• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: The Faith of Beasts by James S. A. Corey

• Listening: Impossible Sports by Cab Ellis

If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.

New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the 2026 European Heat Wave

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about ADHD Subtypes & the pod is on Gender Conformity

• I made a simple QR code app for Macs, iPads, and iPhones, if you’re looking for a means of quickly creating and customizing such things (for free)

Conversational Depth

I personally believe that we should put everyone out of work.

That’s a big statement, and for all you know, I could be saying that the world’s workers are expendable, and as soon as we can automate them away, we should, even if that leaves them starving on the street.

I’m very much not saying that, but you have no way of knowing this if I leave you with the headline version of this belief.

A more thorough, context-rich espousal of this opinion goes something like this:

I think we should put everyone out of work, but only after we’ve rewired society and the economy to sustain them. We should no longer be reliant on jobs to pay bills, have homes, and access education and entertainment. These things should be available free or incredibly inexpensively to all, advanced automation ensuring everyone has a stable baseline, first, and then as time goes on and the potency of these technologies (and the breadth of their application) increases, that baseline, basic living standard, should also tick upward.

Over time, everyone’s quality of life improves, no one is left behind, and we’re all free to spend our time and energy on whatever pleases us. This might (and likely will) include things that people are paid to do today. But our labor and performance will no longer determine whether we survive and the quality of the life we’re able to live. We’ll thus be liberated to do things we find fulfilling, whether that means managing high-tech astronomical equipment to identify novel exoplanets, making some kind of art, or playing video games all day. And our infrastructure will continue ticking along, maintained by the wondrous machines that have replaced us.

That’s a far more expansive context, and the undertone and meaning of the statement changes as a result.

Many of the opinions we encounter, especially but not exclusively in online spaces, fall into the former category. These statements are so superficial as to be functionally meaningless, but we still treat them as if they’re complete thoughts worth engaging with.

Real conversational depth is difficult within these online spaces because of the incentives that have shaped them.

Recognizing this (and acting accordingly) isn’t a solution to our communication issues, but it can help us waste less time and energy, investing in digital environments that fracture and superficialize discourse as a feature, not a fixable bug.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• Winners of the British Wildlife Photography Awards 2026

• Plume: A Tale of Murder and Mayhem in the Everglades

• The Most Accurately Predicted Genocide in History

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

Milwaukee is in the midst of a heatwave, and I’m dying; just sweating way too much and trying to keep my brain functional.

Just a few days ago it was 75 (F) and I feel like I didn’t appreciate that enough while I had it. Now it’s in the mid-90s (higher with the heat index) and I desperately want to move to Canada, as far north as I can go. No more, please.

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New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

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Solar storms.

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: The Rise and Reign of the Mammals by Steve Brusatte

• Listening: The Flood by Ben Caplan

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Balcony Solar

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Intense Heat & the pod is on Cognitive Shuffling

• I made a simple ‘envelope stuffing’ budgeting app for iPhones/iPads/Macs that you might find useful

Ligaments and Tendons

The text on all the buttons in an app, the tiny instructions under a toggle on a website, and the pop-up tooltips you encounter on an otherwise confusing form is called microcopy, and writing it is a facet of user experience (UX) work.

These snippets of text can be tricky to write because they need to help users understand what’s happening, what will do what, and how to accomplish what they want to accomplish in a succinct, ingestible manner (and ideally in the written voice of the brand whose app they’re using or form they’re filling out).

There are all sorts of tricks to writing better microcopy, from using specifics and leading with outcome-related verbs (“Save as PDF” rather than “Click to Save”), to ensuring you include clear, interruptive modals (pop-up interface windows) so the user has one more opportunity to reconsider before something destructive and irreversible (like deleting a database).

I enjoy UX writing, partly because it’s so fiddly, and partly because it requires using words in a dramatically different way than (for instance) one might use words when writing a novel.

But I also find a great deal of satisfaction in learning about the various ligaments and tendons that alchemize mere words into successful communication.

In one-on-one, in-person communication, for instance, instead of leveraging system windows and well-honed microcopy, you might pick up on the other person’s spoken rhythm and default approach to conversational turn-taking, and slide into that same cadence, while also offering them appealing conversational doorknobs (spoken opportunities for them to expound upon a topic on which they may be keen to elaborate).

Communication at all scales and contexts can feel awkward or frustrating at times. But by thinking of every interaction as an opportunity to learn and grow, teach and share, guide and be guided, and then applying the appropriate scaffolding, it’s possible to convert otherwise purposeless prose into something situationally productive, and to upgrade an interaction from a verbal jumble into something memorable and meaningful.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• How Almost Everything We Thought We Knew About the Maya Is Wrong

• Masayoshi Matsumoto Meticulously Transforms Balloons into Expressive Critters

• Rattlesnakes at My Door

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

I built an alternative to the Anki app recently, and I’m just so happy with how it’s turned out.

Anki is a really wonderful, powerful spaced-repetition flashcard app that’s free online and on your laptop, but costs a small fortune on iOS. I started messing around with a variation on the theme, removing some of the complexity and adjusting a few things that I thought could be clearer. And for the past week, my version (Truly Simple Flashcards) has been my most used app.

Looking forward to getting this one out the door and up on the App Store. There’s always so much I want to learn, and not nearly enough time in the day in which to do so (that doesn’t stop me from trying, though).

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

Or hit me up via other methods: Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or ant armor.

In 25-country survey, Americans especially likely to view fellow citizens as morally bad.

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: Paved Paradise by Henry Grabar

• Listening: Gunslinger by Natalie Bergman

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the Cholesterol Therapies

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Remote Work & the pod is about the Tocqueville Effect

• I made a simple app for iPhones/iPads/Macs that allows you to track your pain, mood, and symptoms

Early to Rise

For the better part of a decade, I’ve maintained a habit of getting to bed as close to 8pm, maybe 8:30pm as possible. I then read for a spell before getting a solid 8-hours of sleep and waking up at 5am.

Individual preferences will vary on this, and biological predispositions make this sort of schedule a cake-walk for some and a near-impossibility for others.

What nudged me in this direction after a lifetime of being more of a night owl was the undeniable realization that I’m most alert, cognizant, and capable in the early hours of each day. Now, I cherish my mornings and the simple little first-thing routines that are enjoyable unto themselves, but which also give me what I need for the balance of my day.

The main downside of this sort of sleep-wake rhythm is its impact on one’s social life.

The distortion of that old saying about being an early riser is right: early to rise, early to bed, makes a person healthy but socially dead.

Building and maintaining a social life when you adhere to this kind of schedule is tricky. A surprising number of social norms are night owl-oriented, so you miss out on a lot of what your local community has to offer if you slip into bed at 8pm each night.

I’ve found that focusing on day-time communities helps; I even started a reading group, in part because all the other reading groups in my area typically meet at night.

It can also help to make semi-regular exceptions, knowing that your next-day rhythm will be disrupted. My twice-monthly D&D group often goes until 9 or 10pm, for instance, but the enjoyment I glean from that group is worth the tradeoff.

Different people have different energetic and mental rhythms, and it’s likely your perfect setup will look different from mine. You might come alive beginning at 10pm, whereas I’m essentially a potato at that point. Likewise, you might not be a fully functioning human at 5am, while I’m up and energized at that hour, excited to greet the day.

The goal is to find a rhythm that lines up with your natural predisposition, and then (to the best of your ability, at least) orient the things you can control around that biological bias.

There’ll be immovable objects, of course, and this process is more difficult the more people you have in your life and living in your household. But tweaking what can be tweaked and leaning into the groove of how your body and brain behave tends to bear valuable fruit. And the first step of that process is allowing yourself to acknowledge that your current setup might not be ideal for who you are and how you operate.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• Sins of the Children

• Phenakistoscopes

• Interstate 19: America’s Only Metric Highway

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

It’s been abysmally hot and humid in Milwaukee these past few weeks, which means my mornings have been even more important because they’re the only time of day I’m not actively melting into an unthinking, unproductive Colin-puddle (though thankfully this past handful of days has been not just survivable, but delightful).

My girlfriend recently returned from a long family visit out on the East Coast, and we’ll probably be bopping around town a fair bit, enjoying the many festivities that fill seemingly every moment of every day in this city when things get warm. I’ll be slathering myself in sunscreen and praying for cool breezes for the duration, but it should still be a good time.

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

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First, they came for the journalists.

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: System Collapse by Martha Wells

• Listening: Expert in a Dying Field by The Beths

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the SpaceX IPO

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Stress and Learning & the pod is about Corporate Buzzwords

• I recently released an iOS camera app that only shoots unfiltered, un-messed-with RAW photos

Fluffy Optimization

Tools and systems can help us automate our tasks and routines, and much of the time, we should do exactly that when the opportunity arises.

We perform many labors because someone has to (and the responsibility somehow fell on our shoulders), not because we want to, or because they help us learn or grow.

Thus, we do the laundry, we juggle that spreadsheet, we attend yet another cookie-cutter meeting and in countless other ways expend our time and energy on things that are perhaps necessary, but not in any other way valuable or fulfilling.

I would argue that once flagged and mapped (so they can be reliably and beneficially automated), most of these responsibilities should be. In an ideal world, we humans would be spending all day painting and writing and making movies, and our technology would be folding the underwear and politely nodding their way through yet another PowerPoint about KPIs.

As we foist these responsibilities onto our agentic software and increasingly dextrous robots, though, we have to be really, truly, meticulously careful about what we give up in the process.

Some tasks, some responsibilities, some cumbersome efforts, are (as it turns out) psychologically vital to our health or continued development.

Maybe doing the laundry actually was important because of the role it played in breaking up our day, or as a quick little jolt of accomplishment that helped us power through the rest of the day.

Writing is often difficult, and even people like me who happily do it for a living don’t always find it enjoyable. But the process of writing is fulfilling. And writing allows us to extract our thoughts into an external medium, where they can then be assessed, reworked, and weighed in a manner that’s impossible when our cognition is limited to our skull-based wetware.

I could do away with the difficulty of writing, then, and by some measures that would be a productivity victory. It would certainly save me a lot of time.

But in doing so I’d be denying myself a process that, while at times tedious and draining, also makes me better. Not better because of the final written product, but because I invested the time and energy to make it.

Automation can be a wonderful boon when applied thoughtfully, but it should also be approached with care, lest we accidentally unload the burdens that strengthen us, leaving only the low-effort, superficially enjoyable fluff.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• Museum of Plugs and Sockets

• Forgotten Postcards

• Antarctica Has a ‘Gravity Hole’

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

This week’s Let’s Know Things episode was partly about the wave of enormous AI company IPO’s that are on the horizon, and I’ll be interested to see how those systems and tools evolve following those IPOs.

There’s a chance the surge in income will lead to some spectacularly powerful new offerings, but it’s also possible it’ll represent the beginning of the end, the current AI players possibly going the way of the early Dotcom entrants (many of which went under when that bubble popped).

Alternatively, things could go the way of the early fiber optic cable boom, the involved companies investing gobs of money to install a silly amount of early internet infrastructure before mostly collapsing—their assets bought up at a significant discount by the companies that then turned the internet telecommunications industry into a sustainable business. I tend to think some version of that latter possibility is more likely, but I wouldn’t be surprised to see several more years of boom, first.

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

Or hit me up via other methods: Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or romance trope.

The birthrate is plunging; some say that’s a good thing.

IKEA periodically slips enthusiastic Swedish words into its lingo, while Nike leans on inspiring, motivating, sports-related language.

Strong brand voices can stand alone, and there’s a good chance you’d recognize many of these voices without any other accompanying elements. These voices help reinforce the brand’s overall identity and contribute to its purpose, and the stronger the voice, the more jarring it can be if it’s ever off (if Nike started speaking like IKEA, or vice-versa).

Though it can sometimes feel strange to think in these terms, especially for personal projects where the voice often emerges organically (and thus sounds like us), having a unique and consistent brand voice can make even simple, personal communications a lot more effective and pleasant.

This won’t always be possible or necessary, but one of the simplest ways to develop and maintain this kind of voice for whatever you’re making and sharing is to think in terms of archetypes.

For my software company, Truly Simple Tools, I aim to be the trustworthy, local mechanic that politely but directly tells you what you need to know. For my MKE Meetups newsletter, I try to evoke the person in the school lunch room who invites you to come sit at their table, and maybe even saves you a spot.

Read more

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: Identity Designed by David Airey

• Listening: Tick Talk by Shrink the Giant

If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.

New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the Jones Act Waiver

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Future Generations & the pod is about Transcending Embarrassment

• I recently released an iOS/macOS symptom & mood tracker called Truly Simple Symptom Log

Adult Friendships

1. It’s often more difficult making friend as adults because we have fewer sources of random serendipity through which we might meet a compatible person.

2. We also have more and stronger opinions and preferences as we get older. So while anyone roughly our age would have made for a fine companion when we were 5, when we’re adults, our filters are tighter and our tendency to nope our way out of potential friend situations is higher (there are fewer compatible people, because our sense of ‘compatible’ becomes more stringent as we age).

3. As we get older, there are also more stresses, strains, responsibilities, and other priorities competing for our time, energy, and resources. As kids, we could go hang out with another kid all day long because that’s what our time was for. As adults, we have our own kids or pets or partners or parents to take care of; we have bills to pay and lower backaches to tend to; we’re worried about politics and the state of the world and the security of our romantic relationships and the stability of our jobs and the size of our retirement funds.

4. Those variables have always informed our capacity to initiate and develop friendships, and that’s why community organizations like church groups and social clubs and fraternal organizations like the Freemasons have, for so long, been fundamental to adult social groups. These have been the only reliable means of sparking and cultivating adult relationships outside of work and possibly neighbors for a long time, and thus they’ve been central to how we do things.

5. Today, many of those previously leaned-upon access points for friendship have changed, weakened, disappeared, or moved online. The numbers vary depending on where you live, but far fewer people are enthusiastic members of faith-based groups than even a generation ago. Third places where we might meet up with neighbors have been replaced by more commercial spaces, and most of our daily communications with people outside our partners, immediate family, and coworkers have moved online into digital spaces where it’s more difficult to start and stoke real-life relationships.

6. Most of the data we have on non-familial, non-romantic relationships between adults in the modern world suggest that bonding over shared interests and spending a lot of time with other people at a regular cadence is the most reliable way to develop new friendships. Reading and gaming and knitting and birding and frisbee golf and wine tasting and shuffleboard and foreign language practice meetup groups are all excellent options, especially if they meet (and we attend) regularly, because these groups help us check all those boxes.

7. Those online spaces can also be useful for improving burgeoning relationships: adding a group chat to your shuffleboard club can allow you to stay in touch between meetups, while also giving you the opportunity to connect with other members over other interests, for instance. Even better is inviting some of those people to non-shuffleboard-related activities via this chat, which then gives you another touchpoint over which to bond, and more chances to connect.

8. My mental model for the “friendship recession” plaguing much of the wealthy world right now assumes that the things we used to rely on for sparking and cultivating friendships as we get older are no longer common or reliable, and the new things that have replaced them (like social networks) have been optimized for other purposes, and are now more focused on selling us stuff and gobbling up our attention than connecting us with other human beings. We therefore have to try a lot harder to build ad hoc opportunities for meeting and spending time with other people, because the passive, in-built stuff previous generations could rely upon either no longer exist, or no longer serve the same purpose.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• Why the US Population Boom Became a Bust

• The Fonts of the U.S. Federal Courts

• Sheep Drive

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

I recently started physical therapy to help address some supination in my running and walking gait, and wow am I sore. I’m doing all these tiny little exercises meant to stabilize my overall structure long-term, and they are destroying me. Which is good! Or will be eventually. But wow. Very achy all the time.

I had to get new running shoes to help with this process, too, and they’re so cushiony and lightweight that I feel like my feet are swaddled in smushy foam. They’re a dream to run in, but I feel a little silly every time I put them on; it’s like I’m wearing marshmallows and going outside to bounce around in them.

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

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How an enslaved, shipwrecked African became the US’s first great explorer.

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: A Parade of Horribles by Matt Dinniman

• Listening: Dumb Feeling by Mei Semones

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the 2026 DRC Ebola Outbreak

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Cognitive Decline and Employment & the pod is about Abnormality

• I recently released a new iOS/macOS daily writing goals app called Truly Simple Word Tracker

Well-Rounded

Pleasure is a relatively superficial but high-impact and immediate experience.

Eating a candy bar can be pleasurable in that we’re flooded with happy chemicals when we consume certain combinations of sugars, fats, and sodium.

Sometimes we pursue things because we know an experience or achievement will be satisfying.

Satisfaction is to pleasure like eating a hearty, healthful meal is to eating a candy bar.

Often we experience both pleasure and satisfaction at the same time: each bite of a lovingly prepared meal can be pleasurable. But the preparation, anticipation, consumption, and after-consumption sense of fullness, can also be satisfying.

We’re more likely to experience fulfillment—which is arguably a step more complex than satisfaction—when preparing a meal for, or to consume with, someone else.

Knowing another person has enjoyed the fruits of our labor, and getting to experience the afterglow of having applied our hard-won skills and understanding to those ends, can stimulate a deeper, almost eudemonic sense of rightness and attainment.

All three of these internal states—pleasure, satisfaction, and fulfillment—are important, and ideally we experience them in interwoven combinations that motivate us to do more healthful, enjoyable, psychologically and physically sustainable things.

It’s not uncommon to overcommit in one direction or another, though, becoming unbalanced and (for instance) pursuing nothing but superficial pleasure and then struggling to figure out why we feel hollow and listless at the end of the day, despite consuming so many metaphorical candy bars.

We might also become too far-sighted, however, entirely investing ourselves in pursuits that will someday pay off in a big, fulfilling way, but day-to-day denying ourselves the motive power we might derive from periodic, momentary pleasures and smaller-scale, but still sustaining and strengthening satisfactions.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• A Pokémon of a Different Color

• Tabletop Roleplaying Games and Violence

• Slinging

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

Beyond app-making, (still) book-editing, and all my usual work, I also started physical therapy the other day

I’m hoping to fix (or make less-bad) the supination in my running and walking gait, which I’ve long been vaguely aware of, but didn’t realize was associated with things like twisted ankles, plantar fasciitis, and shin splints; all issues I suffer semi-regularly, and would like to suffer not-at-all.

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

Or hit me up via other methods: Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or barbed-wire fence telephone network.

New zine about 1960s Penguin crime novels.

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: Goliath’s Curse by Luke Kemp

• Listening: Idiot Box by Sharon Van Etten

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the potentially impending Super El Niño

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about School Start Times & the pod is about Paranormal Beliefs

• I recently released a new iOS/macOS personal wiki app called Story Wiki

The Starting Problem

When enthusiastic about something, it’s not uncommon to become so bogged down in details to the point that you never quite get around to getting started.

Maybe instead of writing that book you’ve been dreaming up, you spend all your time world-building and outlining. You craft characters so meticulous and fleshed-out that they feel real, but the more effort you put into that before-work, the less attainable tackling the book itself becomes.

Or perhaps you’ve got a great idea for a small business, or a workout plan you’ve been meaning to try out, or a new habit (making a list of all the friends you want to stay in touch with, and then plotting all their names on the calendar as a reminder to give them a call periodically) that you just know will be good for you, but you can’t seem to find a way in; can’t seem to get started.

It can all feel just really big and overwhelming. And these things are important, so starting off wrong, doing it the wrong way, is unacceptable. That would be the death of the dream.

I’ve discovered over the years that, despite regularly experiencing all these same doubts and concerns, that the best solution to the starting problem, the inclination to fiddle around with before-work details instead of getting to work, is to just start.

Like, immediately. Right now.

As soon as you put the first mark on the page, write the first real, actual word in the Scrivener document, plot out the first friend-call (and then make that call), the project feels more real, but also feels a lot more grounded and attainable.

It’s no longer something that you’re thinking about doing, it’s something you are doing.

You’re in the midst of the project, not dreaming about it. And as such, the fear of the unknown dissipates, the impossible scale of a concept unconfined by reality is reduced to concrete dimensions, and your thoughts become a lot more practical: not can I do this, but how best to do this? Not when should I start, but what should I do next?

Over time, you can build up a reflex and default to just getting started. And while this reflex doesn’t make big, hefty undertaking any less big or hefty, it does tend to make such projects seem a lot more attainable because it’s easier to imagine the tangible, in-progress version of things from the get-go, which in turn eases all those before-work hesitations, concerns, and doubts.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• Can You Just Do Things?

• Why Your Best Ideas Come After Your Worst

• Spotless: The Stain Solver

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

I’ve recently updated the Truly Simple Tools website to better reflect the brand, and the updates I’m making to the portfolio of apps I’ve built.

I also met up with some strangers from the internet this past weekend to do an escape room (see photo), which was a lot of fun. I’ve been forcing myself out the door as much as possible, as my girlfriend is visiting family on the east coast and will be gone for about a month, and I have a tendency to become a hermit when not nudged to be appropriately social by her presence.

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

Or hit me up via other methods: Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or labyrinth.

“It’s fine if I suck sometimes.”

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: A Drop of Corruption by Robert Jackson Bennett

• Listening: Churning by Katerina Pipili

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about 2026 UK Local Elections

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Ord Clouds & the pod is about Yawning

• I recently released a new iOS/macOS word-tracker app (for projects like books, but also writing rituals): Truly Simple Word Tracker

Sustaining Curiosity

Especially at paradigm-fracturing moments when it feels like the ground is shifting, the world has changed, and our previously stable grip on “the way of things” has softened, it’s important to focus on exploration, understanding, and interest.

As technologies, cultural norms, economic systems, and the myriad impacts of these larger forces on our day-to-day begin to disrupt our momentary rhythms and future plans, there’s an understandable tendency to ignore, deny, or push back against these forces; not because we think it’s possible to put the toothpaste back in the tube, but because accepting the new reality they’ve instigated is more than we can currently handle.

At such moments, it can be helpful to reorient away from knee-jerk (if perhaps justified) disavowal and denegation, and instead aim for a humble sort of curiosity.

Not approval, not acceptance: a genuine interest in the spiraling variables triggering the tumult.

This alternative perspective allows us to see the things (even those that unnerve us) more clearly, and it pushes us to understand these forces more completely. As we come to better grok these perturbations, we may find there are facets of them we appreciate and perhaps even celebrate. We might also find they are even more poisonous than we assumed, but because we’ve taken the time to more fully understand them, we also have a better sense of how to combat and counter them.

Whatever the ultimate outcome, a considerate, deliberate, open stance will almost always be the ideal response to reflexive defensiveness in the face of novelty.

Curiosity nudges us away from easy bias toward hard-earned knowledge and, counterintuitively, maintaining our inquisitiveness through turbulent times is one of the more intellectually and emotionally sustaining things we can do at such moments.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• MMAcevedo (short fiction)

• Graphic Design History Resources

• In the World’s Driest Desert, Chile Freezes Its Future to Protect Plants

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What Else

I’m in the process of updating several components of my online presence.

It wasn’t that long ago that social media was a vital aspect of one’s digital self, but now I find (for me and a lot of people I know, anyway) it’s a bit of an afterthought. That’s mostly because of the (de)evolution of these platforms into parasocial networks, I suspect, but it’s possibly also because lot of the more interesting building is occurring away from these platforms, these days.

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Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: The Tainted Cup by Robert Jackson Bennett

• Listening: Spike Island by Pulp

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Child Mortality

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Haunted Houses & the pod is about Sense of Self

• I added some new functionality to my Truly Simple Kanban app (for iOS/macOS)

Not One Map

I’ve always liked the idea of being my own patron, which in practice involves figuring out how to make enough money to both put a roof over my head and to fund my own creative explorations and growth.

Sometimes this has meant working actual jobs (way back in the day); sometimes it’s involved taking on clients; sometimes it’s been a matter of selling things like books and setting up paid subscriptions for some of my writings and podcasts.

A strange patchwork of income sources has allowed me to serve as my own Medici for about two decades, at this point, and I feel immensely fortunate to be able to say that.

Everyone will have their own best-fit (or best-fit for this exact moment) approach, though, and finding the right balance can take time—there’s no one, true, perfect way to lead a creative life.

For most of us, the ideal approach will involve taking stock of our personal portfolio of skills, experience, and capacities, and then figuring out how to leverage these things so that we’re economically (and psychologically) stable, with enough time, energy, and resources left over to spend on whatever creatively fulfills us.

Some people have trust funds, some have high-earning career paths, some have neither money nor solid paychecks, but do have simple needs and inexpensive tastes.

The trick is to juggle and arrange these elements in such a way that, in the end, you have what you need to create whatever it is you think should exist in the world.

Making this happen might require you pick up some new skills, that you on a job, or that you figure out how to monetize an activity that was previously just for fun (without negating the other benefits of that activity). It’s possible to make the wrong tradeoffs, or to give too much away in this pursuit, which might require backtracking or a full reassessment of both priorities and costs.

Ultimately, though, if you can self-fund at least some component of what you’re making, that gives you absolute power over some facet of your creative life. And that’s a type of freedom and fulfillment that’s difficult to achieve via any other means.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• High Fashion

• What Can We Gain by Losing Infinity?

• A Conflict of AI Visions

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What Else

I’ve been scheduling little coffee & chat meetings with strangers here in Milwaukee, and as was the case when I was on the road, meeting new people as part of my routine, it’s become one of the most interesting and fulfilling aspects of my week.

Beyond that, I’m muddling through the last act (of the 4th draft) of the book I’m editing, and building a new (symptom log) app that I hope folks will find useful, and which I’m enjoying putting together.

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Spooky feelings in old houses may be caused by boiler sounds, study suggests.

Remember that there are almost always more reasons not to make something than there are to make it. This is why we’re not all building scale-model castles when we’re children, and why we don’t build our own spaceships, start our own businesses, or create our own sculptures as adults.

The cost of making things in terms of time, in terms of energy, in terms of resources (including money, but not only money), and in terms of knowledge and know-how (and the additional costs of acquiring said knowledge and know-how) can be extraordinary, even for non-spaceship ambitions.

Simply deciding to write a book or paint a still-life or cook a nice meal from scratch is often more than we can afford, because of all the other priorities (chosen, inherited, and foisted upon us by life) that compete for those same scraps.

I would argue that this is one of the most vital contributions of technology to human flourishing: the leverage provided by electricity, by computers, by city-scale water filtration systems is immense. We’re liberated from so much base-level busywork we might otherwise be doing by these tools and systems and infrastructure (tangible and culturally enacted), and that’s nothing to sneeze at.

Read more

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: Vulture Capitalism by Grace Blakely

• Listening: Much Better by My First Time

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New Work

• I recently released two new apps for iOS & MacOS:

  • Story Wiki is for worldbuilders who want to keep all their characters, kingdoms, rules, politics, magic systems, etc in a personal wikipedia

  • Truly Simple Word Tracker is for writers who want to keep track of their progress on projects (like books) and on their writing rituals

  • Both are free for a single project, ritual, and wiki, or you can pay $5 to have as many of all those things as you like (that’s a one-time, lifetime unlock)

  • Check out all my apps at Truly Simple Tools

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Iran War Costs

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Conflict Headlines & the pod is about Local Positivity Bias

On Liking Things

When we hear a new song for the first time, we might immediately love it, we might knee-jerk hate it, and we might feel nothing at all about it.

This initial response is predicated on our existing musical taste and to some degree on our perception of our taste (we understand what kind of music we tend to like, and if a new song doesn’t have obvious earmarks of that type of music, we might discount it immediately as “not for us”).

Our internal reaction is also informed by our circumstances at the moment in which we’re exposed to the new song: the weather, if we’re working in an office or lounging on a beach, whether we’re well-hydrated, inebriated, hungry or full, in love or in the midst of a bad breakup.

One of the most powerful determinants of whether we’ll like a song or not, though, is how often we hear it, because our brain rewards familiarity and predictability.

So if we hear a song once, we may respond neutrally or negatively, but if we hear the same song three or four or more times, our brains may begin to flash the reward signals associated with “I like this!” because it’s fond of being able to predict the next note or lyric in a song, and we may consequently realize, hey, this song is actually pretty good, I’m into it.

This is why record labels push so hard to get their artists’ new singles on all the radio stations and onto all the algorithmically generated playlists: what we like is partly (and powerfully) shaped by exposure and repetition. And this can be manipulative and even scary to think about, especially if you ponder just how many of our likes, our personal tastes, were probably fashioned by exactly this sort of psychological exploitation; marketing is a powerful force, and much of what we think of as uniquely “us” (especially in terms of taste) actually originates with these sorts of campaigns.

That said, I appreciate the idea that what we like (and are capable of liking) is malleable, because that suggests we have the capacity to like more things, perhaps even intentionally, should we choose to do so.

There will of course always be things that we reflexively don’t like, and there will be (probably many more) things we don’t like because it’s trendy or statusful not to like them.

I tend to believe that liking more things can be beneficial, though, because it allows for the appreciation of a larger variety of experiences, and upon such appreciation are holistically fulfilling lives built.

There’s a good chance that you’ve never tasted your favorite food before because you haven’t been exposed to it yet. There’s just a lot of food out there in the world, and the likelihood that you’ve randomly been exposed to your all-time favorite by happenstance is negligible.

Being open to more things makes it a lot more likely that you’ll eventually discover your favorite everything (food, music, location, friend, career, hobby), because there will be fewer biases and self-imposed limitations (“I don’t like sushi”) standing between you and that discovery.

That expanded surface area for discovery is, itself, a strong argument in favor of liking more things. But I’ve also found that challenging my own dislikes—attempting to identify positives about music genres or foods I’m not fond of, or people who initially rub me the wrong way—helps me perceive more roundness in everything and everyone. I tend to notice more potential likes when I’m looking for them, and I experience more like-related benefits when I give myself permission to violate my reflexive don’t-like responses.

None of which rids the world of music and people and food that I consider to be annoying or rude or disgusting. But this approach, making this kind of effort, does help me understand why some people are the way they are, and why some things that I consider to be not great (or abysmal) are enthusiastically celebrated by other people who probably find my own likes to be just as confounding as I find theirs.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• The Rise And Fall Of ‘Petty Tyrants’

• The Mystery in the Medicine Cabinet

• Reclaimed by Nature

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What Else

I had a few interruptions to my pace and schedule, but I’m finally approaching a finished 4th draft of my in-progress novel, Methuselahs, and MKE Meetups (which I run here in Milwaukee) has been growing steadily, which feels good.

Nothing huge going on right now, then, but there are little bits of iterative progress all over the place, which tend to add up to big, hefty accomplishments, given enough time and tending.

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New study compares growing corn for energy to solar production. It’s no contest.

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman

• Listening: Everybody’s Trying to Figure Me Out by HAIM

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the 2026 Hungarian Election

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Bixonimania & the pod is about Enacted Extraversion

Taking Stock

Every couple of years I begin to yearn for the relative predictability and camaraderie of a more conventional work-life.

The idea of earning a paycheck (and knowing how much it will be for!), speaking to the same people every day, and having a semi-habitual routine (that’s not entirely set by me) seems novel and intriguing when you’ve been doing the opposite for nearly two decades.

There’s something psychologically calming about the notion of not having to be responsible for absolutely every aspect of all the work I do; having other people in the loop, doing their part, hefting their allotment of the workload so I can settle in and focus on mine.

Then again, I really enjoy having full control over how I spend my time and energy. I think it would be interesting and educational to experience the alternative for a while, maybe 5-10 years, but I would absolutely miss my current sense of near-absolute time-freedom and self-guided everything.

Also (and this may or may not actually be a big deal), my skills and experiences do not fit cleanly into the funnels and filters used by the typical work world to determine who would be a good candidate for a given position.

I would probably need to find something specialized, some kind of unusual employer or work situation, as I would almost certainly be sieved-out by the AI or algorithmic systems meant to pare-down the number of applicants for a given position, due to my strangely shaped career.

That latter realization is humbling because I’ve worked hard to build the life I have. Being reminded that core aspects of this life (and the skills, knowledge, and sacrifices required to keep it afloat) aren’t necessarily valued by traditional employers can be deflating.

Then again, having this kind of unusual professional background also unlocks doors that people who have stuck to the traditional employment path would have trouble opening.

I can’t tell you how many incredibly talented, experienced people I’ve met who have tried to leave their jobs to go off on their own, only to find they’re missing a bunch of necessary knowledge and know-how (things that were previously handled by others within their organizations, perhaps), or that they simply lack the mindset to fail and try again, over and over and over, until something eventually works (and maybe imperfectly).

Many of these people have told me they admire and covet the way I live, and the benefits of my time-rich career.

In response, I usually tell them that I wish I had their economic predictability (and thus, stability), their team of collaborators, and a LinkedIn profile that reads as ‘competent, experienced professional’ to the increasingly automated systems that determine whether we’re successes or failures.

It’s possible to do a bit of both, of course.

I sometimes work with clients, and that offers me some of what I miss about the traditional employment world without too seriously impinging on the benefits of the weirdo life I typically enjoy.

That said, I also recognize that it’s human nature to crave that which we don’t have, and there will likely always be a part of me that wants to walk the path I’m not currently on (right up until I start walking that other path, at which point I’ll covet the one I just left).

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• The Quiet Disappearance of the Free-Range Childhood

• The Great Ozempic Experiment

• Solar Power in Africa Is Heating Up Thanks in Part to Chili Peppers

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

We had absolutely bonkers weather here in Milwaukee last week: four straight days of torrential rain, destructively large hail, and intense tornadoes.

Not fun! The roads were all flooded, and I had to double-back three times on the drive home from D&D one night to avoid roads that were completely subsumed, filled with drowned cars and people fleeing them.

It looks like we’ve got some dry days ahead, at long last, and it’s not brutally hot like it was in the weeks leading up to all those storms. So I’m planning to enjoy the outdoors in this liminal weather period between ‘kind of just constant tornadoes and flooding’ and ‘actually too hot and humid to function.’

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Are OnlyFans models the best way to explain the climate crisis?

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: Playground by Richard Powers

• Listening: Tiger at the Drugstore by Skating Polly

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Mythos

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Hawks and Doves & the pod is about the Rumpelstiltskin Effect

Missing the Point

Some of us want to accumulate money because we simply can’t stop ourselves.

To those thus inclined, money is like Pokémon cards or Civil War relics or anything else a person might hoard. And because accumulation feels good, triggering biological reward responses that would have nudged our proto-human ancestors into gathering resources (the better to survive and procreate), some of us keep accumulating money, hitting that ‘get more’ button over and over and over again until we die.

For many of us, though, money actually represents freedom. Or safety. Or the leverage required to accomplish some long-cherished goal. Sometimes the money itself is the point, but sometimes it’s more about what the money symbolizes: the gaps it fills in our lives.

Working out can be similar.

Some people exercise because of the physical and psychological rewards inherent in the act of straining their muscles and circulatory systems. But for others, going to the gym or for a run is a means of staying alive long enough to see their children grow up, or to remain fit enough to continue enjoying long hikes through the wilderness with their partner.

For some people, romantic relationships represent stability. For others it’s love. For still others it represents a certain type of accomplishment or life milestone.

Having kids, investing in our careers, cultivating hobbies, writing books, competing in marathons—all have overt meanings, but also deeper, more specific and personal meanings.

Almost always, our actual reasons for raising children or writing a book will be far more complex than the cursory explanations for these undertakings. In some cases, those default rationales will be just a small part of a larger portfolio of reasons, and in others they’ll be completely orthogonal to our true, us-shaped motives.

Whatever the nature of our ambitions, it’s useful to understand them with as much granularity as possible. Such understanding can help us to aim for ultra-specific aspects of our goals, rather than superficial, iconographic versions of them that kinda sorta look like what we have in mind, but which in practice miss the point entirely.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• When Working Out Becomes an Addiction

• William Blake, Remote by the Sea

• How a ‘Universal Basic Neighborhood’ Can Help Americans Live Longer

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

With all the hubbub of activity this past week (including my trip out to Seattle to visit family and help out with my toddler nephew) I completely forgot that I’m turning 41 tomorrow!

Not a terribly exciting age-number (40 was a biggy, and I feel like 42 has good pop cultural significance), but I’m looking forward to another year of learning, growth, and just the right amount of befuddlement, upset, and wonder.

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Miscellanea: the war in Iran.

Assembly languages are very low-level and close to that binary in the sense that what the human writes doesn’t require too much translation to be converted.

Other languages, like Python, C++, or Java are higher-level and thus further from binary, but they’re also easier for humans to read and work with.

In this context, ‘higher-level’ basically means ‘more layers of abstraction.’ You start at the foundation (with binary) then go up a level, to something like assembly. Then you go up and up and up, adding more abstraction, hiding more of the computer-optimized complexity and replacing it with human-optimized intelligibility.

More abstraction generally means more people can create and wield digital tools, because you no longer need a doctorate in order to write “Hello, World!” on a computer.

As you move further up to more abstracted languages, then, you make these tools more accessible to more people, and allow more humans to use digital leverage in more intuitive ways.

As a trade-off, though, you lose some of the technical details and peculiarities that folks working in assembly or binary might notice and be capable of fiddling with at an extremely granular level. Your options become in some ways more limited and finite, even as your other capabilities grow.

Read more

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: Babel by RF Kuang

• Listening: Limelight by Tune-Yards

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Note

• I’ll be visiting family in Seattle next week, so I’m skipping next week’s newsletter, and will talk to you again the following week :)

New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Ukraine and Iran

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Gender Conformity & the pod is about Mental Subtraction

Directional Play

Hobbies are great because you don’t have to invest too much of yourself in them, but you absolutely can if you like, and if you do, you tend to get more out of them.

You can pick up a hobby—say coloring in coloring books or creating monsters with Legos or playing disc golf or performing interpretive dance—and you don’t have to convince a single person to give you money in exchange for your brick-hydra or your pubescence-inspired tap-dance. You can just do it, and keep doing it, and no one has to like what you do or how you do it but you.

I like to think of hobbies as directional play, as while hobbies tend to be fun (or otherwise enjoyable), there’s also room for growth and development. You can build really simplistic Lego monsters with a few dozen pieces, or you can engineer staggeringly large and complex grotesques. You can have a blast at either end of that spectrum, but you can also choose to progress from one side to the other, and you can stop anywhere you like along the way (and if you find a spot you especially like, you can stay there forever without negative consequence).

That directionality is nice because growth and accomplishment can feel good and be fulfilling.

But ‘play’ is also important, here, because most of us don’t play enough: we don’t just mess around, try and do things just for their own sake. Not as adults, anyway. And it’s liberating to have something in our lives that we don’t have to be good at, and in which we can just fumble around in whichever manner feels right at any given moment.

Hobbies can also, sometimes, evolve into other things, including professions.

There’s nothing at all wrong with this when it happens, but most of us will be best served by periodically reminding ourselves that not everything needs to be monetized, and not everything needs to be purposeful (in the sense of goosing some kind of growth metric, or helping us develop in a quantifiable way).

It’s okay just to do and try things, and to have hobbies that help us pass the time, give us an excuse to be around others, and that stoke and sate our curiosity.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• An Unstoppable Mushroom Is Tearing Through North American Forests

• Everything I Know About Self-Publishing

• How to Network When You’re Socially Anxious

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

I am exhausted.

It’s a lot of work, getting ready for these Seattle trips. But these past few days I’ve also been knocked flat by whatever this cold/flu/covid thing is that’s going around right now. I thought I dodged it, but it finally got me.

So I’ve been aggressively resting in order to get over it (or bare minimum no longer contagious) by the time I leave for Seattle. But man, not fun.

Say Hello

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Western AI models “fail spectacularly” in farms and forests abroad.

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: The Alternative by Nick Romeo

• Listening: Running/Planning by CMAT

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the Cuban Oil Blockade

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Cognitive Shuffling & the pod is about the Region-Beta Paradox

• I’ve also recent completed an update of all my iOS/macOS apps, if you’re interested in checking out the Truly Simple Tools portfolio :)

Templates and Scripts

I have a general sense that—wherever we end up next, however our technologies and politics evolve, and whatever shapes our communities and systems and social norms and economic realities are nudged into as a consequence of those evolutions—it’ll still be beneficial to have a keen sense of self-knowledge.

By self-knowledge I mean an understanding of who we are, what we want, what we care about, our relative advantages and disadvantages in different spheres of life, a rough comprehension of our capacity to suffer and sacrifice and love and give and gracefully receive, and the priorities (and variables) that underpin and inform all of these things.

Beyond providing us with a more thorough awareness and appreciation of our own uniqueness (and consequently, that of everyone else on the planet), self-knowledge also contributes to our capacity for self-expression.

As our self-understanding grows, so does our ability to share that cognizance via conversations with our partners and friends, through our votes and other efforts to influence society, law, and governance, through our art, and even through what we’re willing to do to pay the bills (and the nature of the entities we’re willing to do those things for).

Going deeper than the superficial on this can require a fair bit of work, in part because much of what we think we believe or care about, what we consider to be “us,” isn’t actually fundamental to who we are. Throughout our lives, all sorts of (often well-meaning) entities give us templates and scripts to work from, and we adopt these beliefs, rationales, and routines because, well, why not? What’s the alternative? This lending of philosophical motivation starts young and never really stops.

Peeling off those outer layers to figure out what’s beneath them can be the effort of a lifetime, and it can be disorienting making progress, because rather than discovering some latent, long-suffocated belief system or portfolio of goals underneath all those inherited worldviews, many of us will instead discover a whole lot of nothing, not second, complete and more perfect self that’s been hidden away, waiting for us to uncover it.

From there, our second effort of a lifetime is to fill that nothing with something; but this time, we ideally opt for something more us-shaped.

I think a lot of people, by adulthood, has at least a shadowy sense of this undertaking, and has probably even taken a few steps toward figuring out who they are, sans all those external doctrines and dogmas.

Something that I’ve personally found to be helpful in this effort is semi-regularly stepping back and imagining that the forces that shape my life, my decisions, my sense of the possible and impossible, today, are no longer there.

Money is gone, politics have become unrecognizable (or unnecessary). Maybe we no longer need our bodies, or we’ve discovered other intelligent life that maybe has some answers (about the big questions) for us. Maybe we’ve achieved world peace and post-scarcity and now we just have to figure out what to do with all our free time.

If things were to be shaken up in fundamental ways, who would I be? What causes, what goals would be important enough to me that I would want to invest myself in them? What would shape my actions, my overall trajectory, for the balance of my life?

Then, stepping back to now, to this reality: what does that tell me about who I actually am, what I should actually be doing, and what I should actually be working toward?

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• A Japanese Glossary of Chopsticks Faux Pas

• The Little Town Making Nearly All of China’s Lanterns

• ‘World’s Largest Battery’

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

I’m heading back out to Seattle in about a week and a half, and I’m already preparing for that, which mostly means doing double the normal amount of work so that I can really be there while I’m there, with as few deadlines and external responsibilities pulling me away from family time as possible.

I do have some fun meetups and other little social get-togethers between now and my departure, though, which should serve as nice pressure valves on what might otherwise be a too-aggressive work schedule.

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

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Writing factory: notes from a life on China’s assembly lines.

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: Catastrophe by Christopher Ferguson

• Listening: What Do I Know by Deep Sea Diver

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Better Batteries

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about the Tocqueville Effect & the pod is about Mental Fatigue

Break to Make

I recently updated the operating systems on my iPhone and Macbook Pro, as usual waiting a while because the folks behind some of the software I use drag their heels on getting confirmed-compatible versions of their offerings out the door. I also try to the avoid the worst of the new-release bugs that hide in every OS upgrade across every possible computing platform, these days.

The new versions of both OSes are pretty terrible. I’m sure this feeling isn’t universal, but the general consensus seems to be that Apple stumbled on this, producing strangely ugly, slow, disarrayed base-layers for their two most important platforms.

Some of the apps I use every day are now borderline unusable, lagging and sputtering under the weight of all the unnecessary decorations and doodads that have been crammed into this “upgrade.” My outdated phone, after years of amiably puttering along like a fresh device, is suddenly acting its age, creaking and sighing every time I ask it to perform even the simple of tasks.

If you couldn’t tell, I’m not happy with all this. And the incessant insistence that I upgrade—please upgrade, don’t you want to upgrade, you must upgrade now—delivered by popups and other dark pattern elements splashed across my screens, only add insult to injury.

They forced this on me, and I’m irritated about it.

That said, in these sorts of moments I try to remind myself that new stuff will almost always be irritating or terrifying at first, at least to some portion of the intended audience. And the older we get, the more likely we are to be thus disarrayed by novelty, because we become more set in our ways, more prone to exploit rather than explore, and more latently skeptical of the unfamiliar (on average, at least).

I also try to remind myself that truly wonderful next-step evolutions seldom arrive fully baked and perfectly conceived. In most cases they’re partway there; an interesting vision bundled up in an annoying, detrimental, maybe even confoundingly bad wrapper. It can take a while for the good to be identified and amplified, and the bad whittled away.

This isn’t just true of tech giants and their products. Every good thing I’ve ever made, all the incredibly valuable, fulfilling, healthful next-steps I’ve ever taken, have been processes, not one-shot pivots. And almost always we have to break things in order to make things: we can patch and suture the old for a long while, iterating on what works. But at some point that awkward collage of ideas will need to be reassessed and, ideally, reborn as something new; a fresh canvas to tweak, refine, and over the course of years revise into its own patchwork masterpiece (which will then be destroyed and replaced).

This isn’t always a fun thought, but it’s this or stagnation.

That’s what I tell myself, anyway, as another app fails to load and another digital tool I rely upon to do my job stutters and shuts itself down, the machines running them collapsing under the weight of un-asked-for tacky UI elements and yet another, buggy software update.

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Interesting Links

• In Every Language

• Noble Gas Impasse

• Peel-And-Stick Solar Panels

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What Else

After a couple of 70-ish degree (F) days, during which everyone was outside, in shorts, getting sunburned, the state of Wisconsin just basically shut down in the face of an historic blizzard. The weather whiplash is real up here, folks.

In other news, I’m in the process of revising my Truly Simple Tools app portfolio (lots of updates already released) and outlining/planning some new apps I’ve been thinking about for a while, but haven’t had the time to hunker down and tackle.

I’m also about a fifth of the way through a new, major (4th) draft of Methuselahs, which is just such a fun story and I can’t wait to share it with beta readers after this (and then a comparably quick spelling/grammar/etc) draft.

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Dyslexia and the reading wars.

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: Consider This by Chuck Palahniuk

• Listening: All My Freaks by Divorce

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the 2026 Iran War

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Corporate Buzzwords & the pod is about School Phone Bans

• I also have a fun little milestone (one-year anniversary) for my MKE Meetups project this week

Hugs Not Nuggs

It’s been said that the average person living today—especially in wealthy countries—will enjoy a better overall quality of life than an emperor living a few hundred years ago, and I tend to think that’s true.

Average life- and health-spans have dramatically increased even since the mid-20th century, and the portfolio of conveniences, understandings, entertainments, rights, and other baseline benefits we enjoy simply for having been born in the right place and time is astounding when considered within the total context of human history.

Not all change is positive, of course, and we collectively experience plenty of semi-regular backsliding. There are also changes that are “good” in one sense and “pretty dang terrible” in another, and I would argue that the majority of our social and communication infrastructure moving online, and the subsequent prioritization of engagement metrics over all others, falls into that latter category.

This isn’t universally the case, and there are degrees of engagement that are more healthful than harmful. Just as allowing oneself to periodically eat fast food rather than strictly adhering to a lifestyle-defining, nutritionally perfect diet 100% of the time can be beneficial, it could likewise be argued that occasional, moderated exposure to TikTok dance videos and Instagram puppy memes is actually not so bad, and possibly even better than zero exposure to such things.

When taken to extremes, though, even the most innocuous-seeming apps and platforms can be deleterious to our health. And because of the powerful incentives that shape these pseudo-social online spaces, and the ease with which we can experience them (compared to comparable experiences in the real world) we’re more likely to engage with them in extreme and unhealthful—rather than periodic, not-so-bad, maybe even on-balance good—ways.

Real life is a lot messier and more frictional than online socialization, and interacting with other human beings is a lot more complex, stressful, and at times anxiety-inducing than engaging with online content.

You can’t like-and-subscribe your way into a friendship, and experiencing the full range of human emotion with another person who has an inner-life just as rich as your own requires effortful thought and communication that’s more dense and elaborate than a reaction emoji.

If social media is the fast food of human interaction, real-life exposure to other human beings is a complex, home-made meal.

Buying and consuming a box of chicken nuggets is casually simple to the point of being utterly thoughtless. Orchestrating a kitchen full of ingredients into a delicious, subtle, dietarily rich final product can seem like a ridiculously heavy lift in comparison.

But even though our internal reward systems love the salts, fats, and sugars of ultra-processed snack foods, we’re only really fueled, at a deeper level, by the weightier stuff: by hugs, not nuggs.

I don’t personally think there’s anything wrong with the periodic cheat-food, and I think it’s possible to become so obsessed with a type of anti-technology purity that we miss out on really stellar memes and harmless, superficial interactions that might serve as the right anxiety-easing brain-snack at the right moment.

But these lighter-weight, nutritionally vacant options are best served as irregular additions to lives enriched by the deeper, hard-earned and more eudemonia-inducing stuff that ideally makes up the foundation of our diets, dialogues, and lives.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• Bring On Defunct: The iPod Enthralls Young Music Listeners

• China’s 450km/h Bullet Train Is the Fastest Ever Built

• On Similes, Good and Bad

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What Else

I’ve just started the 4th draft of a novel I’m working on (Methuselahs), and I’m having a lot of fun figuring out what the second year of my MKE Meetups project will look like, while also working through the catalog of apps I’ve built to give everything a polish and minor upgrade (I just got a new version of my writing app Authorcise out the door, for instance; if you’ve got a Mac, it’s free and a lot of fun to use).

It’s been wonderful seeing Milwaukee come back to life this past week as the weather has modestly improved and we’ve had some nice, sunny, warm-ish days. It doesn’t exactly die when we hit the deep-freeze months, but there are a lot of people walking (often with their dogs and kids) around my neighborhood when it’s above 40, and that makes all the difference in the world for the energy of a place.

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

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The fix for looksmaxxing? A wholesome, affirming forum for bald people.

• Current Location: Milwaukee, WI

• Reading: Blood by Dr. Jen Gunter

• Listening: The Milkman by Petey

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New Work

• This week’s Let’s Know Things is about Killer Robots and Mass Surveillance

• This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Transcending Embarrassment & the pod is about Brain Eras

Reset Layers

Every morning I like to reset to zero.

After a quick little stretch-focused workout, I get the kettle going and put all the dishes and silverware away. I straighten and tidy anything within reach, and I take my pill (levothyroxine for my faulty thyroid), cleanse my mouthguard (for my faulty TMJ), open the living room blinds to let in some light, and commit myself to having a good, fulfilling day.

There are minor variations to this routine, especially if I’m on the road. And though I get up at 5am most days, if I have an flight (or the like) I’ll sometimes skip or breeze through a few steps.

But I find the process of getting things back to a baseline before the unpredictable disruptions of a new day soothing because I know that, bare-minimum, I’m beginning from a familiar stance. And I know that no matter what the day brings, I can return to that stance when I’m done.

There’s another layer of resetting in which I regularly engage: that of the deep-clean.

I work from home, so I can usually keep things orderly with just a little straightening here, a little dusting there. But chaos accrues in the gaps despite my best daily efforts, so periodic heavier lifts are necessary.

This typically happens about once a month. My partner and I divide up the apartment and go whole-hog on the organizing, scrubbing, dusting, laundering, and vacuuming. Some of the same happens more regularly, but this larger-scale, holistic effort leaves us with a satisfyingly new-feeling home that we’re able to enjoy for the day or two before the apartment feels “lived-in” again.

Up another layer is a “Spring Cleaning” sort of resetting, which involves not just cleaning, but a grand reorganization of our space and lives.

There’s a lot of trashing and donating at this level, as we don’t just put things in closets and scrub the floors—we take the time to reconsider what we actually need and what’s just sitting there, gathering dust and taking up valuable real estate.

This is a maybe quarterly activity, and it’s usually a multi-day, at times week-long endeavor. It feels amazing, though, because it psychologically frees up a lot of space (even more than it literally frees up), and it serves as a reminder to check in on our goals and expectations (and how they’ve changed since the last check-in), as well, which leaves us with recalibrated compasses that point toward more us-shaped destinations.

This is on my mind because we’re about to start in on that latter-most type of reset, and my brain is already buzzing with the possibilities and potential.

What no longer serves me? How do I want to be spending my time? What am I holding onto because I feel like I have to, or because it made sense for a previous iteration of me that no longer exists?

Every layer at every scale is important, though. Sometimes I’m shocked by just how much of a difference even the little daily reset makes, its value obvious when I skip it for even a few days and a disordered, messy confusion floods in, disrupting pretty much everything and reminding me why I adopted it as a ritual in the first place.

If you enjoyed this essay, consider supporting my work by becoming a paid subscriber, buying me a coffee, or grabbing one of my books.

Interesting Links

• You’re Probably Using the Wrong Dictionary

• Permanent Docking Pier Reaches McMurdo Station After 9,100-Nautical-Mile Tow

• Most Older Adults Who Live at Home Want to Age in Place, but They Aren’t Entirely Confident They’ll Get To

If you want more links to interesting things, consider subscribing to Aspiring Generalist.

What Else

If the weather gods aren’t messing with those of us in the Great Lakes region, today we should hit the 40s (F) and this Friday we should be stepping into a minimum of a week’s worth of 50+ degree weather.

Which is an astonishing thought after this much frigid cold, ice, and cartoonishly persistent snow!

After the mercury tips above 60 I’ll start whining about the heat, but for now I’m looking forward to wearing fewer layers, opening the windows, and enjoying clear sidewalks for a while.

Say Hello

New here? Hit reply and tell me something about yourself!

You can also fill me in on something interesting you’re working on or something random you’re learning about.

I respond to every message I receive and would love to hear from you :)

Prefer stamps and paper? Send a letter, postcard, or some other physical communication to: Colin Wright, PO Box 11442, Milwaukee, WI 53211, USA

Or hit me up via other methods: Instagram, Threads, Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, or Hackers hack.

Whether it’s yoga, rock climbing or Dungeons & Dragons, taking leisure to a high level can be good for your well-being.