Well-Rounded
May 27, 2025
3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: A Parade of Horribles by Matt Dinniman
Listening: Dumb Feeling by Mei Semones
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 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.
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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.
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