- Kevin Kelly: How Will the Miracle Happen Today?. Kelly, age 73, looks back at his days as a hitchhiker and describes what it was like to feel that the universe was conspiring to help you:
My new age friends call that state of being pronoia, the opposite of paranoia. Instead of believing everyone is out to get you, you believe everyone is out to help you. Strangers are working behind your back to keep you going, prop you up, and get you on your path. The story of your life becomes one huge elaborate conspiracy to lift you up. But to be helped you have to join the conspiracy yourself; you have to accept the gifts.
How many adults younger than, say, 45, would have anything but a deeply cynical take to the above?
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Rachel Kwon: Bye 2025. OK, I may have found one such person as these memories of a particularly harrowing year end on a much more hopeful note than anything I would have written if all of it had happened to me.
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Branko Milanović: Was the world of the 1990s better than today’s? Betteridge’s law of headlines easily applies even without taking into account that the 1990s were particularly rough in my then-home country. In particular:
Thus almost all that was believed in the 1990 was either proven wrong, or was self-serving. Hypocrisy’s uncontested rule relegated any daring or alternative opinions to the lunatic fringe. Freedom of expression in the ideologically dominant part of the world was not controlled by the thought police but was controlled by the mandarins of knowledge and requirements for success. They asphyxiated the thought and created a wooden language that distorted reality. Everybody knew what to think (or at least what to say) to get ahead. It was ideologically a barren period where clichés were regarded as ultimate accomplishments of human thought. Today’s world may not be better but is certainly intellectually freer.
- Luis Garciano: A New Year’s letter to a young person. On how to choose a career path that won’t easily be replaced by AI, with a head-nod to oncology. I am myself partial to plumbing. (ᔥTyler Cowen)