Friday Fodder #22
What's Trending? What's Transcendent?
Well, we did it. We survived the week. It was a near thing, let me tell ya. All the end of year reflection and predictions and yearnings for more make for a high amplitude time. Welcome to 2025!
On to the reading!
Timely
2024 Recap: Paying My Soul - In the spirit of reflection, I bring you one of the most earnest personal recaps of 2024. Lovely writing, a lot of change, and a great homage to PG’s city whispers. I hope the fire in her eyes stays there.
I feel like 2025 is my last chance (at everything) - From the inimitable Sherry Ning comes the anxiety that all the greats have that all the greats before them were even better and they don’t measure up. I don’t know Sherry but if I did, I’d tell her you’re in it. Right now. Sherry said it best: “you’re called to live, not perform.”
We Need Children Now More Than Ever - A Christmas reminder of the hope and inspiration that children bring the world. They bring us more optimism, more faith, and more humanity. To anybody that is engaged or newly married and thinking about getting a dog, stop. Go have some drinks (get married as necessary) and get happily pregnant instead.
The Great American Poisoning - Many of our New Year’s Resolutions deal with our relationship with food. Mine sure do. In the age of MAHA this is a great primer on what the hell is going on with American health and why so many of us are a different shape than our grandparents.
Timeless
You Don’t Need A Smartphone - There are two types of childhoods: those with phones and those without.
From Goldman Sachs Trader to Parking Lot Striper - There’s a migration away from cities and high finance and white collar jobs. Some of it came from Covid times, sure, but there’s more to it than that and this is a first person take.
Done, and Gets Things Smart - If you’re a software engineer that was active between 2005 and 2015 — thats eons ago, which makes you a neckbeard now by the way — you’ll have read Steve Yegge before. This blast from the past acts as a not-so-subtle reminder that the perfect world-changing candidate you’re looking for probably isn’t on the job market at all.. and if they are, they’re interviewing you not the other way around.
The Cross and the Machine - “I went searching, then, for the truth. But where to find it? Elders, saints, and mystics are notable these days for their absence.” A beautiful memoir on the author’s path towards orthodoxy. It reminds me of the Hound of Heaven. And the Auden quote is also one of my favorites.
Books
Meditations by Marcus Aurelius - I’ve just reread this book again and it’s just as good. Written almost two thousand years ago as a private journal, it was never intended to be published. It’s not a long book, but it’s one that you read slowly: each page has lessons to teach. If you’re interested in Stoicism, don’t read an exposition on it. Just read Marcus Aurelius.
Tweets
Some good ones, so you don’t need to scroll!
The world is amazing. Cheers!