Week 434 was posted by Charanjit Chana on 2026-02-16.
2016 onwards has felt pretty bleak. Brexit, Trump, COVID and then Trump Returns. Disaster after disaster.
The political temperature in the UK alone is odd given the stability and relative sensible nature of the current Labour government. They're not getting everything right and advised by right-leaning idiots rather than taking full advantage of their majority to make people's live better, but we're not suffering incompetence or cruelty to the same degree as we did with the previous government. Well, not from my point of view anyway.
Putting aside the more political side of the past 10 years, there's been a lot of negativity for men to feed off. I find it odd that so many look out at the world and decide that they are being wronged by their peers rather than by those that wield unfathomable amounts of money.
To counter that, I didn't necessarily seek out, but stumbled across a few videos that give context to where we are and why we are where we are.
You need to be bored
Dr Arthur Brooks mentions Dan Gilbert who wrote a book called Stumbling on Happiness which I read nearly 20 years ago. Being bored is something I struggle to do myself, let alone teach my kids to do but I still aspire to being bored and while I love being online and working with the web, it is worthing disconnecting from it all sometimes.
Maintaining your human independence
AI, robots and algorithms look to be the future we're headed towards but it doesn't have to be that way. Nick Offerman works with his hands and while I'm not a woodworker, I love doing arts and crafts more than anything these days. Especially since the pandemic when I took a stab at working with brush pens.
Can we all get on?
Munya Chawawa on theatre and representation, but he touches on the political atmosphere now and asks this question in relation to immigration.
Empathy for men
Scott Galloway's talk on The Daily Show was really interesting. Whatever you might think of his delivery, I think the message is largely right. The world is moving and evolving, but the traditional roles and expectations of men (and women) are in flux and I see why it might be hard for people to take stock of where it's all moving to.
Scott Hanselman's TED talk on how we aren'y built for an information rich environment and how are behaviours reinforce habits that we don't necessarily want to implement.
AI was supposed to give us Fridays off
I can't back this statement enough, surely AI should be enabling us to do less work and to be more creative (or bored), instead we're using it to multiply productivity (are we really though?).
On AI predicting, with certainty, the next word. The key word is predicting:
It's not good, it's not bad. It just is.
This talk had me reflecting more on the use of AI than ever before.
Enshittification
Unionisation and regulation. It baffles me that the US appears to be so anti-union and organisations often behave as if their existence would be under threat were employees to unionise. I think that is the ultimate argument for being part of a union. If an organisation can't function without treating you properly then why should it exist? Enshittification has infultrated so much of our lives. White goods tied to the internet, 0.5GB iPhone apps to control them and subscriptions galore.
Tags: