it’s an existential threat, a sign of decline, a battle between good and evil. The stakes feel high, even when they are not. The same goes for parenting choices. What should be deeply personal decisions—breastfeeding vs. formula, how much screen time a child gets—turn into moral and cultural flashpoints.

This shift is deeply at odds with the classical liberal ideal of individual autonomy. In a free society, people should be able to make choices about their own lives without excessive interference. The growing impulse to police how others live erodes this principle. It replaces tolerance with judgment and freedom with social coercion.

Part of the answer may be as simple as stepping back. Recognizing that not every decision needs public input. That just because something exists doesn’t mean it requires your approval. That cities, like societies, thrive when people can make different choices without constantly being subject to the scrutiny of those who would never choose that path for themselves.

If you’re about to fire off a comment about a development you’ll never live in or a parenting decision you’ll never make—maybe just… don’t? A return to "It's a free country" might be exactly what we need. Here are a few ways we can behave more helpfully online:

1. Ask Yourself: Is This My Business? Before commenting on something, take a second to ask whether this choice actually affects you. If it doesn’t, maybe it’s not worth your energy. If it does, is the comment section of a post the right place to confront it? Perhaps attending a zoning meeting, county council meeting, or researching further is a better place to start.
   

2. Cultivate Curiosity Instead of Certainty. Instead of immediately taking a hard stance, try asking a question instead. “I wonder why someone might choose that?” is a far more productive mindset than “That’s obviously a terrible idea.”
   

3. Recognize That Not Every Thought Needs to Be Shared. Social media conditions us to believe that every opinion we have is worth broadcasting. But sometimes, the best response is silence. Not every debate needs another voice, especially when it’s about choices you’ll never have to make.

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The Apollo Era and Trusting in Big Things

I was recently reading about the Apollo era and the space race. It reminded me how, in the 1960s, America decided to put a man on the moon and, remarkably, did it. Sure, the journey was messy—full of setbacks, improvisation, and even tragedy—but there was something powerful about a nation believing big dreams were not only possible but achievable. Apollo wasn’t just a technological feat; it was a triumph of a high-trust society willing to tolerate risk because it trusted the shared narrative pushing it forward.

One of the most striking moments in this era was JFK’s 1962 “We choose to go to the Moon” speech. He framed the challenge as something we would do not because it was easy, but because it was hard. More importantly, he spoke as if success was inevitable—not because the technology was already there, but because the collective will existed to make it happen. Contrast that with today: is there a single national project we talk about with that kind of certainty? The very idea feels foreign.

The Trust Collapse in Modern Space Efforts

Today, it's striking how difficult big ambitions have become. Consider NASA's Space Launch System (SLS) or Boeing's Starliner spacecraft. Both projects are mired in delays, cost overruns, and endless complications. Every decision is scrutinized by multiple stakeholders, each amplified by today's fragmented media environment. The public sees every flaw in real-time, every mistake is amplified, and every setback becomes a case study in failure. The result? Paralysis.

SpaceX, by contrast, operates with a different model—faster iteration, tolerance for failure, and a greater degree of autonomy from public scrutiny. When SpaceX explodes a Starship prototype, it’s framed as part of the process. If Boeing or NASA suffers a setback, it’s framed as institutional incompetence. That’s not just a difference in corporate culture—it’s a difference in how much trust exists in the institutions themselves. SpaceX benefits from a narrative of forward motion, while NASA and Boeing get bogged down in layers of distrust and scrutiny.

How Media Fragmentation Killed Unified Action

This shift isn’t just about bureaucracy—it’s about media. Marshall McLuhan famously categorized media as "hot" or "cool." Hot media, like radio, provide clear, authoritative messages that require little audience interaction. They foster shared narratives, clarity, and coherence, building higher societal trust because the message feels settled and authoritative. Roosevelt’s Fireside Chats succeeded precisely because radio created a sense of intimacy and trust.

"Cool" media, like social media and television, are inherently participatory, fragmented, and ambiguous. They demand audience involvement to construct meaning and thrive on engagement, skepticism, and division. When every topic invites immediate public reaction and debate, trust erodes. It's harder to trust institutions when each decision is publicly dissected in real-time, splintered into competing narratives.

This played out during the COVID-19 pandemic. At the start, many expected a national sense of unity—something akin to wartime mobilization. Instead, media fragmentation quickly made collective action nearly impossible. Policies changed rapidly in response to new data, but in a low-trust environment, those shifts looked less like responsiveness and more like inconsistency. Every directive was met with counter-expertise, every mandate with debate. The message was never singular, never authoritative—because the media environment itself prevented that from being possible.

Why Media Matters to Abundance and Dynamism

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson recently argued that we're living in a period of artificial scarcity—regulatory roadblocks preventing abundance. But maybe the deeper issue is that we live in a "low-trust" society shaped by cool media. Abundance and dynamism require shared narratives, common purpose, and trust that institutions can deliver. When our media constantly fragments attention, multiplies voices, and undermines authority, it’s no wonder bold, unified action feels nearly impossible.

Consider again the Apollo missions: They weren't uncontroversial, but disagreements didn't immediately spiral into endless public disputes amplified by fragmented media. Today, every NASA decision becomes a media event, subjected to relentless critique, conspiracy theories, and skepticism.

Reclaiming Dynamism Through Local Trust

If media environments profoundly shape trust—and thus, our capacity for dynamism—then addressing stagnation means rethinking how we communicate. We won’t go back to the simplicity of radio’s hot medium, nor should we idealize it. But recognizing that media shapes our societal trust can help us create clearer, more authoritative narratives amid the noise.

But at the personal level, the most actionable way to rebuild trust is not through grand national projects, but through small-scale, local action. When trust is low at the institutional level, it often remains strong within communities, churches, small businesses, and local initiatives.

If you’re frustrated with stagnation, start with what’s in front of you. Can you organize something tangible in your town? Can you invest in relationships that reinforce trust? Can you build something where success is visible and shared? That’s how trust grows—not through speeches or institutions alone, but through action that people can see, experience, and believe in.

The problem isn't a lack of bold thinking or abundance; it's that our current media environment, by design, undercuts the kind of trust needed for big action. Perhaps this means we must become more intentional storytellers, crafting messages that resonate clearly despite fragmentation. Maybe dynamism today requires not just new policies, but also new ways of communicating them—ones that can withstand the participatory churn without losing coherence.

Ultimately, if we want an era defined by abundance and innovation, we’ll first have to rebuild a foundation of trust—and to do that, we’ll have to master the very mediums currently eroding it.

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Despite having endless entertainment, limitless information, and more convenience than any generation before us, there’s a growing sense that something is missing. We chase happiness through distractions, but the moment we stop scrolling, the emptiness creeps back in.

Why? Because somewhere along the way, we lost sight of what happiness actually is.

Throughout history, happiness wasn’t just about feeling good—it was about becoming good. Philosophers from Aristotle to Aquinas saw happiness as the product of virtue—cultivating wisdom, self-discipline, and meaningful relationships. It required effort, intentionality, and sometimes struggle. The idea was that happiness is not something we passively receive, but something we actively build through the choices we make and the habits we cultivate.

Today, we’re told a very different story. Happiness is something to be consumed, not pursued. If you’re not happy, just buy something, watch something, or click something. The goal isn’t personal growth—it’s instant relief from discomfort. And the media environment we live in thrives on that impulse.

Social media, streaming platforms, and news cycles don’t encourage reflection or depth. They’re built to keep us engaged, stimulated, and scrolling—always moving to the next thing before we’ve had a chance to process the last. Instead of fulfillment, we get fleeting hits of pleasure that disappear as quickly as they arrive.

This isn’t just about technology—it’s about how our entire culture has been rewired. We’ve been conditioned to expect that happiness should be easy, that struggle is unnecessary, and that if we’re not instantly satisfied, something must be wrong. But in every past era, people understood that true fulfillment comes through growth, discipline, and sacrifice—not from avoiding those things.

The Consequences of Chasing the Wrong Thing

This shift from pursuing happiness to consuming distraction has profound consequences:

• We mistake amusement for fulfillment. Entertainment keeps us occupied, but does it leave us better?

• We’ve lost the ability to sit with discomfort. Growth and meaning require effort, but we avoid both by drowning out hard moments with noise.

• We are always stimulated, but rarely satisfied. The next video, the next headline, the next notification—they keep coming, but they don’t fill the void.

• We look outward instead of inward. Rather than cultivating virtue or wisdom, we search for happiness in external validation—likes, follows, and fleeting attention.

The result is a kind of cultural restlessness—people always chasing happiness but never quite catching it. We wonder why we feel so disconnected, so anxious, so dissatisfied. But when happiness is framed as something to be consumed rather than pursued, discontent is inevitable.

Rethinking the Pursuit of Happiness

The lesson from history is clear: true happiness isn’t about having more but about becoming more. It comes from virtue—living with purpose, seeking wisdom, and developing the character to handle life’s ups and downs.

Happiness is found in doing hard things well—in the pursuit of excellence, the resilience to endure setbacks, and the satisfaction of meaningful work. It is not an escape from effort but the reward of it.

To reclaim a more fulfilling life, we can start by making small but meaningful shifts:

• Consume with Purpose – Choose media that enriches rather than distracts. Ask: "Is this helping me grow or just keeping me entertained?"

• Embrace Silence and Reflection – Create space for thinking deeply instead of constantly filling the void with content.

• Engage, Don’t Just React – Read deeply, discuss ideas, and resist the urge to consume passively.

• Seek Fulfillment, Not Just Amusement – Prioritize habits that lead to personal growth rather than fleeting pleasure.

• Develop Patience and Resilience – Recognize that happiness isn’t instant. It requires practice, discipline, and the ability to endure discomfort.

The endless pursuit of entertainment hasn’t made us happier—it’s made us restless. If we want real happiness, we have to stop chasing distractions and start building something deeper.

The pursuit of happiness isn’t about what we consume—it’s about who we become.

Platforms don’t care if we love or hate what we see—they just care that we’re watching. And nothing holds attention like negativity. The result? A culture where “hate-watching” is the norm, doomscrolling is a daily habit, and criticism has become more engaging than the content itself.

The Rise of the Anti-Fan

We’ve entered an era where being a fan isn’t about enjoying something—it’s about obsessing over its failures. Entire online communities exist to pick apart bad writing, lazy storytelling, or ideological missteps. And the more people complain, the more engagement these franchises generate.

Hate-fueled consumption isn’t limited to entertainment. News operates on the same logic. Political partisans follow their ideological opponents closer than their own side, just to stay mad. Headlines are written to provoke reactions, not inform.

This all makes perfect sense in a technopoly, a term coined by Neil Postman to describe a society where technology doesn’t just shape culture—it dictates its terms. In a technopoly, engagement is the only currency that matters, and efficiency trumps depth. The market rewards whatever keeps us clicking, not what’s good, true, or meaningful.

How Technopoly Warps Our Pursuit of Happiness

This environment conditions us to confuse attention with value. If something trends, it must be important. Think back to a few weeks ago when we discussed how certain types of stories dominate the news cycle, making events feel more frequent than they actually are. If a topic dominates our feeds, it must matter. Most of what we consume, however, doesn’t leave us happier, wiser, or more fulfilled. It just keeps us watching.

Historically, happiness wasn’t about being endlessly entertained. The classical idea of happiness—one embraced by the Founders—was tied to virtue, self-discipline, and the pursuit of excellence. Today, we’re encouraged to pursue not virtue, but engagement.

Entertainment used to be a means to an end—a way to enrich life, reflect on deeper truths, or share communal experiences. Now, entertainment is the end, and we consume it passively, often in ways that make us more cynical.

Breaking the Cycle

Technopoly thrives on passivity, but breaking free is possible. A few ways to start:

• Choose What You Engage With—And Why: Before clicking, watching, or doomscrolling, ask: Is this enriching, or just keeping me occupied? Algorithms reward what we consume—so be intentional.

• Stop Hate-Consuming: If something frustrates you, stop watching. Refusing to engage with media that thrives on outrage sends a stronger message than endless critique.

• Curate Your Inputs: Follow people and platforms that inform, challenge, and inspire—not just those that provoke.

• Reclaim Leisure as More Than Distraction: Entertainment should add to life, not just fill the gaps. Seek out media that encourages thought, creativity, or genuine enjoyment.

The Choice is Ours

Technopoly isn’t going away, and the attention economy isn’t changing overnight. But the most powerful shift happens at the level of personal habit. We don’t have to be passive consumers in a system designed to keep us reacting. We can choose to engage differently. More intentionally. More meaningfully.

If happiness is more than just distraction, then our media habits should reflect that. And maybe, just maybe, the most subversive act in a technopoly is simply refusing to play along.

The zoo itself is perfectly fine. It has giraffes and big cats—enough to delight my son, who loves seeing the animals up close. But it’s not remarkable on a national scale, and it doesn’t need to be. Yet, in our media-driven world, it almost feels taboo to admit that something is just good enough rather than the best. That phrase feels like an insult.

There was a time when a place's character was almost entirely shaped by its inhabitants. The food, the architecture, the way people spoke—all reflections of a particular area's history, geography, and culture. But today, that local distinctiveness is being eroded, not by deliberate cultural destruction but by something more insidious: the all-consuming presence of the global village.

Marshall McLuhan coined the term "global village" to describe how electronic media collapsed time and space, instantly connecting people across the world. But with that collapse came a tradeoff—places began to lose their distinctiveness as everything became part of a shared, homogenized culture. The internet accelerates this even further, making trends, aesthetics, and ideas instantly portable, dislodging them from their original contexts and scattering them everywhere.

The Pressure to Compete Nationally

Take Greenville, SC, for example. It has undergone an impressive transformation in the last few decades, earning a spot on endless "Top 10" lists: top 10 small cities, best places to retire, best downtowns in America. And yet, as these accolades stack up, Greenville’s identity seems to shift toward being the place that belongs on those lists rather than simply being itself. The pressure to compete nationally—to be seen, ranked, and validated—seems to be shaping how the city markets itself, how new businesses present themselves, and even how residents talk about where they live.

This phenomenon isn’t unique to Greenville. My sister lives in Knoxville, TN, and every trip I take there reminds me of that. Look at coffee shops in any mid-sized American city, and you’ll likely find the same Edison bulbs, reclaimed wood, and minimalist typography. Look at real estate development, and you’ll see identical luxury apartments with names like "The Lofts at [Insert City Here]." Even independent bookstores, which should be the definition of local character, are starting to look and feel the same everywhere. It’s as if the particular has been sanded down to fit a template of what a good, desirable, modern city should look like.

The irony is that while people crave authenticity and a sense of place, they often default to the aesthetics and branding of everywhere else. This is what Alan Jacobs gets at in From Tech Critique to Ways of Living: the problem isn’t just that technology connects us, but that it reshapes the way we think about where we live, pulling us toward global validation rather than local flourishing. When everything is connected, it’s easy to assume that your city or town needs to measure up to a national standard, rather than simply serving the people who live there.

What Would It Look Like to Reclaim Local Distinctiveness?

It would require resisting the urge to frame every city improvement in terms of national rankings. It would mean focusing less on how a place is perceived by outsiders and more on how it actually functions for those who call it home. And perhaps most importantly, it would mean recognizing that not everything needs to be the "best." Some things just need to be good enough—not to the world, but to the people who use them.

If the global village flattens local distinctiveness, then the response must be to reclaim the value of the particular—not because it competes well on a national stage, but because it is ours. I like our little zoo in Greenville. My wife and I have a family membership, and I love that I can just pop down and sit with my son and watch the giraffes to his heart’s content. And yes, there are bigger and better zoos in the world, but I’m trying to be more of a person who is perfectly content letting those zoos fade into the background for now.

This isn’t about accepting mediocrity—it’s about broadening our understanding of what makes something good. True authenticity isn’t about fitting an aesthetic mold; it’s about creating spaces where people can genuinely be themselves. That means not every place will cater to my personal tastes, and that’s okay. The more people feel free to experiment, to create businesses or public spaces that reflect their own vision rather than an expected formula, the more likely it is that something will emerge that truly resonates with me.

Not everything in life needs to be an “experience” or a destination. Some things just need to be. So let’s stop marketing our lives and start living them.

You’re at a family dinner, and you mention a major news event. Your cousin shrugs, having never heard of it. Your uncle shares a different perspective from what you read this morning. Suddenly, you realize you’re not just debating opinions—you’re living in different realities. But why?

Believe it or not, this isn’t just a media problem. It’s a physics problem, too.

The Physics of Time and Perception

I’ve always been drawn to time travel. Stories about time loops and alternate realities fascinated me from a young age (a steady diet of Back to the Future screenings played a role). Even outside fiction, I’ve loved books that explore time for non-scientists. One recently made me see surprising parallels between physics and media.

In physics, there is no universal “now,” says Carlo Rovelli in The Order of Time. Time doesn’t flow the same way everywhere. Two people in different places don’t experience the same present. Information—light or data—takes time to travel, meaning your “now” isn’t necessarily someone else’s. This idea helps explain our fractured media environment.

Media Timelines and Algorithmic Delay

The same principle applies to media and information. The news cycle moves at different speeds for different people, influenced by habits, timing, and algorithms. Just as two distant observers in space perceive time differently, people in the same society can live in separate informational realities.

I know I checked out of the Marvel Cinematic Universe for a bit there, but the scenes of Dr. Strange jumping between timelines in Doctor Strange in the Multiverse of Madness comes to mind. Each reality was different (some more than others), but none operated by the exact same laws (or laws of nature for that matter) as the original timeline. Depending on what media we consume, we might be living in totally different versions of reality. One person might see an event as a global crisis, while another dismisses it as a hoax. Neither is necessarily “wrong” within their reality—different media timelines just shape them.

Traditional newspapers report daily. Cable news updates every few hours. Social media refreshes in minutes. Meanwhile, books and long-form journalism span months or years. Depending on your sources, your perception of “now” may differ from someone else’s.

Adding another layer, social media algorithms filter content based on engagement. If an event happens but your algorithm deems it irrelevant, it might as well not exist in your version of the present. One group might intensely discuss a new issue while another is still reacting to last week’s conversation.

Why We Can’t Agree on Reality

When people operate on different media timelines, it becomes difficult to have a shared reality. Some people hear about events immediately, while others find out days later (or never). What’s urgent in one media ecosystem may be outdated or irrelevant in another. When people can’t even agree on what’s happening, it’s easy to assume the worst about others’ perspectives.

Can We Sync Our Timelines?

So how do we navigate this multiverse of information? While we may never return to a perfectly unified reality, we can take steps to close the gaps. To close these informational divides, we must be intentional about how we consume and share information. A few key ideas that can help you get started:

1. Diversify Your Sources – Read across different media formats (print, online, long-form, social media) to get a broader view of unfolding issues.

2. Be Aware of Algorithmic Filters – Your social media feed isn’t a neutral or complete version of reality.

3. Engage in Slower Thinking – Instead of reacting instantly to the latest story, take time to absorb and reflect before forming an opinion.

4. Talk to People Outside Your Bubble – Conversations with people who consume media differently can expose gaps in your timeline.

The Need for a Shared Present

In physics, simultaneity is relative—there’s no single, objective “now.” But in culture and politics, if we don’t work toward a shared sense of reality, division deepens. Recognizing the media timelines we inhabit and intentionally expanding our perspectives can help bridge these gaps.

It's always struck me that at the end of Back to the Future, Part 1, Marty isn’t back in his original timeline (even though the film presents it as such). He changed how his parents met, and while he winds back up in a similar timeline, he will never return to his original reality.

I think that’s a good realization for us to have. Barring some catastrophic event, our digitally fractured reality seems to be our table stakes for now. The decades the world experience of a singular “mass media” turned out to be an outlier, not a culmination of “progress.” For most of history, people navigated fragmented realities. It’s only in recent decades that mass media created an illusion of unity. We’ve lost the skills necessary to navigate a fractured world; we can (and must) relearn them.

Stray notes: For those interested, this is a great summary of time travel in fiction:

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After World War II, America redesigned its cities to accommodate cars, not people. Sidewalks disappeared, highways cut through neighborhoods, and everything spread out. The goal? Make transportation fast and efficient. However, the result was cities where people were disconnected, dependent on cars, and lacking communal spaces.

Many older cities at least had a history of being walkable. So, even in a car-focused world, we still feel the pull toward human-centered spaces. But the internet? It never had a past to return to. Almost from the start, it was built around machines, not people.

Optimizing for Machines, Not Meaning

In the few years of the public internet before search engines, content was largely hand-curated. Websites linked to other sites, forums, and bulletin boards helped users find valuable content. Reputation and expertise mattered more than gaming an algorithm. People explored the web in a way that encouraged discovery, surprise, and deeper engagement.

Search engines changed that. They made information easier to find and reshaped the internet to prioritize rankings over actual knowledge. To be clear: this shift wasn’t all bad, or even mostly bad—search engines made the web searchable at an enormous scale. But, like all technologies, it had tradeoffs:

• Discovery gave way to optimization—Instead of stumbling onto something new, content is now designed to rank well rather than inform.

• Depth gave way to speed—Search engines reward quick, surface-level answers, not deep, thoughtful discussions.

• Human curation gave way to algorithmic control—Machines decide what we see, prioritizing engagement metrics over real value.

AI is making these tradeoffs even more pronounced. If search engines cause humans to reshape content for ranking, AI generates optimized content outright. Machines feed off their output, creating an endless loop of recycled, shallow information.

Without meaningful direction, AI doesn’t discover new knowledge—it repurposes what’s already out there, often flattening nuance and reinforcing biases. As AI-generated content floods the web, search engines index it, and the cycle repeats. If search engines turned the internet into a highway system, AI threatens to make it a closed-loop maze—where everything looks familiar, but nothing leads anywhere new. The exurbs of the digital age are upon us.

The Tradeoff: Efficiency Over Experience

But it’s not just changing what we see—it’s changing how we think.

Just like car-centric cities made walking inconvenient, machine-optimized content has made deep thinking online rare. The more we optimize for speed, the more we lose depth, originality, and genuine connection.

• From active seeking to passive consumption—Instead of searching and exploring, we wait for AI-driven feeds to serve pre-selected content that reinforces our beliefs.

• From thoughtful discourse to reactionary engagement—Online discussion now rewards outrage and hot takes instead of careful, thoughtful debate.

• From long-form thinking to fractured attention—Algorithms push quick dopamine hits over deep reading, making it harder to focus and engage critically.

The tradeoff is clear: machine-driven content has made us less curious, less thoughtful, and less in control of the knowledge we consume. Like I mentioned in my article last week, it’s easy to get dragged into the media consumption we are given, rather than digging deeper, exploring a myriad of sources, and coming up with our own conclusions.

Rebuilding the Internet for People: What You Can Do

People are working to reclaim cities by making them human-focused again. The internet needs the same shift—but where to even begin? Here’s how you can take back control of your online experience:

• Break free from algorithmic feeds—Subscribe to newsletters, visit websites directly, and avoid endless scrolling. Rather than pulling you into another auto-generated suggestion, look for content that ends.

• Prioritize human curation—Follow trusted writers, blogs, and discussion-based communities where real people decide what’s valuable, not algorithms.

• Engage with long-form content—Read books, essays, and in-depth articles instead of relying on headlines and social media snippets.

• Contribute, don’t just consume—Write, discuss, and create rather than passively scrolling. Human conversation is the antidote to machine-generated noise.

The way we use the Internet shapes the future of knowledge. We built cities for cars and lost sight of people. Let’s not do the same with the Internet.

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A plane crash, a mass shooting, a stock market plunge, a celebrity scandal—each of these events feels like the only thing that has ever happened. They dominate our feeds, spark endless discourse, and disappear almost as suddenly as they arrive, replaced by the next urgent headline. But something lingers: the subtle shift in our perception of reality.

Is the world more dangerous than before? Are disasters more frequent? Have things reached some unprecedented state of decline? Or is something else at play?

The Algorithmic Engine of Recency Bias

Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky identified what’s known as recency bias—our tendency to give disproportionate weight to recent events when forming judgments. If something just happened, we assume it’s more common than it is. If it’s fresh in our minds, we overestimate its probability of happening again.

This is a well-documented cognitive shortcut, but what happens when it’s coupled with an information environment designed—at an architectural level—to maximize the prominence of the recent?

Algorithmic media, from social feeds to recommendation engines, prioritizes engagement. And nothing engages like what’s happening right now. Older information fades from visibility, often not because it’s irrelevant but because the machine values newness over depth. A breaking event isn’t just news—it’s fuel for the attention economy.

The result? Our brains, already wired for recency bias, are given an IV drip of confirmation. The event we just saw feels like it must be happening all the time because it’s all we see. Our priors—the mental models we use to predict the world—get rewritten, not based on statistical reality, but on what the algorithm chooses to show us.

There’s another effect at play: the shortening of cultural memory. The past has always been a contested space, but in an era where the pace of digital information erases context faster than ever, it barely stands a chance. What happened a week ago feels like ancient history. News cycles move at warp speed, and events that would have once shaped discourse for months are now buried under a deluge of new content.

The implications are profound. When each crisis feels without precedent, we lose the ability to learn from history. Patterns become invisible. We react like every new event is a one-off rather than part of a recurring cycle. This is particularly dangerous in public policy, financial markets, and social movements, where long-term memory is crucial for making informed decisions.

Fighting the Recency Machine

So, how do we push back against a system that feeds our worst cognitive instincts?

1. Seek context over immediacy. When a significant event occurs, look for historical parallels. Read long-form analysis, not just the breaking updates.

2. Resist the algorithm’s pull – Diversify your information sources. Be intentional about following thinkers who emphasize historical patterns and big-picture analysis.

3. Reclaim personal memory – If something feels unprecedented, ask: Is it? Find out when something similar happened before and compare.

4. Slow down – Our brains aren’t meant to absorb information at the pace of an algorithm. Taking breaks from the feed isn’t just healthy—it’s a form of cognitive resistance.

We can’t undo recency bias entirely—it’s built into how we process information. However, we can recognize how algorithmic media amplifies it and actively work to correct it. The past still matters, but only if we fight to remember it.

That’s it for now, thanks for reading, and see you again soon.

• I’ve been thinking a lot lately about dynamism vs. stasism. At a high level, dynamism embraces change, innovation, and decentralized problem-solving, trusting that progress emerges through experimentation and adaptation. Stasism, by contrast, seeks control and stability, favoring top-down regulation to manage uncertainty and preserve existing structures. I’ve found this a handy way to engage with the current discourse around Elon Musk, Steve Bannon, and the rise of the “tech oligarchs.” I was introduced to these terms via a great episode of The Remnant by guest Virginia Postrel. Her 1998 book The Future and Its Enemies is on my shelf waiting to be read but that concept has been in the back of my mind as I’ve listened to a lot of discourse around this subject. I have generally found myself persuaded by the “dynamist” arguments; still, as a conservative, I am also persuaded by the need to preserve existing structures unless there’s a compelling reason to throw them out. Thinking through these topics while listening to some recent interviews has been very helpful:

  • Peter Thiel on Trump, Elon, and the Triumph of the Counter-Elites

  • Marc Andreessen on AI, Tech, Censorship, and Dining with Trump

  • Sam Altman on His Feud with Elon Musk—and the Battle for AI's Future

  • Opinion | How Democrats Drove Silicon Valley Into Trump’s Arms - The New York Times

• Related, The Free Press has been on fire lately, specifically with their Honestly with Bari Weiss podcast. Here are some recent favorites not listed above:

  • Tom Holland on How Christianity Remade the World

  • What to Expect in 2025: Predictions from Niall Ferguson, John McWhorter, Nellie Bowles, Leandra Medine, and more

  • How Not to Die in 2025

  • What We Can Learn from the Ancient Stoics

• I went down a zoning rabbit hole (as evidenced by my post a couple of weeks back), which really means I’ve been thinking a lot about how we build our cities. On the one hand, strict zoning rules that limit density push new homes farther out, making providing roads, utilities, and services more expensive. Since residential areas don’t always generate enough tax revenue to cover these costs, cities often raise taxes, frustrating residents. At the same time, supporters of zoning argue that it helps maintain neighborhood character, prevent overcrowding, and reflect what homeowners want. Some also worry that removing these rules could lead to rapid development that strains schools, roads, and public spaces. This was a big topic during my county council campaign and one I’ve continued to think a lot about. In my digging, I found many arguments presented in Arbitrary Lines persuasive about abolishing zoning altogether, but this is undoubtedly a live topic I’m interested in.

• Another area I’ve been thinking through lately is mimetic desire—the idea that we don’t just independently form our wants but instead model them on what others desire. Luke Burgis’ Wanting (which draws on René Girard) helped me see how this plays out in everything from politics to tech to urban planning. Burgis emphasizes that to escape the clutches of mimesis, we have to surround ourselves with different models. He proposes doing this by engaging with a broader intellectual tradition, which is why his Philosophy for Creators and Entrepreneurs: A Curated, Anti-Mimetic Reading List struck me. He argues that modern life is deeply siloed—business leaders talk only about efficiency, religious conversations often stay within their own theological shorthand, and intellectual discussions are confined to academia. This fragmentation makes it harder to form a cohesive view of meaning, creativity, and progress. His reading list challenges this by spanning centuries, requiring engagement with ideas that have shaped human civilization. Instead of only focusing on the latest thinkers or industry trends, he encourages cross-disciplinary reading—philosophy, history, theology—to build a richer framework for understanding what we create and why. It has made me reflect on how many of the debates I’m following—dynamism vs. stasism, zoning, tech oligarchs—aren’t just about policy choices but about deeper, competing visions of human flourishing shaped by what (and who) we allow to influence us. Last year, I listened to The Odyssey for the first time all the way through, and at the moment I’m reading Confessions by St Augustine. I hope to engage with more of these titles as I go.

Whew. Thanks for letting me get that off my chest. See you again soon.

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In a recent issue of The New Atlantis, Nicholas Carr sheds light on a forerunner to McLuhan, Harold Innis. Innis, a Canadian professor in the early 20th century, made significant contributions to a wide array of subjects. Of particular interest to us, he laid the groundwork for theories that McLuhan and his followers would later expand upon. McLuhan himself acknowledged this influence, stating, "I am pleased to think of my own book, The Gutenberg Galaxy, as a footnote to the observations of Innis on the subject of the psychic and social consequences, first of writing then of printing."1

You can see a quick summary of the work of Innis here.

There’s a lot of great stuff in this article, and I would highly encourage you to go check out the full piece, but one part that stood out to me in the piece came from his “What do we do about it” section that follows the rather bleak diagnosis that frequently comes in these types of articles:

Deeply versed in classical history and philosophy, Innis venerated the oral traditions of conversation and debate, teaching and tutoring, that formed the heart of ancient Greek culture. In their intimate, human scale, he saw an antidote to mechanized media, a means of escaping the dominion of information empires. A spoken word may be as evanescent as a tweet or a snap, but the acts of talking and listening — together, in one place — remain unmatched as vehicles for critical, creative, and communal thought.2

Innis valued face-to-face dialogue, seeing it as a powerful way to think creatively and connect with others, unlike modern media. This idea brings back to mind Andy Crouch’s, The Life We’re Looking For, one of those easy reads I did in 2022 that’s lived rent-free in my head ever since. Specifically, in a podcast interview about the book, Crouch is asked in the context of a church minister what people should be doing to create the environments Crouch describes in the book.

Discussing the dissatisfaction that almost everyone has with their use of technology in contemporary life, Crouch calls up the idea of focal practices3. He talks about the importance of having “heightened meals” prepared communally and shared in a manner that makes the time unique (you can listen to the full question and it’s response starting around the 46:50 mark)

This is one of these recurring themes that I find myself landing back on again and again: the way technology steals my ability to be present. Innis’ notion of technologies of space, such as the internet and social media, mean that we are always everywhere (which also means we are nowhere in particular) in our mental space. There are days I could tell you more about the happenings in Jerusalem, Kyiv, and Washington than what’s happening along Main Street, Taylors.

Carr and Crouch emphasize the importance of the voice because it is inherently a limited medium that, by necessity, forces us to be physically present with one another in the same context if we are to have a genuine connection. Innis’s thoughts have many fascinating implications, but today, I challenge us to consider how we can create more intentional and focused practices and spaces where we can truly hear others and, hopefully, find the life we are looking for in the process.

______________________

If you’re intrigued by the Focal Practices idea, check out Alan Jacobs on it here.

Share Context and Content

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One thing I’ve thought a lot about over the past year is zoning. Zoning is a system of rules that governs land use in a given area. Originating in the early 20th century, zoning divides cities and towns into districts designated for specific purposes, such as residential, commercial, or industrial use. It also prescribes the density or intensity of those uses in each district. Effectively, zoning is the context that shapes the content of our communities.

Zoning was born out of a desire for stability. When early zoning maps were created, the goal was to set clear expectations for how the land would be used, ensuring a sense of permanence and predictability in community planning. Planners envisioned these maps as static blueprints—once a parcel of land was designated for single-family homes, factories, or commercial buildings, it was assumed that those uses would remain unchanged. It was recognized that the maps might need to be updated occasionally, but the idea was that experts could figure out the right mixes of uses and set us on a great path forward. Effectively, we trade part of the rights to do what we want on our property for the stability of knowing that everyone around us will be constrained and that an unbiased arbitrator will decide what’s appropriate.

This dynamic is rooted in an idea central to the Progressive Era: the belief in the power of the “unbiased expert.” Zoning assumes that a planner can determine the best use for every parcel of land, regardless of the complex, subjective needs of the people who live there.

There’s a core tension here: humans are bad at predicting the future. We are subject to all sorts of biases in our thinking, and while we can employ tools to help us compensate for those biases, they are never perfect. The reality of zoning bears this out. In Greenville County, for example, rezoning is routine, with requests constantly reshaping the map to reflect changing economic and community needs. This dynamic creates even more tension:

• Existing property owners view their zoning as a promise that this is how their community will always be, and many build their lives around that promise.

• Prospective property owners or even existing ones who want to do something different with their property see the reality of the ever-changing zoning map and believe that with appropriate resources and political maneuvering, they can change the zoning to meet their desires.

This intent vs. reality divide leads nowhere pretty, as you can imagine. Those who bought into the promise feel betrayed, and those who have watched the map be changed so frequently in other places don’t understand the fuss.

Zoning makes the promise of stability explicit, but we buy into unspoken promises in other domains frequently:

• We believe our car is working great until the day it goes into the shop.

• We believe jobs are safe and secure until they are not.

• We believe our health can be counted on until one day, it can’t.

These promises, either spoken or unspoken, will eventually come face to face with reality. The question for us is, when faced with these realities, how do we respond? Some contexts will call for a fight, while some will call for us to concede, but regardless, it’s essential to think through what our expectations are ahead of time to ensure they align with the reality we are facing.

If you’re interested in learning more about zoning, there’s a lot of content out there. I’ve recently finished Arbitrary Lines by M. Nolan Gray, and I think the way he talks about it is very understandable. He is very much on the “we should abolish all this” side of the argument and doesn’t pretend to be unbiased, but I think he offers one of the best explanations of zoning for a layman I’ve encountered.

With that, thanks for reading, and see you again next time.

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