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The more you learn about a subject the less capable you are of understanding what the average person knows about it. In journalism this can result in articles that are incomprehensible to anyone who doesn’t have the proper background. It can also result in information not being published because it seems too obvious. 

For example: it’s really easy to use modern laptops with desktop screens, keyboards, and mice. This means that, if you have a laptop, you (probably) don’t need a desktop computer. 

I’ve pitched this to several publications in the past month and none of them have picked it up, calling it too obvious for an article. And I’m sure the computer people reading this article agree. But not everyone is a computer person, and not everyone knows things like this. 

I know multiple people who purchased a desktop computer, in addition to their laptop computer, simply because they like having a full-sized keyboard, monitor, and mouse. And I agree: those things are nice to have! But you don’t have to get a whole other computer in order to use them—you can plug them all into your laptop. 

I’m writing this article on a MacBook Air that is plugged into a 4k monitor, speakers, a big old mechanical keyboard, and a full-sized mouse. But I can, at any moment, unplug the laptop and keep writing somewhere else. It’s amazing, and it’s how everyone should live.

You might be thinking that you don’t want to bother plugging and unplugging all of those things. And I’ve got good news there: docks. Anker makes a good one for $20. Plug your monitor, mouse, keyboard, and charger into the dock and you only have one cable to manage. Even better: many modern monitors have a dock built in, and even charge your laptop for you. 

Now, there are exceptions. If you’re really into PC gaming there’s a good argument for a dedicated desktop computer. The same goes for anyone who needs a high-powered GPU. That’s not most people, though. Most people are better served by a laptop and a dock. 

Because using your laptop as a desktop isn’t just cheaper—it’s easier. You don’t have to worry about syncing files between two devices, because you just have the one. And you can take all of your work with you anywhere. 

A lot of this is obvious to a lot of the people reading this, and this is one of the hardest things about being a journalist. Every time I write about anything I need to do two things: explain a topic in a way that’s useful for people who don’t know anything about it but also not completely boring for those who are knowledgeable. 

I’m a freelance technology journalist, pitching stories and tutorials to editors who are also technology journalists. This means that I, and the editors I’m trying to sell articles to, know a lot about technology. And I like that! It is fun writing about weird stuff that you’re interested in for a living, and getting to do that work with other people who are interested in it. But it can sometimes be easy to overlook the obvious tips that a lot of people can benefit from. 

In review: go ahead and plug your desktop computer tools into your laptop. It’s great. Thank you for reading this. 

If you want to understand America, spend some time in thrift stores. These are monuments to our collective excess—a museum of the things we’ve collected and discarded. 

I love digging through the electronics shelves looking for potentially useful adapters or devices. I also get most of my clothes from the racks there, mostly for environmental reasons. If I’m honest, though, I mostly just hate being in retail stores and have fun in thrift stores. Finding something great amidst all of the junk is a great feeling. 

But there’s a feeling of melancholy mixed in. It is impossible to browse a thrift store and not feel like society is collapsing under the weight of consumerism. There is just so much of everything. We buy cheap crap, accumulate too much of it in our homes, and then we get rid of it. 

Now, that’s not the origin of everything in these stores. A lot of it, I assume, belonged to someone who recently passed away—families keep what they’re interested in and donate the rest. Some of the like-new items were probably gifts briefly kept out of a sense of obligation only to be inevitably donated a few years later. Some are overstocks from retail stores or custom event swag. The rest, though, is crap someone bought for themselves and never actually used, or only used a little bit, and then donated (possibly in order to feel a little less guilty about it). 

There is so much excess and waste. We buy way more crap than we need, mostly because it’s affordable to do so. And the crap we don’t need is made overseas under conditions intolerable to both the worker and the environment. It’s something we all know but try not to think about.

Knowing and feeling all of this makes the current political moment complicated. I sincerely believe that the chaotic trade policy being pursued by the aging game show host currently running the country is going to be a disaster for America. He’s going to drive the country into an unnecessary recession that causes a lot of pain, and I don’t want to underplay that. 

But I also believe the world would be a better place if we all bought less stuff. This is not the logic of infinite-growth capitalism, an ideology that left unchecked would have us buying and throwing out more stuff each year than the year before. The idiots running the country have accidentally given us an opportunity to go the other way—to buy less. 

If we’re going to survive as a species on this planet of limited resources, we need to acknowledge the absurdity of our consumption and learn to reduce it. We can start small. We can learn how to repair things instead of replacing them. We can learn to take care of the things we own, or observe we really don’t need another one. And we can get better at borrowing tools from friends instead of buying them ourselves and only using them once. Higher prices are an opportunity to learn these skills. 

Featured image via Gwyn Fisher (Creative Commons)

Writing isn’t just my job—it’s how I think. When I’m not sure what I feel about something I start typing. I put down ideas, contemplate whether I agree with what I just wrote, and in this process figure out how I feel. 

A lot of my blog posts start as me playing around with ideas. Most such documents never end up published, though, because the point isn’t the content—it’s the process of writing itself. Writing, for me, is a practice—a skill I improve over time and use to understand the world. 

Lately I’ve been trying to put a finger on why I hate so much of the rhetoric that surrounds AI, and I think the answer is related to the human art of practice. I’ve been struggling to put this into words until I saw a Bluesky post by Sam Halpert paraphrasing a Ted Chiang article about AI in the classroom. From that article:

Using ChatGPT to complete assignments is like bringing a forklift into the weight room; you will never improve your cognitive fitness that way.

This metaphor really clarifies things. We all know that using machines to do physical tasks doesn’t count as exercise. The same things applies to our minds. Asking an AI to write about a topic isn’t the same as going through the process of writing. Sure, AI might be capable of writing a blog post not that different from the one you’re reading now. What AI can’t do, though, is give me the intellectual experience of thinking through these ideas. And that intellectual experience isn’t just some annoyance that’s slowing down my writing output—it’s the entire point of writing itself. 

I’m reminded of that AI CEO who thinks making music isn’t fun. Here’s what he said: 

 It’s not really enjoyable to make music now. It takes a lot of time, it takes a lot of practice, you need to get really good at an instrument or really good at a piece of production software. I think the majority of people don’t enjoy the majority of the time they spend making music.

Put aside, for now, that millions of people make music entirely because they enjoy doing so, and focus on his reason for saying people don’t enjoy it: because it takes practice. The assumption here is that we all want to skip the practice and get to the good part. This idea fundamentally misunderstands what it means to be human. The challenge of learning an instrument isn’t a barrier to enjoying making music—it’s a key part of why people like making music. You notice there’s something you can’t do and you spend time practicing until you can do it. That progress is rewarding because we are wired, as humans, for self improvement. Improving skills, over time, is enjoyable. So is using those skills to create. 

This isn’t just true in the arts, or academic pursuits. It’s true in recreation. Take video games. These are fun because they offer challenges and give you a chance to get better at facing those challenges. The first time you play a Mario game you are going to run into every Goomba and fall into every pit. The fun comes when, on the second play-through, you get a little bit further than last time. The better you are at a game the more you crave difficulty, which is why games always get more challenging as you make progress. 

Human flourishing demands these kinds of learning curves. Practice isn’t a barrier to enjoying life—it’s an essential tool for doing so. Technologists would do well to keep this in mind and think about how their tools can enable, not replace, this kind of learning and self improvement. 

featured image of cat piano via Public Domain Review

Our culture is out of balance in all kinds of ways. One breakdown I don’t think is talked about enough: extrinsic motivation has completely overtaken intrinsic motivation. 

This might seem irrelevant right now. Fascism is on the rise, a recession is looming, and (checks notes) there’s a nonzero chance the USA is going to invade Canada. Yes: there’s a lot going on in the world, but I promise you: motivation touches everything that’s happening right now, online and off. 

To oversimplify: extrinsic motivation is doing something in order to get something out of it—money, fame, or avoiding punishment. Intrinsic motivation is doing something because you love doing it. Now, no one can be entirely intrinsically motivated. Food, for example, costs money, and for most people working is the only reliable way to get money. My contention is that we’ve tipped way off to the extrinsic side of the scale right now, and it’s making us miserable. 

There are obvious symptoms of this. Take the idea that any hobby you have should become a side hustle. There’s nothing inherently wrong with making a few bucks selling your art at the farmer’s market, if you can pull it off. But you don’t need to sell your crafts in order to benefit from them. The act of creation, itself, can provide satisfaction. People like to play instruments even though you could just listen to music on Spotify; people like to bake bread even though you could just buy a loaf at the grocery store. Why? Because there is meaning and joy to be had in the act of developing skills and creating things. 

That meaning is underemphasized right now. Throughout our culture we’ve valorized extrinsic motivation and, in some ways, made clear that it’s the only thing that matters. Take the internet (no, really—take it away from me). 

At the risk of looking at the past through millennial-shaded glasses, the early days of the internet were built around experimentation and shared interests. People built blogs and posted on them regularly not out of any expectation of becoming famous or getting paid but because it was an interesting thing to do. Some of the most popular early websites, articles, and viral videos were people just messing around with a new artform for the fun of it. There was a vitality to that. 

The advent of social media changed this dynamic. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, and TikTok all prominently tell you how many people have seen a post, turning posting into a kind of competition Eventually there started to be real money at stake—having a post or video go viral could lead to a career. This inevitably led to the internet professionalizing. The cringy attention grabbing thumbnails on YouTube, the websites full of AI-generated re-writes of articles found elsewhere, and the trolling posts that are intentionally upsetting people to increase engagement are all symptoms of this. 

Now, there are plenty of people who still post things online for no other reason than they love it. And there were certainly people posting in the pre-social internet because they wanted to build influence or start a career. And there is nothing wrong with wanting people to see the things you create. My contention isn’t that intrinsic motivation is good and extrinsic motivation is bad, only that the balance in our culture is tilted too strongly right now. 

This becomes more evident if we look at sectors of the online economy that provide no creative output or tangible benefits to the world. Take sports gambling, which at this point is impossible to avoid learning about if you even occasionally watch a sport. Gambling apps take watching sports—something traditionally done for intrinsic reasons like pleasure, relaxation, and community—and add the extrinsic promise of profit. Gambling ads preach that it is not enough to watch the game for fun—you should be trying to make money at it. And the message is working: American sports gambling netted $13.71 billion in 2024, according to ESPN. 

Or, taken even further, let’s talk about cryptocurrency, which is the most extrinsically motivated thing I can think of. Seventeen years after Bitcoin’s launch and these currencies still aren’t used to buy and sell goods on a regular basis. The value of these currencies is entirely tied up in the fact that they might be used for legitimate trade someday, and somehow this idea means crypto assets are worth $2.86 trillion according to Forbes. People don’t buy cryptocurrencies to use them as currencies—they buy cryptocurrencies because they think the price will go up, and the price goes up because people buy the currencies, who buy them because they think the price will go up. It’s an entire “sector” of the economy built on nothing but extrinsic motivation. 

The same pattern is playing throughout society right now. It’s happening in arts. Walt Disney reportedly once said “We don’t make movies to make money—we make money to make more movies.” It’s hard to think of a sentence that less accurately describes the company named after him, which these days mostly makes sequels and “live action” remakes. In politics the people who care about actual issues, and want to take concrete steps to address those issues, are drowned out by those who are motivated instead to acquire and hold power for its own sake (or in order to avoid prosecution and/or acquire money). And it’s happening in the media business, as private equity firms acquire newspapers and digital publications only to gut their editorial staffs. 

I could keep going. It’s one of those patterns you can’t stop noticing once you think about it. And it’s not something we can fix overnight. What I will say is this: the more time I spend doing things for their own sake the happier I am.

Image source

Signal is a secure communications app somewhat infamous for responding to FBI subpoenas for data by saying they don’t have it. The nonprofit that runs Signal set up a system that makes it impossible for them, or anyone else, to have any access to your conversations. 

It’s a remarkable tool in our current age, where seemingly every app is built to spy on us. Secure as Signal is, however, it’s important to remember that your conversation is only truly private if Jeffery Goldberg, Editor of The Atlantic, isn’t part of your group chat. 

This might sound obvious—no communication tool, no matter how secure, is private if you send a copy of everything you’re saying to a prominent journalist. It happens, though, so it’s a good idea to ensure it isn’t happening to you. 

To get started open Signal and head to your group chat. Tap the name of the group chat at the top of the screen, then scroll down until you see the list of people in the group. Ensure that none of the people listed are Jeffery Goldberg, Editor of The Atlantic. 

Ideally everyone in the thread should have a recognizable name, tied to a phone number or handle you’re familiar with. If there’s someone you don’t recognize consider messaging them directly, outside of the group text, and asking whether they are Jeffery Goldberg, Editor of The Atlantic. He will tell you if he is. 

It’s also generally good practice to periodically ask your group chats whether Jeffery Goldberg, Editor of The Atlantic, is present, just to be sure. Do not worry if you feel odd asking this—it’s standard security practice. 

To reiterate: no conversation is truly private if you include Jeffery Goldberg, Editor of The Atlantic. In general it is good advice not to include prominent journalists in conversations you would like to keep private. It’s true for your Dungeons and Dragons group, it’s true for the group text you use to shit talk your boss during Zoom meetings, and it’s true of any illegal group text used to discuss national security issues outside the proper channels.