Good afternoon lovely email friends. I finally got a haircut, and it’s a delightful thing to experience after so long. Also I had the presence of forethought to find a picture of myself looking reasonably collected, which I could point at while pleading “that guy—make me look like that guy”. So now I look like that guy, if he ate nothing but cake for a month.
💖 Feel free to stop striving: learn to relish being an amateur: A nice examination of what it means to do things for love rather than money; it needn’t mean sacrificing your aspirations, it simply means that you become the custodian and narrator of your own experience of striving. See also: The joys of being an absolute beginner – for life and, from far back in the archive: We’re all a bunch of amateurs.
💭 Keep Brainstorming—Your Best Ideas Are Still to Come: Imagine a brainstorming session. At what point do you think you’ll come up with your best, most inventive idea? Most assume that lightbulb moment will arrive right away, when you’re feeling freshest. But according to new research, the common (and mistaken) belief that we generate our best ideas early can actually squash creativity. And while we’re thinking about thinking, See also: The 6 Fundamental Concepts of Systems Thinking.
💸 How to save money: Aside from basic needs, your financial priorities are up to you. Resist short-termism by keeping in mind your values and goals.
🥤 11 Things I’ve Learned From Going Sober In My 20s: A relentless public narrative about the reopening of pubs is lost on those of us not preoccupied with drinking alcohol in someone else’s house. See also: 11 Ways to Make Friends Without Drinking Alcohol and, from the archive, the one that (I think) produced more replies than any other: What can you drink when you’re not drinking?
🧡 Orangutan nests: Here’s something you need to know. Orangutans, like all great apes, build nests. Sometimes these include pillows, blankets, and bunk beds.
🙀 In big tech’s dystopia, cat videos earn millions while real artists beg for tips: A forensic study of what’s going wrong with the attention economy: instead of paying musicians properly, the likes of Spotify have set up ‘donation’ buttons – thus passing the buck to fans.
🧹 ‘Cluttercore’: the anti-minimalist trend that celebrates mess: Maximalist interiors full of mismatched stuff are a sign of the times. This article explores the rise of creative chaos at home, and why it makes us feel safe and cocooned.
🎨 The Bob Ross Virtual Art Gallery: the online community have taken to Bob Ross in ways that could hardly have been explained in his heyday. This gallery of his pictures is part exhibition part data-visualisation. See also: How To Buy A Bob Ross Painting.
🤪 Why ‘quirky’ people are attractive: There are some universal standards of beauty, so why has evolution not made us all beautiful? When it comes to attraction, originality can pay off.