3-Item Status

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk

• Listening: All My Freaks by Divorce

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the 2026 Iran War

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Corporate Buzzwords & the pod is about School Phone Bans

• I also have a fun little milestone (one-year anniversary) for my MKE Meetups project this week

Hugs Not Nuggs

It’s been said that the average person living today—especially in wealthy countries—will enjoy a better overall quality of life than an emperor living a few hundred years ago, and I tend to think that’s true.

Average life- and health-spans have dramatically increased even since the mid-20th century, and the portfolio of conveniences, understandings, entertainments, rights, and other baseline benefits we enjoy simply for having been born in the right place and time is astounding when considered within the total context of human history.

Not all change is positive, of course, and we collectively experience plenty of semi-regular backsliding. There are also changes that are “good” in one sense and “pretty dang terrible” in another, and I would argue that the majority of our social and communication infrastructure moving online, and the subsequent prioritization of engagement metrics over all others, falls into that latter category.

This isn’t universally the case, and there are degrees of engagement that are more healthful than harmful. Just as allowing oneself to periodically eat fast food rather than strictly adhering to a lifestyle-defining, nutritionally perfect diet 100% of the time can be beneficial, it could likewise be argued that occasional, moderated exposure to TikTok dance videos and Instagram puppy memes is actually not so bad, and possibly even better than zero exposure to such things.

When taken to extremes, though, even the most innocuous-seeming apps and platforms can be deleterious to our health. And because of the powerful incentives that shape these pseudo-social online spaces, and the ease with which we can experience them (compared to comparable experiences in the real world) we’re more likely to engage with them in extreme and unhealthful—rather than periodic, not-so-bad, maybe even on-balance good—ways.

Real life is a lot messier and more frictional than online socialization, and interacting with other human beings is a lot more complex, stressful, and at times anxiety-inducing than engaging with online content.

You can’t like-and-subscribe your way into a friendship, and experiencing the full range of human emotion with another person who has an inner-life just as rich as your own requires effortful thought and communication that’s more dense and elaborate than a reaction emoji.

If social media is the fast food of human interaction, real-life exposure to other human beings is a complex, home-made meal.

Buying and consuming a box of chicken nuggets is casually simple to the point of being utterly thoughtless. Orchestrating a kitchen full of ingredients into a delicious, subtle, dietarily rich final product can seem like a ridiculously heavy lift in comparison.

But even though our internal reward systems love the salts, fats, and sugars of ultra-processed snack foods, we’re only really fueled, at a deeper level, by the weightier stuff: by hugs, not nuggs.

I don’t personally think there’s anything wrong with the periodic cheat-food, and I think it’s possible to become so obsessed with a type of anti-technology purity that we miss out on really stellar memes and harmless, superficial interactions that might serve as the right anxiety-easing brain-snack at the right moment.

But these lighter-weight, nutritionally vacant options are best served as irregular additions to lives enriched by the deeper, hard-earned and more eudemonia-inducing stuff that ideally makes up the foundation of our diets, dialogues, and lives.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• Bring On Defunct: The iPod Enthralls Young Music Listeners

• China’s 450km/h Bullet Train Is the Fastest Ever Built

• On Similes, Good and Bad

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

I’ve just started the 4th draft of a novel I’m working on (Methuselahs), and I’m having a lot of fun figuring out what the second year of my MKE Meetups project will look like, while also working through the catalog of apps I’ve built to give everything a polish and minor upgrade (I just got a new version of my writing app Authorcise out the door, for instance; if you’ve got a Mac, it’s free and a lot of fun to use).

It’s been wonderful seeing Milwaukee come back to life this past week as the weather has modestly improved and we’ve had some nice, sunny, warm-ish days. It doesn’t exactly die when we hit the deep-freeze months, but there are a lot of people walking (often with their dogs and kids) around my neighborhood when it’s above 40, and that makes all the difference in the world for the energy of a place.

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

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The fix for looksmaxxing? A wholesome, affirming forum for bald people.

3-Item Status

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: Catastrophe by Christopher Ferguson

• Listening: What Do I Know by Deep Sea Diver

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Better Batteries

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about the Tocqueville Effect & the pod is about Mental Fatigue

Break to Make

I recently updated the operating systems on my iPhone and Macbook Pro, as usual waiting a while because the folks behind some of the software I use drag their heels on getting confirmed-compatible versions of their offerings out the door. I also try to the avoid the worst of the new-release bugs that hide in every OS upgrade across every possible computing platform, these days.

The new versions of both OSes are pretty terrible. I’m sure this feeling isn’t universal, but the general consensus seems to be that Apple stumbled on this, producing strangely ugly, slow, disarrayed base-layers for their two most important platforms.

Some of the apps I use every day are now borderline unusable, lagging and sputtering under the weight of all the unnecessary decorations and doodads that have been crammed into this “upgrade.” My outdated phone, after years of amiably puttering along like a fresh device, is suddenly acting its age, creaking and sighing every time I ask it to perform even the simple of tasks.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m not happy with all this. And the incessant insistence that I upgrade—please upgrade, don’t you want to upgrade, you must upgrade now—delivered by popups and other dark pattern elements splashed across my screens, only add insult to injury.

They forced this on me, and I’m irritated about it.

That said, in these sorts of moments I try to remind myself that new stuff will almost always be irritating or terrifying at first, at least to some portion of the intended audience. And the older we get, the more likely we are to be thus disarrayed by novelty, because we become more set in our ways, more prone to exploit rather than explore, and more latently skeptical of the unfamiliar (on average, at least).

I also try to remind myself that truly wonderful next-step evolutions seldom arrive fully baked and perfectly conceived. In most cases they’re partway there; an interesting vision bundled up in an annoying, detrimental, maybe even confoundingly bad wrapper. It can take a while for the good to be identified and amplified, and the bad whittled away.

This isn’t just true of tech giants and their products. Every good thing I’ve ever made, all the incredibly valuable, fulfilling, healthful next-steps I’ve ever taken, have been processes, not one-shot pivots. And almost always we have to break things in order to make things: we can patch and suture the old for a long while, iterating on what works. But at some point that awkward collage of ideas will need to be reassessed and, ideally, reborn as something new; a fresh canvas to tweak, refine, and over the course of years revise into its own patchwork masterpiece (which will then be destroyed and replaced).

This isn’t always a fun thought, but it’s this or stagnation.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as another app fails to load and another digital tool I rely upon to do my job stutters and shuts itself down, the machines running them collapsing under the weight of un-asked-for tacky UI elements and yet another, buggy software update.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• In Every Language

• Noble Gas Impasse

• Peel-And-Stick Solar Panels

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

After a couple of 70-ish degree (F) days, during which everyone was outside, in shorts, getting sunburned, the state of Wisconsin just basically shut down in the face of an historic blizzard. The weather whiplash is real up here, folks.

In other news, I’m in the process of revising my Truly Simple Tools app portfolio (lots of updates already released) and outlining/planning some new apps I’ve been thinking about for a while, but haven’t had the time to hunker down and tackle.

I’m also about a fifth of the way through a new, major (4th) draft of Methuselahs, which is just such a fun story and I can’t wait to share it with beta readers after this (and then a comparably quick spelling/grammar/etc) draft.

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

Or hit me up via other methods: Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or ant scan.

Dyslexia and the reading wars.

3-Item Status

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: The Alternative by Nick Romeo

• Listening: Running/Planning by CMAT

If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.

New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the Cuban Oil Blockade

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Cognitive Shuffling & the pod is about the Region-Beta Paradox

• I’ve also recent completed an update of all my iOS/macOS apps, if you’re interested in checking out the Truly Simple Tools portfolio :)

Templates and Scripts

I have a general sense that—wherever we end up next, however our technologies and politics evolve, and whatever shapes our communities and systems and social norms and economic realities are nudged into as a consequence of those evolutions—it’ll still be beneficial to have a keen sense of self-knowledge.

By self-knowledge I mean an understanding of who we are, what we want, what we care about, our relative advantages and disadvantages in different spheres of life, a rough comprehension of our capacity to suffer and sacrifice and love and give and gracefully receive, and the priorities (and variables) that underpin and inform all of these things.

Beyond providing us with a more thorough awareness and appreciation of our own uniqueness (and consequently, that of everyone else on the planet), self-knowledge also contributes to our capacity for self-expression.

As our self-understanding grows, so does our ability to share that cognizance via conversations with our partners and friends, through our votes and other efforts to influence society, law, and governance, through our art, and even through what we’re willing to do to pay the bills (and the nature of the entities we’re willing to do those things for).

Going deeper than the superficial on this can require a fair bit of work, in part because much of what we think we believe or care about, what we consider to be “us,” isn’t actually fundamental to who we are. Throughout our lives, all sorts of (often well-meaning) entities give us templates and scripts to work from, and we adopt these beliefs, rationales, and routines because, well, why not? What’s the alternative? This lending of philosophical motivation starts young and never really stops.

Peeling off those outer layers to figure out what’s beneath them can be the effort of a lifetime, and it can be disorienting making progress, because rather than discovering some latent, long-suffocated belief system or portfolio of goals underneath all those inherited worldviews, many of us will instead discover a whole lot of nothing, not second, complete and more perfect self that’s been hidden away, waiting for us to uncover it.

From there, our second effort of a lifetime is to fill that nothing with something; but this time, we ideally opt for something more us-shaped.

I think a lot of people, by adulthood, has at least a shadowy sense of this undertaking, and has probably even taken a few steps toward figuring out who they are, sans all those external doctrines and dogmas.

Something that I’ve personally found to be helpful in this effort is semi-regularly stepping back and imagining that the forces that shape my life, my decisions, my sense of the possible and impossible, today, are no longer there.

Money is gone, politics have become unrecognizable (or unnecessary). Maybe we no longer need our bodies, or we’ve discovered other intelligent life that maybe has some answers (about the big questions) for us. Maybe we’ve achieved world peace and post-scarcity and now we just have to figure out what to do with all our free time.

If things were to be shaken up in fundamental ways, who would I be? What causes, what goals would be important enough to me that I would want to invest myself in them? What would shape my actions, my overall trajectory, for the balance of my life?

Then, stepping back to now, to this reality: what does that tell me about who I actually am, what I should actually be doing, and what I should actually be working toward?

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• A Japanese Glossary of Chopsticks Faux Pas

• The Little Town Making Nearly All of China’s Lanterns

• ‘World’s Largest Battery’

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

I’m heading back out to Seattle in about a week and a half, and I’m already preparing for that, which mostly means doing double the normal amount of work so that I can really be there while I’m there, with as few deadlines and external responsibilities pulling me away from family time as possible.

I do have some fun meetups and other little social get-togethers between now and my departure, though, which should serve as nice pressure valves on what might otherwise be a too-aggressive work schedule.

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

Or hit me up via other methods: Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or yoghurt delivery.

Writing factory: notes from a life on China’s assembly lines.

3-Item Status

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: Babel by RF Kuang

• Listening: Limelight by Tune-Yards

If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.

Note

• I’ll be visiting family in Seattle next week, so I’m skipping next week’s newsletter, and will talk to you again the following week :)

New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Ukraine and Iran

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Gender Conformity & the pod is about Mental Subtraction

Directional Play

Hobbies are great because you don’t have to invest too much of yourself in them, but you absolutely can if you like, and if you do, you tend to get more out of them.

You can pick up a hobby—say coloring in coloring books or creating monsters with Legos or playing disc golf or performing interpretive dance—and you don’t have to convince a single person to give you money in exchange for your brick-hydra or your pubescence-inspired tap-dance. You can just do it, and keep doing it, and no one has to like what you do or how you do it but you.

I like to think of hobbies as directional play, as while hobbies tend to be fun (or otherwise enjoyable), there’s also room for growth and development. You can build really simplistic Lego monsters with a few dozen pieces, or you can engineer staggeringly large and complex grotesques. You can have a blast at either end of that spectrum, but you can also choose to progress from one side to the other, and you can stop anywhere you like along the way (and if you find a spot you especially like, you can stay there forever without negative consequence).

That directionality is nice because growth and accomplishment can feel good and be fulfilling.

But ‘play’ is also important, here, because most of us don’t play enough: we don’t just mess around, try and do things just for their own sake. Not as adults, anyway. And it’s liberating to have something in our lives that we don’t have to be good at, and in which we can just fumble around in whichever manner feels right at any given moment.

Hobbies can also, sometimes, evolve into other things, including professions.

There’s nothing at all wrong with this when it happens, but most of us will be best served by periodically reminding ourselves that not everything needs to be monetized, and not everything needs to be purposeful (in the sense of goosing some kind of growth metric, or helping us develop in a quantifiable way).

It’s okay just to do and try things, and to have hobbies that help us pass the time, give us an excuse to be around others, and that stoke and sate our curiosity.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• An Unstoppable Mushroom Is Tearing Through North American Forests

• Everything I Know About Self-Publishing

• How to Network When You’re Socially Anxious

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

I am exhausted.

It’s a lot of work, getting ready for these Seattle trips. But these past few days I’ve also been knocked flat by whatever this cold/flu/covid thing is that’s going around right now. I thought I dodged it, but it finally got me.

So I’ve been aggressively resting in order to get over it (or bare minimum no longer contagious) by the time I leave for Seattle. But man, not fun.

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

Or hit me up via other methods: Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or lonely wiki.

Western AI models “fail spectacularly” in farms and forests abroad.