We just celebrated my older son’s birthday this weekend, with about a standard a party as you can throw. He had a blast. His friends had a blast. It was so much fun. My birthday is coming up soon and I am becoming a much less exciting age.
I think that birthdays, and birthday parties, are for kids. It’s kind of a core ideology of mine.
That makes me a bit of a curmudgeon. But I think it’s for good reason. When your young, and I’m perfectly happy to accept that this extends into young adulthood, there are years that are true milestones. You are so rapidly advancing through life that to come together with friends and have a good time can be a really genuine celebration of something momentous. There’s a real burst of energy in kids parties that represents this that I just don’t think you see with adults.
As you get older, those milestones fade. Our process for advancing becomes something we need to actually work on, not something that just comes with time. And then that phase in life hits, I think it’s time to put away the parties and celebrate those milestones in another way.
But hey, that’s just me.
John Gardner on the process of self-renewal
Life is an endless unfolding, and if we wish it to be, an endless process of self-discovery, an endless and unpredictable dialogue between our own potentialities and the life situations in which we find ourselves. The purpose is to grow and develop in the dimensions that distinguish humankind at its best.
September 8, 2024
Since reading this, I’ve been tracing the zyntranet, for at least the reason that it’s a demographic that a) Trump seems very interested in and b) almost certainly won’t vote. It’s a movement without a personality, a subculture without an identity. The superficial output of a flattening of culture. The next wave of boomers.
Over the last ten years or so, a broad community of fratty, horndog, boorishly provocative 20- and sometimes (embarrassingly) 30-somethings–mostly but by no means entirely male–has emerged to form a newly prominent online subculture. This network is adjacent to the “sports internet” of 40something dads and the “hustle internet” of Miami crypto bullshit and the “reactionary internet” of trad influencers, but is its own distinct community with its own distinct cultural referents–college sports, gambling, light domestic beers, Zyn nicotine pouches–and influential personalities and media outlets, among them Dave Portnoy, Pat McAfee, Antonio Brown, and Call Her Daddy, in addition to dozens of minor podcasters and hey-fellow-kids content creators who nearly all work for sports-betting concerns.
September 6, 2024
Jim Nielsen on decisions through building. How can you bring the cost of failure down so low, that it can become an integral part of your decision making process?
Building can be a form of navigating, e.g. you build where you want to go. But it can also be a form of way finding: you build to realize where you want to go. Nothing informs decision making like building the “wrong” thing.
