As the editor of Thinking About Things, I'm always fascinated to see which articles take off.
I can never tell in advance. Sometimes I feature an article that I'm lukewarm about, and receive a deluge of responses and feedback, and soon see it circulated among the newsletters and on reddit and on the top of Hacker News. And sometimes I put out an article that I found transformatively mind-blowing and receive muted to no acknowledgment.
In the absence of concrete quantitative data, the click rate becomes my guide to the collective interests of Thinking About Things readers. The click rate tells me what people want to know about. It expresses what captivates people's attention, and perhaps even offers subtle insights into the zeitgeist of the time. Through the lens of clicks I can discern unspoken questions and curiosities that bind a diverse audience together.
The dominant theme that emerges amidst the most-clicked and forwarded articles of 2023 is mental health, depression, and social interaction. These topics compose a full half of the top 10 most popular articles here. It's a testament to the ultimate human pursuit; articles about predicting eclipses or Parisian cooking strategy can't hold a candle to what it is that people want - happiness.
Without further ado, here are the top-performing Thinking About Things articles of 2023.
By Steven Wittens on Acko.net
An exploration of meritocracy, and why catering to the lowest common denominator leaves everyone unhappy.
"If you're hiking and you stop to let other people catch up, don't start walking immediately when they arrive. Because that means you got a rest and they didn't. I think about this a lot."
I want to dissect this sentiment because I also think it says a whole lot, but probably not the way the poster meant it. It's a perfect example of something that seems to pass for empathetic wisdom, but actually holds very little true empathy: an understanding of people who actually think differently from each other.
By Wolf Tivy (@wolftivy) at Palladium Magazine
A perspective on taking a measured leap into self-pursuits.
I quit my engineering job in 2014. I was good at it and it was good to me, but it wasn’t the future. I was still working out my plans, so I hit the gym, pursued the most interesting and important ideas I could find, and started looking for a wife.
I met her at a party. I liked her hair. She liked my name. I made fun of her career. She gave me her number. Her friend, who was into prophecy, told her I would be her future husband. It still took work, but it helps to have Providence on your side.
It also helped that I was unemployed. I had time to court her properly. I’ve heard that middle-class people with respectable jobs have fewer kids than people who don’t work as hard. I’m not surprised. She believed in the virtue of poverty and also believed in me, so we didn’t worry about money.
“This is bad for your career,” said the little wage-slave voice in my head, “you should be focusing on more lucrative projects.” The little voice was wrong.
By Oz Nova (@oznova_) on csprimer.com
Notes on maintaining motivation over time, and identifying and acting upon it.
“If you ask highly productive people what helped them establish a consistent routine, they will typically tell you 64 different tactical details, like they went to bed in their gym clothes, or used a tomato-shaped timer, or stared directly at the sun for 5 minutes each morning (did I get that right?). Maybe these things had some non-negative effect for those people, I don't know! But surely they are low order bits.
The highest order bit is motivation. There is no amount of tactical low order bit fiddling that will compensate for a lack of genuine desire to do what you are doing. There may be ways to kindle a spark of motivation, or to make it easier to act on your motivation... perhaps you could have a tomato shaped timer programmed to remind you, every 25 minutes, of why you are doing this? But if you are consistently failing to achieve consistency, it may be that you have an overwhelmingly strong instinct that perhaps you should quit. Sometimes that nagging voice is right!
By Sasha Chapin (@sashachapin) on sashachapin.substack.com
Notes on an endless skill.
But many conversations can be nudged in the direction of openness, spontaneous complexity, and shared emotionality. And a surprising number of conversations, thus encouraged, can become quite connective. These are the conversations where you’re likely to find yourself laughing, rambling excitedly, engaging in extended weird riffs, crystallizing old knowledge in new patterns, feeling comprehended, feeling loved, and, generally, having the sensation that you’ve temporarily stepped outside the walls around your being. I’ve tried hard to figure out how this can be cultivated.
By Adam Mastroianni (@a_m_mastroianni) on Experimental History
A new way to think about brain power.
People who are good at solving poorly defined problems don't get the same kind of kudos. They don’t get any special titles or clubs. There is no test they can take that will spit out a big, honking number that will make everybody respect them.
And that’s a shame. My grandma does not know how to use the “input” button on her TV’s remote control, but she does know how to raise a family full of good people who love each other, how to carry on through a tragedy, and how to make the perfect pumpkin pie. We sometimes condescendingly refer to this kind of wisdom as “folksy” or “homespun,” as if answering multiple-choice questions is real intelligence, and living a good, full life is just some down-home, gee-whiz, cutesy thing that little old ladies do.
By Rayne Fisher-Quann (@raynefq) at internetprincess.substack.com
Isolation is easy; living is hard.
The social standard this culture offers is one of controlled, placated solitude. Its narrative often insists that you’re surrounded by toxic people who are trying to hurt you, and the only way to ever become the person you’re meant to be is to cut them all off, retreat into a high-gloss cocoon of talk therapy and Notion templates, and emerge a non-emotive butterfly who will surely attract the relationships you’ve always deserved — relationships with other “healed” people, who don’t hurt you or depend on you or force you to feel difficult, taxing emotions. And finally, your life will be as frictionless and shiny as you, alone, have always deserved for it to be.
By Resident Contrarian (@ResidentContra1) at residentcontrarian.com
An article about being stressed out.
Eventually, you get to a condition I’ve seen several people fired for, which HR usually terms something like “work avoidance”. Sometimes this is just a lazy guy not wanting to do his job, but sometimes it’s a person who has rendered themselves incapable of facing the mountain of bad feelings their work tasks have become. They have faked the moon landing so hard, in effect, that it has become real.
Listed by Weng-Keen Wong at cs.cmu.edu; original origin unknown
A complaint was received by the Pontiac Division of General Motors:
"This is the second time I have written you, and I don't blame you for not answering me, because I kind of sounded crazy, but it is a fact that we have a tradition in our family of ice cream for dessert after dinner each night. But the kind of ice cream varies so, every night, after we've eaten, the whole family votes on which kind of ice cream we should have and I drive down to the store to get it. It's also a fact that I recently purchased a new Pontiac and since then my trips to the store have created a problem. You see, every time I buy vanilla ice cream, when I start back from the store my car won't start. If I get any other kind of ice cream, the car starts just fine. I want you to know I'm serious about this question, no matter how silly it sounds: 'What is there about a Pontiac that makes it not start when I get vanilla ice cream, and easy to start whenever I get any other kind?'"
The Pontiac President was understandably skeptical about the letter, but sent an engineer to check it out anyway.
By Jonathan Carson (@jonathancarson_) at The Now
A new way of thinking about depression, anxiety, and burnout.
It’s not hard to understand why the tiger seems withdrawn. Of course she’s unhappy, you think.
The solution to the tiger’s suffering seems obvious, too. You don’t immediately think, “This tiger needs to go to tiger therapy and get a prescription for tiger antidepressants so it can feel better about living in a zoo and stop feeling sad about having to suppress its wild instincts”. You don’t think the tiger needs to “get over it” and make the most of its situation. You don’t consider showing the tiger a YouTube clip of Tony Robbins explaining the power of positive thinking.
You conclude that the best thing for the tiger would be to set it free in its natural environment, to allow it to pursue its true calling, rather than attempting to force it to adjust to a sub-optimal way of life.
Imagine if we took the same approach to human suffering.
An exploration of the complexities of social class.
65% of people are in the labor class. They work jobs where labor is seen as a commodity, ie there’s not as much sense of career capital or reputation. They base virtue and success around Hard Work. Its lower levels are minimum wage McJobs, its middle levels are assembly line work, and its higher levels are things like pilots, plumbers, and small business owners. The stratospheric semi-divine level is “celebrities” like reality TV stars who become fabulously rich and famous while sticking to their labor class roots.
In closing, I want to express my deep appreciation to Thinking About Things's financial backers. Your support means the world to me.
Here's to a 2024 filled with good thoughts, interesting reading, and invigorating life.
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