In theory, people in the West haven’t had to cook since the 1950s, when ready-made meals first became available. Nowadays, there’s an infinite variety of such meals, and, in many countries, it’s actually cheaper to only eat processed food than it is to buy fresh ingredients and cook for yourself.

From just-add-water porridge to frozen pasta to instant ramen, you can eat whatever you like, whenever you like, and you won’t have to prepare a single meal. Of course, once you start factoring in health, the picture gets more complicated. But from a financial and taste perspective alone, there’s no reason to not eat convenience food 24/7—and yet, the cooking and restaurant industries are larger than ever, and growing.

Every year, thousands of new cookbooks hit the market. Millions of cooking videos are uploaded to social media every day. Cooking shows, new restaurants, more advanced equipment, creative concepts like virtual kitchens—food is on a roll, and the train is only accelerating. Why? Because humans love food. Humans love cooking. And humans love to learn from other humans about food and cooking. If 80 years of cheap, ready-made meals haven’t changed that, it’s unlikely the next 80 will. Perhaps not even the next 800. In fact, recipes from the year 1,200 are pulling in large crowds right now.

AI is doing to various kinds of work what ready-made meals have done to cooking: provide lots of cheap alternatives which, ultimately, make the real deal even more popular. Now, millions of people can dabble in creating special effect videos with a few simple prompts. But will more folks than now put in the hard work to become true special effect experts? Probably not. And so the video editing industry gets new tools—more cookbooks, more recipes, more ingredients—but it won’t prevent a tight-knit community of editing nerds from thriving.

Sure, not all numbers will go up everywhere. Some roles and workflows will change. But activities only become obsolete once we lose interest in them—and wherever you can show up and craft something meaningful with intention, chances are, humans will be interested.

Stay curious, and try not to miss the forest for the trees.

Growing up, my sister had mostly different tastes in toys. But every now and then, we did visit “I want too!”-land. It could have been a new gadget, a certain dish at the restaurant, or one simply mimicking the other’s behavior. Inevitably, the copycat would be called out: “You’re just a little imitator!” we would yell. “Nachmacher” in German—”Aftermaker.”

This morning, I felt a sudden urge to make bread rolls in my air fryer. I had a simple recipe on hand, and, to my surprise, I managed to make the dough, knead it, and sit at the kitchen table with four small but good-enough rolls 30 minutes later. My partner was shocked. “You baked these?” It was definitely an unusual move on my end.

After some thinking, I realized what had happened: Having spent 90 minutes watching a great cooking show the day before, I had caught the imitation bug. I may not be able to cook even two percent of the dishes the professional chefs whip up on TV, but I can learn how to make rolls in my air fryer. It’s a tiny, rather pitiful imitation, but it does the job.

In this case, the job was easing some worries I had had at night. Just the usual. Money. Time. The future. And while the saying suggests that “imitation is the sincerest form of flattery,” when you do it in private and mostly for your own entertainment, imitation can become the self-flattery you need to take back your power. It’s a path to re-establishing control when you feel vulnerable.

You can’t solve all your problems in a day. But you can bake a new dish, sketch a dumbed down version of a famous painting, or learn the lyrics to a song in a foreign language. Not all your creations need to be shared. Sometimes, our weakest are our strongest, because they’re purely for us, no one else.

Every now and then, be a little imitator. If you don’t make a big deal about it, no one will call you out—but your impromptu replication might restore your belief in yourself all the same. Lean on imitation as a source of confidence, then level up from there. Happy aftermaking!

While storing away my luggage on the train, I noticed a tall man in his seat, holding a plastic doll. For a second, I was confused. I didn’t see a child nearby. Eventually, his daughter showed up.

“Hmm, why would you bring a four-year-old to the quiet section on the train?” I thought. The family later moved to a four-seater with a table right in front of me, and my judgy-ness persisted for a while. The kid wasn’t even particularly loud. She didn’t run up and down the hallway. She just sat with her parents, talked, and got excited from time to time. “Can I get one too?!” Slightly elevated volume, that’s all, really.

Still, I kept going down the snobby route: “If I had a child, I’d never book seats in the quiet section.” But right with that thought, it hit me: “You have no idea why they’re here—but there’s usually a reason, and, most of the time, it’s a good one, too.” Perhaps they didn’t realize what seats they were booking when they booked them. Maybe all other cars were full. Maybe they didn’t have seat reservations at all. They simply boarded a train and sat down where they found space.

I could imagine reasons for their reasons, too. Running for the train last-minute because a loved one didn’t want to say goodbye. Receiving false information from a train company official. Or it might have been a last-minute trip to check on a family member’s health.

Trains are a great place to practice patience and empathy. Crowds of humans perched together in small spaces, and everyone is merely trying to go somewhere else. Perhaps one day, I’ll show up on your train. Kid in tow, smack dab in the quiet section. If I do, please forgive me. I’ll have to take my chances that, like me, you’ll remember: There’s usually a reason—and I hope mine will be a good one.

It was an interesting idea: self-repaying loans. A crypto project I had stumbled on, let’s call it “A,” suggested you could deposit an asset, borrow 50% of its current value in so-called “stablecoins” pegged to the US dollar, then forget the loan. The system would use your escrowed assets to earn interest and slowly repay your debt. Once all was repaid, you’d get back your initial deposit.

The concept was elegant. No more looming interest payments. No liquidations. And of course you had to bring assets to the table to borrow to begin with. The project would then take a small cut out of the repayments they managed for you. There was only one problem: It didn’t work.

When Project A started, yields in the space were through the roof. Your loan would repay itself within months. Then, a brutal bear market happened, and interest dropped to almost zero. No yield, no repayments—and the duration of your loan goes up, up, up. If your projected repayment time is 50 years, you may as well have lost your collateral. Or spent it on whatever you wanted to buy to begin with. As the team worked to remedy this issue, a shift in revenue occurred.

The team’s idea was to make money from the loan repayments. Instead, they ended up making money from the deposits. Ultimately, Project A worked just like a bank: You hand them money, they work with it, and whatever additional capital they generate, they’ll somehow split with you. I didn’t know the exact breakdown of which yield they chose to send where, but from their dashboards, one thing was clear: You’re not getting paid the way you had intended. Your original business model didn’t work—but you did find another in the process.

This is common in startups, of course. They pivot all the time. In this case, however, the team barely realized what was happening. At least they didn’t want to acknowledge it. I prompted them in the chat. “If you’re making all your revenue on the deposits, aren’t you more like an investment fund than a transaction intermediary?” They admitted this was a problem and claimed they still intended to make the loan part work.

This all happened years ago. Project A is still around. I just checked their stats again. Revenue from deposits outpaces that from loans by a factor of 10.

Life rarely goes to plan. That’s okay. But you do need to acknowledge the job that’s in front of you. Even if it’s not exactly the one you imagined.

Project A could have accepted their role as an investment manager a long time ago. They could have worked to formalize that relationship with their customizers. Instead, they kept playing business as usual. As a result, their marketing still presents a business whose core operating model doesn’t actually exist.

Will they ever get the loans to work? Will they run out of money? Or will they finally acknowledge the job? Time will tell us. But it has already let us know which choice we should make if we’re ever in similar shoes: You can’t change a role you don’t recognize you hold. Accept your part, then go from there.

Over the 2024 Christmas holiday season, I was very concerned about my weight. I kept checking, fretting, and thinking, “Oh jeez, yet another big meal. I’ll have to reduce food intake immediately in the new year.” It wasn’t a massive damper on the time off by any means, but it was present all throughout.

Last year, I wasn’t worried about my weight at all. I felt good about it going in and knew I could always reduce a bit after if needed. Ergo, I simply enjoyed the holidays, right? No.

Instead, in 2025, I was concerned about various end-of-year projects. I wanted to do my annual review, pick a new theme, create a proper friends rolodex and collect people’s addresses, catch up on book reviews, prep some newsletters, and write several articles—all over the course of 10 or so days while also being in holiday mode. I knew I wasn’t gonna be able to do it all, but still, every morning, I checked my various lists and thought about what to slot in where in-between eating with family, gaming, and going for a walk or meeting some friends. Once again, it wasn’t a big downer, but there was definitely a small gray cloud hanging around in the background all the time.

In hindsight, both were unnecessary sources of apprehension, of course. But this is what we do, isn’t it? We rotate concerns. If one reason to worry isn’t available, we draw on another, just to make sure we stay a little bit on edge.

Notice your nervousness. Is it real? Or did you slot a new disc of doubt into your emotional jukebox for no purpose other than preventing the music from stopping?

There are few enough periods free of stress. Learn to enjoy the quiet—and keep your reservations for restaurants and real problems.

In 1970, the people of Florence, a town of around 9,000 souls in Oregon, learned this the hard way.

When beached whales die and their carcasses rot, gases can build up inside their body during decomposition. This has made for plenty of recorded self-detonations since the early 20th century.

Stuck with a beached whale in the middle of November, officials in Florence decided they’d use explosives to help the natural process along. Thankfully, they recorded the incident, which now serves as a cautionary tale. Why? Because instead of a clean beach, local onlookers got whale parts raining from the sky. Rather than fade, the stench spread in a 1,000-feet circle, and a car parked over a quarter of a mile away had its roof caved in from one of the flesh meteors. Not even the scavenger birds wanted a piece of this action. Scared by the blast, they chose flying away over picking off the remainders. Yowza!

The lesson from this event has had its own metaphor for much longer than whales have washed ashore in Oregon, albeit with a different animal at its center: “How do you eat an elephant?” the question goes. Answer? “One bite at a time.”

I’d love to write a book in a day—but I can’t. In fact, I can barely write a single essay in that timeframe. As a writer, the best I can do is nibble. Nibble away at the words until, someday, another tome stands completed.

Whatever shape the whales in your life take, please: Drop the dynamite. Pick up a small spoon instead. Toss sessions at the problem. One. Then another. Then one more, and an extra 10 minutes after dinner. Square inch by square inch, the wall will turn into a door.

You can’t blow up a whale. Only a whale can blow up a whale. So unless you want to collect scraps of rotten flesh for weeks on a smelly beach, I suggest you assemble your important work the only way it’ll hold together: piece by piece—until the coast is clear.

Derek Sivers spent four years writing How to Live. The book contains everything he’s ever learned. His first draft was over 1,000 pages. Then, he edited them down to 113. The result is a masterpiece that’s widely regarded as Derek’s magnum opus.

This post started as a piece about deliberate entertainment. About shifting your mindset from “What’s on TV?” to “I can watch whatever I want, whenever I want, without ads. I just need to know where to look.” But the idea became too big in my head. So I deleted it all, started from scratch, and here we are.

I wish we could see what’s no longer there. A sort of hologram surrounding whatever we’re looking at. “Oh, this used to be ten times the size! So much marble! So much to chisel away for the artist.”

Adding is easy, subtracting is hard. You can only see what’s in front of you, but if you try, you can imagine so much more—including the long, stony journey it took to get there. Learn to appreciate not just what remains but what has been removed. Ask not only “How much had to be done?” Be sure to also ask “How much had to be deleted?”

That’s one of the many big questions asked in Pantheon, an animated TV series. In the show, David, a brilliant programmer, comes down with an incurable disease. His company, Logorhythms, has been working on uploading human minds into the cloud, and so David decides to become the first test subject. Miraculously, the experiment succeeds—and a litany of moral questions unravels from there.

If a company manages to digitize a person, do they have the rights to some of that person’s labor? If you could upload yourself at any point in your life to avoid death, would you do it? And when? Is the person inside the web the same as the old one outside, and how can we know for sure? What if cyberspace is more fun than reality, and no one wants to stay back and maintain the necessary hardware? Would we shut down the internet and go back to simpler times? Would we be able to live without it long-term or clamor to get back online? Where will the energy for all this digital activity come from? And would anyone even still have to work? It’s an endless thread once you start pulling, and not even the world’s fastest computer can process it to a definitive conclusion.

Towards the end, the show begins making big time jumps. One year later. Five years later. 20 years later. Eventually, we cut millennia into the future. It’s only a brief glimpse at how these sweeping technological changes compound in the long run, but it’s enough to serve two interesting indications.

First, you never know what humans will do until you put them in a situation where all the options they could want are actually on the table. Ellen, for example, who is David’s wife, is always adamantly against uploading—until, eventually, she decides to join the cloud herself. New goals fuel new possibilities, and new possibilities enable new goals. Asking someone what they would do if everything was possible is not the same as actually making everything possible for them.

The second indication is that humanity will never run out of problems. If we solved death, disease, and despair, we’d find new constraints and start throwing our creativity at them. In the show, the first uploaded people have a flaw in their code. If they can’t fix it, they’ll disintegrate and die a second, digital death on top of their physical one. Once the flaw is fixed, however, where will the uploaded intelligence live and draw the vast resources it needs from? After the show answers that question, it repeats it right away at scale: At some point, yet another form of digital intelligence emerges—300 billion specimens of it. Where will they live if they’re to support the uploaded humans? Construction work on a massive satellite ring begins, but that’s when moral discussions break out. Progress never stops, but it also never stops being thwarted. That’s evolution—and humans are as subject to it as everything else nature has ever wrought.

Be it a book, a TV show, or a philosophical discussion: Every now and then, grapple with the big questions. They’re not better than the small ones. If anything, they show us that our challenges large and tiny are one and the same. We’ll never solve life, so we might as well take our time—and dive into some beautiful stories while we’re at it.

It was late afternoon, and dozens of people had already visited our exhibition booth. The next guy was looking for a German-speaker. He found me. A tall man in a blue jumpsuit, he immediately proceeded to pour out what was inside of him in a mild East German accent.

The man turned out to be a retired owner of a small construction company who had taken a significant chunk of his retirement funds and put it into our company’s cryptocurrency. He was currently down on his investment and needed to vent. I was surprised at how eloquently he did it.

The man was clearly intelligent. He illustrated our company’s and industry’s problems with so many colorful allegories, it was hard to keep track. If he had written down his thoughts and structured them, it would have made for a great article. Instead, he kept talking at me for a good 10-20 minutes, in which I said all but six sentences, if those.

Suddenly, one of my team members interrupts us. “Sorry to barge in, but Nik, our boss is looking for you on the first floor balcony.” Relieved, I left the exhibition hall, ready to thank my boss for whatever problem she might throw at me next. It couldn’t possibly have been harder than sitting under an endless information shower run by a stranger at an event where your senses are already constantly overloaded.

When I got to the balcony, all I saw was security, a few stragglers, and people down in the main stage area converting the space into a dinner hall. No sign of my boss. A friendly man advised me the room was currently closed, and I left in a bit of a daze. On the way out, the colleague who had alerted me found me. Lo and behold, she deserved my thanks—the whole “you’re needed elsewhere” was a rescue ruse to get me away from an unfruitful conversation, and she played it by the book.

“Oh my god, thank you!” I said. I had been ready to let the man finish, of course, but it had also been clear our chat was headed nowhere. Still, I hope he felt a bit lighter after getting some of his concerns off his chest.

There’s a good book by Sam Harris called Lying. It shows reasonable ways and an ethical argument towards always telling the truth. It’s a great read to aspire to live by—but every now and then, if a friend is worth saving, the little lie that could can go a long way.

I felt like a clogged pipe. Ideas, emotions, effort—nothing would flow through. It was all just pent up behind some inner, invisible wall. “Why am I annoyed at everything?” I wondered. Then, my dad asked me to go for a walk.

That’s when I realized: I hadn’t left the house in over two days. It was simply time to move. To get some fresh air and touch grass.

The other day, I learned about the sacred olive tree near the Acropolis. It reminded me of how grounding it feels to be in nature—and how much better our lives would be if we managed to do so at least for a few minutes every day.

After I came back from the walk, the blockage in my pipe had turned into dust. Life flowed once more.

Have you noticed? Nature is rarely annoying. Even a bad time outside can be a good time when compared to staring at screens. And as it turns out, no matter where we are, we still live in nature. Sometimes, getting a real-world reminder of that is all it takes to move forward.