Three years ago today I posted on carceral environmentalism and I still like that phrase.

"In an era where everything is bullshit and crime..."

This was an off-the-cuff remark I made today, but it resonated with the audience. Feel free to use it.

Then, do things that are neither bullshit nor crime. Fix things. Protect things. Consider the long term. Care about somebody.

Gordon: “So a broken heart is also a heart that is breaking open so that it becomes larger, so that it can hold more of the grief and the love and the joy and the pain of the whole cosmos. That is what it is for. That is what you are for.”

Brother Ali: “I’m using my heart for / what hearts are for.”

Jack Leahy:

It is incredible to me that we humans can live a long, full lifetime on this planet and be unwilling to face the brokenness of our lives and the destruction we have caused ourselves and others. I know shouldn’t get angry about it, but I sometimes do. I hope I can do better when my time comes, but who knows? One of the realizations I had while meditating in the cabin was that we humans, so capable of surviving nearly any catastrophe, no matter how horrific are—at our hidden core, in our most tender and utterly vulnerable ways—so easily broken and nearly impossible to fix. … We can traverse our entire lifetimes in a self-venting miasma of dysfunction so total that it becomes nearly invisible, and never really know why.

David Cain:

One financial lesson they should teach in school is that most of the things we buy have to be paid for twice.

There’s the first price, usually paid in dollars, just to gain possession of the desired thing, whatever it is: a book, a budgeting app, a unicycle, a bundle of kale.

But then, in order to make use of the thing, you must also pay a second price. This is the effort and initiative required to gain its benefits, and it can be much higher than the first price.

From David Cain:

After reading this post on canonical address books by @annahavron, it occurred to me that something like a physical record of important information that could be referenced by someone upon our deaths would be a great idea. I mentioned this to my wife Rachel and she said she saw something like that at our local bookstore and - after some searching - we found I’m Dead. Now What?, an organizer built for this very thing. We’ve ordered one for ourselves and one for our in-laws. I feel like Caitlin Doughty would be proud.

This is a great post that I needed to read today. “My point isn’t that we’re not living in a Diet Dystopia, because I believe we are, but that my cynicism isn’t at all helpful. All it does is make me bitter and unpleasant, like a Caffeine Free Diet Coke.”

I Welcome Your Performance hypertext.monster

Craig Mod:

Boredom is everything, man. I think our loss of boredom in contemporary society is one of the greatest, weirdest, ambient losses. It is one of these things that’s hard to quantify the value of. And we’ve lost it so completely and totally that we very rarely have moments to even re-experience it, unless you do so intentionally. And so for me, yeah the boredom of these walks is, I would say, 50% of the value of it. It’s forcing yourself into a place where you’re not teleporting mentally.

Austin Kleon’s latest (subscriber-only) newsletter issue is about the creative seasons. Two things:

1. It contains a pdf version of a zine he wrote on the subject. I know some people around micro.blog have recently been talking about zines and other ideas for analog delivery of writing. This is an interesting way of doing that: digitally delivering a pdf of something meant to be printed and folded.
2. I am definitely a person who goes through creative seasons. In the past, late-winter and early-spring are when I’ve started more creative projects. This latest round has been a bit of an anomaly since it started in early winter - but I think that was driven in large part by my attempt to resist Big Tech and seeking out other ways of communicating.