Building resilience. Physical books. Valuable websites are disappearing. Banning books is stupid. The courage to ask questions. Wanting to be with people. Finding the right people to be with.
“Terrorism as we ordinarily understand it is inately media-related.”
― William Gibson, Neuromancer
Last week it was Pink Floyd, this week it’s Alan Parsons. I’m having a good time listening to the music of my past.
Unrelated to anything (other than, perhaps, a somewhat less organized list below?), by the time you see this I’ll be recovering from our 22nd hosting of the Pacific Northwest Corgi Picnic. As I like to say, I’ll have the poop of 100 Corgis that had all been running around my back yard to deal with.
1. “Resilience is built in ordinary moments”
The Paradox of Progress – Tom Greene – (Wit & Wisdom)
Focusing mostly on today’s children Greene echoes the common concern that we’ve made life too easy, and that as a result kids are suffering.
Almost half of young adults on earth are struggling at a level that meaningfully interferes with daily life.
And he points out that it’s not a failure on the part of the kids, but rather a symptom of a larger problem. It’s the result of lots of little improvements in life that, over time, have removed or at least dramatically reduced, the need to build resilience.
And individually, none of those decisions seems particularly consequential. But make enough things optional for long enough and eventually you may discover that the things holding people together have quietly disappeared.
There’s no simple solution, but it starts with awareness.
Do this: Teach resilience.
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2. “Physical books constantly provide landmarks”
Why Weird People Like You Still Read Physical Books – (The Sacred and The Strange)
I’m a Kindle reader. I’ve even been know to purchase the Kindle version of a physical book I already own, just to ensure that I’ll actually read it. With the Kindle app on my phone I have thousands of books in my pocket wherever I go.
But that’s not to say there isn’t something different, something special, even, about reading a physical book.
Reading, it turns out, isn’t merely transferring information from paper to brain.
The texture of the pages, the weight in your hands, the cover art, and even watching the bookmark slowly creep toward the back all become part of the experience.
The essay raised some interesting observations on the difference.
Do this: Read books. Paper or electronic, I don’t care. Read.
3. “The web, as we have it, is incredibly fragile”
What just happened to TheNumbers.com should worry us all – Stephen Follows – (Decoding the world Through Data)
This hit very close to home because I’ve experienced it. Not yet as bad as described in the article, but bad enough that I had to double my investment in the server hosting Ask Leo!.
Let’s back up. The issue is a simple one: TheNumbers.com was taken down by an overwhelming flood of bots, AI scrapers, and AI agentic access. The 30 year old site simply couldn’t handle the load, and the 30 year old design wasn’t something that could simply be fixed to compensate.
By 2024, automated traffic had surpassed human traffic, and just last month, Cloudflare announced that bots had reached 57.5% of web page requests.
My numbers match that. TheNumbers.com, however, was hit harder, with only 10% of their traffic coming from actual human visitors.
It’s a dilemma. If it’s of any interest to you at all to understand what online publishers are facing right now I encourage you to read the article. I’m not kidding when I say it’s an existential threat; at some point the cost of maintaining a site either defending from, or feeding the bots simply becomes too high.
Do this: Click through to the sites you care about. Their livelihood depends on it.
4. “A library is not an endorsement of every book inside it.”
This Is Why We Opened A Banned Books Library (In Rural Texas) – Ryan Holiday – (Meditations on Strategy and Life)
Book banning is stupid. And yet it’s the go-to action from pearl-clutchers and the intolerant, believing that banning a book will some how prevent some kind of social calamity. It’s the banning that’s the calamity. (Not to mention the Streisand effect that so often results.)
The whole point of school—and libraries—should be introducing kids to books that make them laugh, make them think, and show them that books can be provocative and transgressive and interesting and creative.
“Make them think.” That’s so often exactly what the banners are afraid of. The concern is that the thinking will challenge their own One Truth in some way.
Holiday includes several thing you and I can do to counter the efforts.
Do this: Read a banned book. Share a banned book.
5. “What will people think of me for asking?”
Ness Letters: The Courage to Be Curious – Anne-Laure Le Cunff – (Ness Labs)
I’ve often been perplexed by people who aren’t curious. We all start out as curious children; what happened along the way to quash that instinct? Fear, mostly. Le Cunff identifies three specific fears: judgement, change, and responsibility. It makes sense, particularly when those fears originate in our formative years.
Spend time with people who reward questions rather than performances of certainty. A good curiosity circle gives you permission to think aloud, explore raw ideas, and change your mind.
Curiosity is is so incredibly important for so many reasons, But these days it does seem to take a certain amount of courage to ask questions.
Do this: Have the courage. Ask the questions.
6. “We need to find ways to actually want to be with other people.”
Strong Ground – Brené Brown – (ebook)
It feels like the dilemma of our times.
In a time fueled by discord, divisiveness, and increasing dehumanization, we need to find ways to actually want to be with other people. It’s hard to buy that what makes us human will save our sanity and our jobs when in fact so many of us have become untethered from our humanity and fundamentally disconnected from one another.
The deck is stacked against us, it seems. We need to take intentional action to be with others.
Do this: Take action.
7. “Oftentimes, loneliness has little to do with the lack of people around you, but the lack of people who understand you.”
The Inner Compass: Cultivating the Courage to Trust Yourself – Lawrence Yeo – (re-read)
In a moment of serendipity, this came across my screen not long after the preceding takeaway. I think one of the reasons we do often resist being with other people is that we envision being with people we don’t like, for any number of reasons. And yet being with others is how we find and discover those who end up mattering most to us.
I’m writing this the day before the Corgi Picnic, mentioned above. After the picnic, after all the guests and strangers and acquaintances go home, the “after party” (really just a relaxed decompression) will be left with a core group of “our people”. These are the people that matter. These are the people who understand.
These are the people we would never have found had we not put ourselves out there, one way or another, in the preceding days, months, and years.
Do this: Cherish your people.
What I’m reading now
- Neuromancer – William Gibson (Re-read)
- The Gate of the Feral Gods: Dungeon Crawler Carl Book 4 – Matt Dinniman
- Good Writing: 36 Ways to Improve Your Sentences – Neal Allen, Anne Lamott
- The Demon-Haunted World: Science as a Candle in the Dark – Carl Sagan
My Reading List – everything I’ve read since 2021.
My Sources Page – the common sources I scan/read regularly.
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