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Superbloom by Nicholas Carr This book really fucked me up. I’ve long thought that I’ve grown up in a uniquely interesting time in regards to the digital age, as when I was attending middle school Facebook started to replace and supplement much social interaction. This book took that perception of mine to the tenth power. When friction is removed from communication (as it has been with phones, texting, social media, etc.) there are real consequences. I used to think I was bad at texting. I could never determine tone from someone else’s text and had a hard time coming across the way I intended over text. After reading this book, I realized that it’s not that I’m bad at texting, it’s that texting is bad at me. Texting strips down what I initialize as a cohesive thought with tone and rhythm of delivery and sends it to someone instantly. When the medium is the message and the medium is a text, what am I really trying to get across? ...

I have long wondered what it would feel like to win a championship - not as a player, but as a fan. While I may not have been old enough to remember the last championship that one of my favorite teams won, I will absolutely bring it up and own it like I was on the court as the clock hit zero. For the American Man, sports fandom isn’t just about the score, it’s about identity, origin, and belonging. ...

When I was younger, I had a video game phase. In middle school, there was nothing my friends and I would enjoy doing more than logging in to our XBoxes and play Modern Warfare 3 together (from the 2010’s, not the new one). When I played online, I wasn’t very good, but I tried hard. A common insult thrown my way was that I was being a “try-hard”. I never understood that. So what I’m trying? If I’m going to do something I care about, I’m going to try to do it well. At that point in my life, I cared about being good at this game so I could play with my friends. They were better than me because they played the previous game (Black Ops) and I hadn’t. I felt I had a lot to learn. ...

I don’t like to use the word “should”. I feel it’s really hard to tell someone what they should do. There’s so much nuance in every situation and so many factors to take account of that I almost never suggest what anyone should do.1 However, when I find that I am trying to think of how I need to accomplish something, it’s almost never the case that I don’t know what I need to do to accomplish it. That’s a very broad statement so let me try to make it more specific. ...

Impostor Syndrome in my definition is feeling like you don’t belong, specifically in a work setting. It’s what I consider to be a subset of anxiety, but that’s a different post. I’ve experienced impostor syndrome a lot - I’m 26 and about to start my 4th full time job. By the time that I left each of the previous 3 jobs, I felt like if I could go back in time and tell myself something to help myself calm down it would be that they hired you for a reason and just focus on execution. ...

One thing I’ve been considering lately is the amount of time that I consume vs. the amount of time I create. It’s probably no surprise that the main example of consumption I’m thinking of is media consumption. In the digital age, you can’t get around that. Every time you unlock your cell phone or step outside you are opening the door to be blasted by the digital puzzle pieces that assemble our complicated culture. So complicated and disjoint, in fact, that I already regret using a puzzle as a metaphor and not a vast complex web.1 But back to consumption itself. I’ve noticed that a lot of consumption can be done mindlessly, which is probably not a good thing? I can’t say for sure why, but I assume that since the brain is a muscle then the processes our brain takes when forming thoughts are a form of exercise. And we should create and form thoughts or else we become dull and uninteresting. ...