Last year, writer Robin Sloan published a brief essay in his newsletter, and one part in particular has stuck with me since:

“You could extinguish a star,” but you never will, because that power is occupied by the task of living.

I was reminded of it talking to a colleague a few days ago who was of a similar (which is to say, middle) age as myself. She noted that we are getting into that not-so-pleasant space in between the hammer of having young children and the anvil of parents who are starting to need some extra care themselves. But of course, I commented, our parents had the same issues and we as children were protected from feeling any effects.

Except now I am having second thoughts, as I do think we have it significantly worse than our parents.

To start with, children require more maintenance than we ever did. Toddler age onward, we act as our progeny’s administrative assistants-slash-social secretaries, scheduling playdates, RSVP’ing to birthday invitations, filling out the afterschool activity calendar. School are no longer send-them-and-forget-them affairs. Parental participation is strongly encouraged and often required. Every day brings a new newsletter from the school district, the school itself, one or more teachers, the PTO, the separately-arranged (and paid for) aftercare, each with a new set of dates to track, tasks to complete, ideas to consider. This is all good! But also exhausting.

Parents live longer, with more chronic conditions and with an ever-growing list of medications. Even those who are healthy have to contend with the modern digital services that have supplanted a 30-minute queuing session at the post office, for which they need technical support. The only apps they can use seemingly without support are those for social media, which they use to spam us with the latest pixelated meme or — if you are not as lucky — AI slop that was reshared in their group.

And then there are our own administrative tasks: separate logins for all utilities, each now requiring 2-factor authentication; mortgage and car payments to keep track of; the ever-growing number of things to repair in the household; all those incantations to chant to get the AV system working (or is that just me?)

So yes, our lives have gotten more complex and if it weren’t for them we’d be busting lots of stars.

Quote of the week, from Adam Mastroianni:

People say “do what you love and you’ll never work a day in your life” and they’re right, because you’ll get bored and go home. If you find the job, the cause, and the partner that annoy you in exactly the right way, you’ll never know peace again.

If this weren’t true, few people would choose medicine as a calling.

Sascha Fast of the Zettelkasten blog writes, in a post titled The Scam Called “You Don’t Have to Remember Anything”:

Rowlands et al. wrote about the so called “digital natives” that they lack the critical and analytical thinking skills to evaluate the information they find on the internet. We need a fully developed mental map of the subject in order to derive value from the results of an internet search.

In short: You need a trained brain to actually benefit from the internet.

But not just from the internet, as the post elaborates. This applies equally or even more to LLM outputs. A great example comes from a recent post on Andrew Gelman’s blog, though not from the man himself, where a human and ChatGPT 5 both try to improve upon a statistical model in a new-to-me language called Stan. Now if you don’t know Bayesian statistics or Stan this will all look like gobbledygook and ChatGPT won’t help you understand.

LLMs are also seeping into the everything-bucket software, the one whose primary purpose is to black-hole every article and textbook you will never read or video you will ever watch. Well now it can also give you the illusion of knowledge and control because you can ask questions about the contents. This is something Casey Newton learned this year:

I can give Notion a sprawling question like “how did the Cambridge Analytica case resolve” and get a good summary of regulatory actions across several years and countries. And by default, web search is off, meaning I know that its AI systems are drawing only on the vetted journalism that I have saved into my database.

This is a dream come true. I finally have a meaningful way to sift through millions of words of article text, ask follow-up questions, and get citations that I can use in my work. Notion may yet prove to be the AI librarian that Readwise never became.

One more thing I’m trying: I mentioned above that I continue to experiment with different ways to save material that might be useful later. Recently a Reddit post turned me on to Recall, which positions itself as a “self-organizing knowledge base.” Currently available as a web and mobile app, Recall lets you save web pages, YouTube videos, PDFs, podcasts, Google Docs, and other materials into a single database that it then organizes on your behalf.

To be clear, I myself have asked for something like this from my everything-bucket software of choice, DEVONthink. And it delivered! But now I am realizing, and Sacha’s post was a good reminder, that these are becoming command line-level power tools — Hole Hawgs of the mind if you will — which can and will do great damage if not used carefully. And unlike the Hole Hawg they are freely available and come with no instruction manual. Caveat utilitor.

A beautiful day in DC, which I have spent running just to stay in place:

• replaced the microwave control board (thank you, YouTube)
• figured out which parts to order to repair broken shades
• repaired busted French door hinges
• declogged drains
• packed and stored the aquarium (RIP, little fish)

All the while evading my progeny’s attempts to rope me into a game of Foresaken, which is apparently what children do these days instead of running around in back alleys and playing hopscotch.

• Joan Westenberg: I Deleted My Second Brain (ᔥMatt Birchler)

There is a guilt that accompanies unread books, articles and blog posts. But there is a special anxiety reserved for unread lists of unread things. My reading list had become a totem of imagined wisdom. A shrine to the person I would be, if only I read everything on it.

When I deleted that list, I lost nothing real. I know what I want to read. I know the shape of my attention. I do not need a 7,000-item database to prove that I have taste or ambition.

• Victoria Song: AI doesn’t belong in journaling

There’s one quote in the book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals that sums it up for me. “It isn’t really the thought that counts, but the effort — which is to say, the inconvenience. When you render the process more convenient, you drain it of its meaning.”

I don’t always agree with author Oliver Burkeman about this. I find no meaning in toiling over hand-washing dishes, and am eternally grateful to the inventor of the dishwasher. But as it pertains to Big Tech’s never-ending quest to simplify writing with AI, I wholly agree that the struggle is what makes the process worth anything.

• Anna Havron: Personal Productivity Analysis Paralysis

I personally abandoned digital for tracking my projects and tasks because I can think of infinity things I would like to create and get done! My imagination is THAT good and ambitious! Thank goodness for paper, which forces me to edit, thank goodness for the friction involved in recording and transferring thoughts and ideas. It keeps me semi-reality-based.

• Nick Maggiulli: Optimizing Ourselves to Death. This is nothing new, of course. Modus omnibus in rebus was first written down some 2600 years ago and has withstood the test of time. It is good to have an occasional reminder.
• Joe Stone: A moment that changed me: I resolved to reduce my screen time – and it was a big mistake. Case in point to the above. Smartphones are magical, when you remember to tone them down.
• Dwarkesh Patel: Lessons from The Years of Lyndon Johnson by Robert Caro. Moderation in everything, even in moderation. Here are two examples of people, Johnson and Caro, who did not hold back on their own thing, with great success.

Robert Caro’s books are about formidable, single-mindedly devoted characters with storybook life arcs. It may be the case, then, that the only person who could write the biography of Robert Caro is the man himself.

• John Gruber: Gold, Frankincense, and Silicon. The amount of money and power one obtains in life are proportional to the size of frogs — or, if you are feeling less charitable, turds — one swallows throughout life, and at some point you either acquire a taste for frogs (maybe you’ve always liked them!), spend a lot of money on therapy and/or drugs, or drop out. And Tim Apple hasn’t dropped out just yet.
• John Gruber again: OpenAI Brings Back Legacy ChatGPT 4o Model in Response to Outcry From Users Who Find GPT-5 Emotionally Unsatisfying. To quote Gruber, “These people need help, and that help isn’t going to come from a chatbot.”
• Duncan McClements: The Sun Never Leaves. The subtitle is “How emigration ended the British Empire”, and it could not have happened to a nicer bunch of overindulgent cut-throats.

Happy reading.

Nori Parelius wrote a thoughtful article about taking notes, managing slip-boxes and “working with knowledge” in general. It matches my experience fiddling with various methods: what should be a playful exploration of ideas can easily become laborious bookkeeping. Caveat scriptor! (ᔥZettelkasten)

I have updated my now page. The last update was in March so let’s call this my Quarterly-ish update.

I have tons of free time, as is evidenced by (a) that I’m spending a half hour writing this blog post and (b) that I spent a couple hours earlier this week reading Atlas’s book, for no other reason than I felt like it. And this wasn’t even the only pleasure book I read over the Thanksgiving weekend. But I’m also in a continual time debt, a veritable treadmill of time commitments. I’m in the middle of writing 5 books and a few dozen research articles, and I keep taking on new projects. No way I can do all of these! But, as with Atlas and his finances, somehow I keep going.

Andrew Gelman describes my life, basically.

Don’t feel obliged from Oliver Burkeman is on my list of things to occasionally re-read. High school was the right time for me to hear this advice from one of his Guardian editors: “if you can’t do something, saying no right away usually makes it much easier for everyone."