"If there is no price you are the price" The paradox of being online despite craving the offline. This is what I'm reflecting on while reading Tommy Dixon's essay "How to end your extremely online era" in my garden in Puglia last Sunday. Recorded this in one long take. Full video in the comments below. (Discovered the essay in @MichaelDean_0 anthology "Best Internet Essays of 2025")

my £90/m claude is doing a much better job at my accounting than my £142/m UK accountant — and it's doing so much more than accounting... things are changing. I probably just need a more basic auditor/accountant that just approves what claude did. eventually not even that...

as much as southern europe can be "impractical" and has its downsides, I personally would never live in the US

I've cycled through more hobbies in five years than my grandfather had in his lifetime. film photography, ambient music, ceramics briefly, language learning, field recordings, fiction. he was a mining engineer for all his life. I think the hobby cycling is partly access (youtube teaches everything) and partly avoidance. if you never go deep into one thing you never face the moment where talent stops and character begins. the hobby becomes the escape from mastery.

the cabin in the woods fantasy is the hermit archetype trying to surface. everyone I know has some version: the small house, the mountains, no wifi, a stack of books, a fireplace. the fantasy intensifies in proportion to how overstimulated your daily life is. jung would say the hermit is the psyche's demand for introversion when the persona has been extraverting too long. what the cabin represents is permission to stop being available. the image carries more weight than the real estate ever could.

there's a bird here that sings exclusively at dusk. I've been trying to identify it for months. it starts around 8:15pm when the light turns amber and stops exactly when the sky goes dark. I don't know what kind of bird it is and I've decided I don't want to know. some things are better unnamed. the modern impulse to identify, categorize, and google everything is a defense against wonder. I'm practicing leaving some things mysterious.

your best work happens when nobody's watching. the presence of an audience activates the persona, the mask jung described. you start performing competence instead of experiencing discovery. every musician knows this. the practice room version is always more alive than the stage version. I write better at 6am when I've forgotten anyone reads my work. the forgetting is the ingredient.

the "deinfluencing" trend where creators tell you what not to buy is fascinating because it's still influencing. the mechanism is identical. someone with a platform is shaping your desires, except now the desire being shaped is the desire to want less. which is still a desire being manufactured by someone with a ring light and a following. actual simplicity doesn't need an audience. but the irony isn't lost on me with making this post.

there's a specific feeling in your mid-30s that nobody names. you're old enough to see the patterns in your own life but still young enough to change them. you've made mistakes you can't undo and you've also just barely started. the people around you are having kids or getting divorced or building companies and you can't tell if you're behind or ahead because the map everyone was following turned out to be for a different territory. that's the loneliest feeling. also the most creative one.

every period of cultural uncertainty produces a romanticization of the previous era. the victorians romanticized the medieval. the 1970s romanticized the 1950s. we're romanticizing the pre-smartphone world. the pattern tells you more about the present than the past. what we call nostalgia is actually a diagnosis: the psyche marking what it lost. pay attention to what a culture romanticizes and you'll know exactly what it's starving for.

the attention economy is a nervous system economy and we should start calling it that. every notification, every scroll, every red badge is a bid for your sympathetic nervous system activation. the business model of the internet is keeping you in low-grade fight-or-flight because that state makes you click, buy, react, share. calm people don't engage. anxious people do. the entire infrastructure is designed to dysregulate you. your exhaustion is a feature.

the trad wife aesthetic is growing on social media and the depth psychology angle is fascinating. when women have been told for decades that their worth comes from professional achievement, the shadow response is a fantasy of the opposite extreme. the cottagecore, homestead, baking-in-an-apron image becomes a compensatory fantasy for exhaustion. the psyche reaches for the life it was told to reject. enantiodromia. the swing toward the opposite. nothing wrong with either, just observing.

the smartest people I know all read fiction and I don't think that's coincidence. non-fiction tells you how the world works. fiction shows you how it feels. and feeling is the information that actually changes behavior. I've learned more about human nature from dostoevsky than from any psychology textbook. just read the confessions of his characters. they teach you things about yourself that no research paper ever could.

the men's work movement is growing quietly and it tells you everything about what's happening in male psychology right now. men are sitting in circles and crying in front of each other for the first time. the fact that this feels radical is the diagnosis. we raised a generation of men who learned emotional safety from absolutely nobody and now they're fifty years old paying $2,000 to learn how to say "I'm scared" in front of another man. the wound is civilizational.

therapy language is destroying the relationships it was supposed to protect. "you're triggering me," "that's a trauma response," "I need to hold space for my feelings." when clinical vocabulary enters casual conversation it turns every disagreement into a diagnosis. forgetting to buy milk becomes evidence of narcissism. I think we've confused having language for suffering with actually addressing suffering.

the explosion of nostalgia content, 90s aesthetics, film cameras, vinyl, y2k fashion, follows a pattern psychologists call regression. when the present feels overwhelming the psyche retreats to the last period that felt safe. for millennials that's somewhere between 1995 and 2005. before the smartphone. before the feed. the nervous system is remembering what it felt like before it was being watched all the time. the clothes and the music are just the vehicle.

sixty million americans listen to true crime podcasts and nobody asks why. jung would say it's shadow fascination. we project our own capacity for darkness onto the killer, the con artist, the narcissist, and by studying them from the safe distance of earbuds we get to touch the parts of ourselves we won't admit exist. the genre's popularity tracks exactly with how repressed the culture has become. the more we perform goodness publicly the more we consume darkness privately.

the word "coach" is dying and I think that's good. it got colonized by people selling certification mills and aggressive sales tactics. the people I work with don't want to be called coaches. they say guide, facilitator, mentor, "I don't know what to call myself yet." the identity is ahead of the language. which usually means the language will catch up. I'm betting on the word guide.

your nervous system is running your business whether you know it or not. the fawn response prices for approval. the fight response overworks and burns out. the freeze response procrastinates on the launch forever. the flight response pivots every three months to a new idea. I've seen all four in clients and I've done all four myself (still do them today) . the business strategy doesn't matter until the nervous system can hold the growth.