Hello gorgeous friends, welcome to 💥BLAST! #80, and with a busy time comes a welcome need for action.
🤑 There’s no such thing as a self-made billionaire: a person stranded on a desert island wouldn’t be able to amass extreme wealth. Understanding no one can claim that they fully deserve what they earn is the first step to addressing wealth inequality.
💃 Why Spotify Has So Many Bizarre, Generic Artists: The platform is filled with search-optimised spammers, and there’s no end in sight.
🎉 The Long Golden Age of Useless, American Crap: Crappiness is not just a material condition but a cultural one as well: an often exuberant and wholly unapologetic expression of American excess and waste. Over time, Americans have decided—as individuals, as members of groups, and as a society—to embrace not just materialism itself but materialism with a certain shoddy complexion.
🙀 Richard Scarry’s Busy, Busy Day in Trump’s America: a dark contemporary portrayal in the widely-recognisable style of cartoonist Richard Scarry.
⛽️ World’s richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50%, says Oxfam: a report compiled by Oxfam and the Stockholm Environment Institute warns that rampant overconsumption and the rich world’s addiction to high-carbon transport are exhausting the world’s “carbon budget”, and that what remains should be used to improve lot of poorest.
🔊 The BBC is releasing over 16,000 sound effects for free download: Brimming with obscure content from the 1920s onwards, the archive covers almost the entirety of the BBC’s existence.
💼 How Work Became an Inescapable Hellhole: Instead of optimising work, technology has created a non-stop barrage of notifications and interactions. Six months into a pandemic, it’s worse than ever.
🎲 7 Strategies for Better Group Decision-Making: When you have a tough business problem to solve, you likely bring it to a group. But larger pools of knowledge are no guarantee of better outcomes. Because of an over-reliance on hierarchy, an instinct to prevent dissent, and a desire to preserve harmony, many groups fall into groupthink.
😭 Our Brains Struggle to Process This Much Stress: if you’ve been feeling awful, your ‘surge capacity’ may be depleted; here’s how to pull yourself out of despair and live your life.
Friends will be friends
Since social distancing entered the public consciousness, it’s been hard to be social. If not spending time with your friends has left you feeling disconnected, that’s understandable. As friendships are voluntarily, we tend to underinvest in them even at the best of times.
But when we don’t engage in regular communication and do activities together, even the closest bonds decay. We may emerge from this year with fewer friends, and that’s alright: it’s a quiet season for friendships. Conversely, now that every relationship is long-distance, perhaps friendship has been remade.
