💬 Quotes & Concepts
- The rate of new e-book releases on Amazon have tripled between 2022 and late 2025.
- Categories such as Travel and Sports and Outdoors have experienced growth by a factor of more than five.
- Average book quality has declined in the LLM era.
- Categories experiencing faster growth in new titles show proportionally larger declines in average quality.
- Survey evidence indicates that nearly half of authors now use AI to assist with their work.
- Authors who debuted in the LLM era disproportionately produce low-quality work, while authors who were active before the arrival of LLMs have increased their output, but continue to account for much of the higher-quality production.
- Job market optimism increased for workers who worked on-site, without the option of remote. Job market optimism decreased among remote workers, hybrid workers, and even workers who worked on-site but have a remote option.
- Higher levels of leadership report higher levels of overall wellbeing. At the same time, they are substantially more likely to report much worse individual days.
- Large U.S. employers are more likely to reduce their workforce after implementing AI; smaller employers are more likely to expand their workforce.
- 18% of U.S. employees said it was “very” or “somewhat” likely their job would be eliminated in the next five years due to technological innovations. In organizations where AI has been implemented, that figure rises to 23%. In some industries, such as finance (32%), insurance (32%) and technology (31%), it is much higher.
🧠 Having gone through a relatively strong Jungian phase in 2015-2016, I am astounded at how much of that school I find very disagreeable now. The exception, however, is the concept of “shadow work”— which remains absolutely invaluable.
💬 My final quote from Kierkegaard—a thought-provoking parable and a personal favorite which I believe helps unlock a main theme of his philosophy:
“Something wonderful happened to me. I was transported into the seventh heaven. All the gods sat there in assembly. By special grace I was accorded the favour of a wish. ‘Will you,’ said Mercury,’ have youth, or beauty, or power, or a long life, or the prettiest girl, or any of the many splendors we have in our chest of knick-knacks? So choose, but just one thing!’ For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: ‘Esteemed contemporaries, I choose one thing: always to have the laughter on my side.’ Not a single word did one god offer in answer; on the contrary they all began to laugh. From this I concluded that my prayer was fulfilled and that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste, for it would hardly have been fitting gravely to answer, ‘It has been granted to you.'”
Happy Birthday, Soren!
💬 Kierkegaard on the beautiful partnership between calling and correction, in Purity of Heart Is To Will One Thing:
A Providence watches over each man’s wandering through life. It provides him with two guides. The one calls him forward. The other calls him back. They are, however, not in opposition to each other, these two guides, nor do they leave the wanderer standing there in doubt. Rather the two are in eternal understanding with each other. For the one beckons forward to the Good, the other calls man back from evil. Of these two, the call of remorse is perhaps the best.
💬 Kierkegaard on the joys of living in a city and the delight of being attentive to strangers, from his journals:
“Precisely for this reason is life in the city so entertaining to him who knows how to find in human beings a delight which is more enduring and yields bigger returns than getting a thousand men to acclaim one for half an hour. Any person, if he had an open eye, may lead a life rich in enjoyment, merely by paying attention to others; and he who has his own work to do would do well to take heed not to be too much imprisoned by it.
But how pitiful to miss what costs nothing: no entrance fee, no expense for banquets, no dues to one’s society, no inconvenience and trouble; what costs the rich and the poor equally little and yet is the richest enjoyment, to miss an instruction which is not obtained from a particular teacher but en passant from any person whatsoever, from conversation with someone unknown, from every accidental contact.”
Describing movement through a city crowd as going “en passant” (a very unique chess move where a pawn steals the other by moving diagonally behind it) is so creative and clever. I think of it often being in NYC.
#neverbored
💬 Kierkegaard on the anxiety that accompanies riches, the pitfalls of wealth, and the assurance of Providence in Christian Discourses:
Why, naturally, the bird teaches us the surest way to avoid the anxiety of riches and abundance. Namely, not to lay up riches and abundance—bearing in mind that one is a traveller. And in the second place, it teaches us to be ignorant of the fact that one has abundance—bearing in mind that one is a traveller. For, like that simple wise man of ancient times, the bird imparts to us instruction in ignorance [by the way it lives]…
How then does the bird live? Well, it is God who every day metes out to the bird the definite measure, i.e. enough; but it never occurs to the bird that it has, or might wish to have, more than enough. What God gives every day is… enough. If the little bird quenches its thirst on a dew-drop, which is exactly enough, or if it drinks from the largest lake, it takes just as little. It does not require to have all that it sees, nor to have the whole lake because it drinks from it, nor to take the lake with it so that it may be secured for its whole life… It merely takes enough.
Oof, so good to re-read. I am quite convinced that one of the most powerful concepts in the world is the concept of enough.
💬 Kierkegaard on character, virtue, and knowledge in Works of Love:
The measure of a person is this: how far is he from what he understands to what he does, how great is the distance between his understanding and his actions?
💬 Kierkegaard on hypocrisy, deception, and trusting others (a personal favorite of mine) from Works of Love:
“But he who gets busy tracking down hypocrites, whether he succeeds or not, should be certain that this also is not hypocrisy, for such investigations are hardly the fruits of love. He, on the other hand, whose life really bears its own fruit will, without wishing it and without trying, unmask or even shame every hypocrite who comes near him; but one who loves will perhaps not even be conscious of this.”
💬 As a Mexican-American man, Cinco De Mayo is already a special day; but it also happens to be the birthday of my highly esteemed Soren Kierkeegard. I hesitate to promise a full Kierkegaardian blog post, but I will be posting intermittent quotes throughout the day:
Aren’t people absurd! They never use the freedoms they do have but demand those they don’t have; they have freedom of thought, but they demand freedom of speech. — From Either/Or
📖 NBER’s latest on the effect of LLMs in publishing:
💬 Okay, okay—one more banger from Mcluhan (from the same essay):
The need of our time is for the means of measuring sensory thresholds and of discovering exactly what changes occur in these thresholds as a result of the advent of any particular technology. With such knowledge in hand it would be possible to program a reasonable and orderly future for any human community. Such knowledge would be the equivalent of a thermostatic control for room temperatures. It would seem only reasonable to extend such controls to ail the sensory thresholds of our being. We have no reason to be grateful to those who juggle the thresholds in the name of haphazard innovation.
💬 From Mcluhan, in his essay on The Relationship Between Environment and Anti-Environment (1965) :
The content of any system or organization naturally consists of the preceeding system or organization, and in that degree acts as a control on the new environment. It is useful to notice all of the arts and sciences as acting in the role of anti-environments that enable us to perceive the environment. In a business civilization we have long considered liberal study as providing necessary means of orientation and perception. When the arts and sciences themselves become environments under conditions of electric circuitry, conventional liberal studies whether in the arts or sciences will no longer serve as an anti-environment. When we live in a museum without walls, or have music as a structural part of our sensory environment, new strategies of attention and perception have to be created.
Oh, the things that this man would have had to say in modern times.
💬 A great tidbit from the current read, Trickster Makes This World by Lewis Hyde:
One of Picasso‘s favorite assignments for a young artist was to have him or her try to draw a perfect circle. It can’t be done; everyone draws a circle with some particular distortion, and that distorted circle is your circle, an insight into your style. “Try to make the circle as best you can. And since nobody before you has made a perfect circle, you can be sure that your circle will be completely your own. Only then will you have a chance to be original.” The deviations from the ideal give an insight into the style, and thus, Picasso says, “from errors one gets to know the personality.”
💾 This blog post from Discourse.org on why they are staying open source in the age of AI is really good:
Biological immune systems work because they’re exposed to threats. They encounter pathogens and build memory. An immune system that’s never been challenged will collapse at the first real infection. Open-source codebases work the same way - vulnerabilities that get found and patched make the software harder to attack. Security researchers who read the code add layers of defense, and public audits build institutional knowledge about where the weak points are and how to shore them up.
💬 Viriginia Woolf in her classic essay on How Should One Read A Book?:
If the moralists ask us how we can justify our love of reading, we can make use of some such excuse as this. But if we are honest, we know that no such excuse is needed. It is true that we get nothing whatsoever except pleasure from reading; it is true that the wisest of us is unable to say what that pleasure may be. But that pleasure—mysterious, unknown, useless as it is—is enough. That pleasure is so curious, so complex, so immensely fertilizing to the mind of anyone who enjoys it, and so wide in its effects, that it would not be in the least surprising to discover, on the day of judgment when secrets are revealed and the obscure is made plain, that the reason why we have grown from pigs to men and women, and come out from our caves, and dropped our bows and arrows, and sat round the fire and talked and drunk and made merry and given to the poor and helped the sick and made pavements and houses and erected some sort of shelter and society on the waste of the world, is nothing but this: we have loved reading.
💬 From Ezra Pound:
“You can spot the bad critic when he starts by discussing the poet and not the poem.”
🚀 I learned today that a small art piece called Moon Museum was smuggled onto the moon by multiple artists including Andy Warhol, Forrest Myers, and John Chamberlain during the original Apollo 12 mission. The fact that it was unauthorized is so amusing to me, and feels appropriate.
💬 A good quote from the newsletter of my young buddy Julian The Businessman aka the Youngest Entrepreneur in NYC:
“Even though hard work produces good results, keep trying until you find something easier that will also produce good results”
👔 Gallup’s annual State of the Global Workplace report is one of my favorites. Here are some findings I will be pondering: