Incredible things are happening on Substack. Each day, I come across at least three exceptionally well-written pieces that often improve my understanding of the world. “How is it available so easily and for free!” I ask myself each time.
has often explained how form shapes the content. I am optimistic about Substack as a public square of intellectualism because it brings together the long-form writing of blogs with the social media-like network effects. Yes, there is a lot of crap; that is Sturgeon's law. But the good ones are really good.I believe much of knowledge and arts is a strong-link problem1. It does not matter much how poor the bad stuff is; what matters is how good the best stuff is. A gatekeeper-free medium, like Substack, is more likely to bring out the best, compared to conformist and status-obsessed academia.
Anyway, without any further ado, here are seven random posts that I read and liked recently. I hope you give each of them a chance. You can always save them to read later.
We evolved in times of food scarcity, particularly sugar. This makes our minds susceptible to overconsumption in this era of abundance.
argues that it is the same with information. We have too much of it in the modern world, particularly with social media. This is causing an “intellectual obesity crisis,” and we need some personal rules for healthy consumption, just like we do for food.I like to think of long-form writing as the protein of the information diet: an important macronutrient that most do not get enough of. Short-form content like tweets, Instagram reels, and YouTube shorts is the sugar equivalent: addictive, abundant, and over-consumed. Perhaps I am overextending the analogy, but seriously, watch your macros!
In general, reading is better than watching as it stimulates a wider range of brain areas, but it is important to maintain diversity in diet. This works on different levels, starting obviously with diversity of medium. It seems unhelpful to arbitrarily restrict oneself to only ‘serious books' and not give other things a chance: novels, movies, magazines, documentaries, and even some amount of Instagram reels or TikTok. Beyond the medium, cutting across domains is great. Think like a polymath; think Renaissance humanism.
The most underrated aspect of diversity in information diet, in my view, is temporal. We tend to consume the ‘latest’ thing, conflating recency with relevance. But think about this: if you were offered free travel and stay for a month, what would you do? You probably would not only visit the latest buildings and malls. Instead, your list might include the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower, the Great Pyramid of Giza, and Burj Khalifa. A mix of new, somewhat old, and ancient. We somehow do not use the same logic when it comes to content. We have literature from across centuries — often available at our fingertips for free — and yet we choose to ignore it every day.
puts it well:… seek out info that's stood the test of time: classic literature, replicated studies, proven theorems, and fulfilled predictions. Millennia of humanity’s accumulated wisdom await you.
I have watched a few of these movies, and I absolutely loved each one of them. I have no reason to believe that the rest would not be great, so I am looking forward to covering the entire list. You should, too.
… the era of orbiting our daily existence around a device in our hands will be just that: an era. And it will go the way of smoking and top hats with monocles and communism.
I am skeptical of Tommy Dixon’s prediction — he himself is, too — but I would love for it to be true. In any case, he makes an excellent case for why we might have peaked with social media usage and will now revert to the mean. The assumption is that it cannot get more extreme: our human desire to experience life for ourselves through raw sensory experiences (i.e., offline living) will fight back. It will be aided by increasing awareness around the ills of being chronically online.
What makes a conversation good? Why do some last for hours and others end in minutes?
gives an illuminating framework. In conversations, he explains, there are ‘givers’ and ‘takers.’Givers think that conversations unfold as a series of invitations; takers think conversations unfold as a series of declarations. When giver meets giver or taker meets taker, all is well. When giver meets taker, however, giver gives, taker takes, and giver gets resentful (“Why won’t he ask me a single question?”) while taker has a lovely time (“She must really think I’m interesting!”) or gets annoyed (“My job is so boring, why does she keep asking me about it?”).
There is nothing inherently virtuous about being either a giver or a taker. Irrespective of how much we give or take, what matters the most is whether we offer and accept affordances:
When done well, both giving and taking create what psychologists call affordances: features of the environment that allow you to do something. Physical affordances are things like stairs and handles and benches. Conversational affordances are things like digressions and confessions and bold claims that beg for a rejoinder….
There’s some recent evidence that what makes conversations pop off is indeed the social equivalent of doorknobs…. Abundant affordances allow for this rapid-fire rapport, each utterance offering an obvious opportunity to respond.
I think of conversational doorknobs as opportunities for double-clicks. Can I double-click on something the other person said? What can I say that the other person might find worthy of double-clicking?
… I’m trying to get comfortable scratching my head a little longer. Being alive is strange and mysterious, and I’d like to spend some time with that fact while I’ve got the chance, to visit the jagged shoreline where the bit that I know meets the infinite that I don’t know, and to be at peace sitting there a while, accompanied by nothing but the ring of my own confusion…
Another one by
(seriously, just read anything and everything on ). Nothing that I say can do justice to the masterful writing of this piece. I find myself wanting to be right all the time. Despite knowing about all kinds of cognitive biases, I fall for them. This piece gave me a renewed resolve to strive for more intellectual humility.
Ironically, most people today have about the same leisure a Russian aristocrat would have had in 1855. But we don’t use it the same way. We don’t think of it as leisure. We don’t think of ourselves as aristocrats.
This has always felt like one of the great ironies of the world I belong to. We have means that in another era would have been reserved for kings or dukes, but it means nothing to us. We can’t enjoy it the same way. We can’t even enjoy leisurely dissipation as they did. Netflix is the least aristocratic activity imaginable. Hinge is less erotic than a ball.
This made me think more deeply about how I spend my time. Perhaps there is something about abundance that makes us complicit. On balance, it is net good: I have access to infinite knowledge. But there is less intensity and importance with which I consume them, precisely because I can always come back to it later. This could not have been taken for granted even a few decades ago.
At the same time, I don’t agree with the romanticisation of 19th-century life. Much of it is survivorship bias: good things tend to survive longer, which makes us think that all the literature and arts of those times were great. The average peasant in the 19th century likely lived a drier life than today’s average worker in almost all ways: certainly worse than the “consumerism, secularism, app-ism—the moderate successfulness… the lack of an essential passion or purpose”
describes in the post.There is also a fair bit of snobbery. I am not sure if this is a good model for everyone. Why does everyone need to think of themselves as aristocrats and only engage in aristocratic habits?
My favourite people are those who do not give me a hard time for failing to return their call, replying late, or — and this is the most important — saying ‘no’ to hanging out. It cuts both ways; I believe I extend that courtesy to others.
This is not apathy: we care deeply about each other. Instead, it signifies that we understand each other and are willing to cut each other some slack. It is an acknowledgment that any relationship, personal or professional, does not mean 24/7 availability. It is a two-way street of consent: both people should be in the right mind space at any given point. That is not always guaranteed but when that happens, it is magic.
On the theme of friendship, also check out
’s simple yet profound take: Give your friends a chance to abandon you.