Scrapbook

In most western contexts [‘normal functioning’] tends to mean: able to work, able to produce, able to participate in the economy without too much friction. The question of whether someone is mentally well is now almost inseparable from the question of whether they’re pulling their weight.

As you get further out, the city spreads and becomes disjointed. There, you are conscious of being a pedestrian where one is not expected, or particularly welcome: Walking beside the highway. Wandering past industrial zones. Cutting through car parks. Despite the presence of pathways, walking can feel like an act of rebellion.

Public transports has a set, non-negotiable speed of movement: it slows you down. It takes you the longer way. It makes the junctions and the hubs of the city explicit.

When I use AI tools, I’m aware that I’m participating in something I haven’t fully consented to – underwriting a set of values, a concentration of power, a particular vision of the future that I didn’t choose and wouldn’t vote for. It’s a reality constructed for us by platforms and capital. Engagement with it feels like complicity, but complete disengagement seems ever more futile. Stepping back and saying ‘I’ll watch from the sidelines’ or even downing the tools entirely (i.e. changing careers) is a privileged option only available to some.

In recent weeks I’ve had conversations with friends and contacts in which they have aired their growing frustrations with the deadening impact of AI on their work. It’s not that their companies are about to let them go, it’s just that everything they do has become that little bit duller.

[Bad Bunny] is aware that he has a global audience and that he's not trying to exclude anyone, but it's more about including people in his Puerto Rican culture, as opposed to doing something that maybe feels less authentic to appeal to people in a way that then the meaning is lost of what he's originally intending to do with his music.

Do a creative thing. Write, draw, paint, photograph, build a web project, design a game. Do something that makes life worth living. Forget your job. Forget your life admin. Forget the siren call of readily-streamable slopflix. Put down your phone. Stop worrying about AI and AI lunatics. Give yourself a night off from the climate crisis and useless governments. Maybe just cook a different and interesting dinner. Please remember to live instead of just being alive.

The question isn’t whether AI will change us, but whether and how we’ll fight for any say in how.

If we rest sooner, we notice that rest is more active. Rest then is going for a walk or spending some time with some friends. It's a different kind of rest because we've still got capacity to do something at all which we actually break completely when we [wait to the extremes until we rest]

…there’s a promising future for anyone willing to double down on the role of conscious human connection in their work. And even if I’m wrong in terms of earning a living – even if the AI Evangelist Podcast Men of early 2025 turn out to be right, and it’s all over for human creativity – I still think that anyone who proceeds on this assumption will experience a more meaningful and vibrant life, a life filled with more aliveness.

This was the first in a series of conversational fly-swats that the pair of them did to each other. Someone would float a topic in the air that could open up at least five minutes of pleasant chit-chat, and the other would whack the plastic swatter over it, killing small-talk potential in seconds.

There's a reason rich people want you to vote with your wallet. It's because they have thicker wallets than you do. Agonizing about your consumption choices is a waste of time. […] If you want to shop at your corner bookshop, I applaud you for doing so. And my book is available in finer bookshops everywhere. But don't kid yourself that that's going to deprive Jeff Bezos of his next penis-shaped rocket launch. These are systemic problems, not individual choices.

In a recent opinion piece, [Louise Perry] describes our collective longing for community – specifically, the kind of village-style child-rearing we claim to want but rarely attempt to build. She argues that modern Western families have splintered into different locations, chasing careers and nuclear family dreams, leaving us spectacularly unprepared for the dependency that bookends human life.