Quickies

🎯 🎶 “Try that in a small town / See how far you make it down the road.” 🎶 Wait, is this a song about being gay? 🤔

🎯 End the actors’ strikes so we can get Natalie Portman starring in a Sinead O’Connor biopic…

🎯 "AI is amazing at writing content from scratch!"
"OK, do you want to read it though?"
"No."
"Does anyone want to read it?"
"No."
"So who is it really for?"
"Well, it's great for SEO."
"So you got a robot to write something for another robot to read. Got it."

🎯 I did it! The most amazing crowdwork clip you’ll ever see. Disagree? Fight me in the comments. (Please.)

🎯 You know why there’s a loneliness epidemic/sex recession? We now have a generation raised on 90's sitcoms like Seinfeld and Sex and the City where each ep was "I won't date 'em because their pinky finger is too long" or whatever. Result: an entire generation that won't budge from unreasonable red flags. Sorry kids, love is compromise.

🎯 "Officials at the Auschwitz-Birkenau Memorial and Museum in Poland criticize comedian…" Gonna stop you right there. Get back to me when Auschwitz is super into a joke. That place ain’t exactly known for its great sense of humor. Ya never see ‘em tweeting, "Didn't like that one joke, but loved the bit about using a time machine to go back and kill Hitler!"

🎯 "Never go to bed angry" is the worst relationship advice. Take a break, sleep on it, and revisit tomorrow. Odds are you won't even care then. Time (plus a poor memory) heals all wounds.

🎯 Anxiety is worrying about the future. Depression is worrying about the past. The cure to both of them is to focus on the present.

Comedy

🃏 I post clips of my standup (and more) at Instagram, TikTok, Threads, and YouTube.

🃏 NYC! Misguided Meditation with Matt Ruby returns in September to an amazing venue: The Psychedelic Assembly. Early bird coupon code gets ya $5 off: MISGUIDED5. Tickets/info here.

🃏 Listen to my podcast:

Kind of a Lot with Matt Ruby Stereoactive Media 24 episodes

Fascinating paragraphs

Shout out to Instapaper for letting me save long pieces and read ‘em later with no hassle. I occasionally highlight “aha” passages there – here are some of the most fascinating I’ve collected so far this year…

🗯 Enough With the Sad, Put-Upon Woman Essay. Rachel Connolly:

There is a manner in which you are encouraged to talk and write about yourself as a woman, at present. You are supposed to foreground your submissiveness; detail the many indignities you have stoically endured in your relationships with men; present the men involved as two-dimensional villains; be humorless; admit to no wrongdoing yourself, not even for a sense of realism; and, finally, craft a metaphor to describe the ways in which you made yourself small. The more incomprehensible the metaphor the better. Even better still, extrapolate that metaphor out to encompass all of womankind. Oh, and a moment where you cried or wept would be good. Not essential, but good. A birthday or celebration spent alone would make for nice color too…

When we explain away the things we do with a shrugging “That’s just what women are like,” we allow a nod to our subjugation to serve as a stand-in for our personality, our experience, and our complexity. The oppressive structure we contest with becomes the totalizing feature of our character. Ultimately, writing like this luxuriates in the existence of the structures it claims to challenge. If we can’t stop doing it, well, at least we could stop celebrating it.

🗯 50 Years Ago, Stevie Wonder Heard the Future. Nnenna Freelon (musician):

He’s a soothsayer. He’s a truth teller. He’s a griot. I can’t look at him in isolation as a young artist then, because I see him in the body of his work, now. But even then, I imagine he had elements of this very wise, worldly view of love and social change. And love as social change. Like when we love each other, when we go through whatever it is we go through — loving and losing — our humanity is impacted by that. A lot of artists who are successful don’t want to take those risks to bring on social commentary into their music. But at the very root of speaking truth to power is love.

🗯 Why Beauty Is So Important to Us. André Aciman:

Beauty has less to do with the material things around us, and more to do with how we spend our time on earth. We create true beauty only when we channel our energy to achieve a higher purpose, build strong communities and model our behavior so that others can find inspiration to do better by each other and our planet. Beauty has nothing to do with the latest makeup or fashion trends, and everything to do with how we live on this planet and act to protect it.

🗯 All the Single Ladies. Rob Henderson:

For now, many young men understand that women want educated and successful partners. Why not work harder to adapt to this preference? In their book, The Demise of Guys, psychologists Philip Zimbardo and Nikita Duncan suggest that the answer is twofold: fake war and fake sex. They argue that many young men have a natural desire for conflict, struggle, and accomplishment. Video games satiate this desire. They are designed to induce a sense of gradual achievement in the face of obstacles adapted to be just above the player’s ability. Alongside this, young men also have a natural desire to seek sexual partnerships. Digital p0rn satiates this desire. P0rn provides a virtual experience of sexual fulfillment with multiple different partners. Many young men may have simply decided to derive a sense of accomplishment from gaming, and a sense of sexual satisfaction from p0rn.

🗯 Vicious Traps. Morgan Housel:

The first rule of very successful people: Those who think in unique ways you admire are likely to also think in unique ways you don’t admire. A lot of people who are admired for thinking, “I wonder what would happen if we tried something different” are the same people who become despised for doing something different that doesn’t work, or loses money, or hurts other people.

🗯 Emily Morse Wants You to Think Seriously About an Open Relationship. Morse:

You meditate for a few minutes, you get in the zone, then you masturb8, and at the height of orgasm, when your sexual energy is at a peak level and you’re at a clear state to transmute whatever you believe into the universe — it’s very potent, clear energy at that moment to think about and feel what it is that you want. It could be about a raise. It could be about a better day. I feel like this is so woo. I’m from California! [Laughs.] But at that moment of your 0rgasm, if in that moment you can feel what you want, picture it, it has powerful resonance.

🗯 Meditations On Moloch. Scott Alexander:

Agriculture. Jared Diamond calls it the worst mistake in human history. Whether or not it was a mistake, it wasn’t an accident – agricultural civilizations simply outcompeted nomadic ones, inevitable and irresistably. Classic Malthusian trap. Maybe hunting-gathering was more enjoyable, higher life expectancy, and more conducive to human flourishing – but in a state of sufficiently intense competition between peoples, in which agriculture with all its disease and oppression and pestilence was the more competitive option, everyone will end up agriculturalists or go the way of the Comanche Indians.

🗯 Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Great ‘Indiana Jones’ Adventure. Waller-Bridge:

Naughty hand is when I’m writing, and I’ll get pissed off at myself for being boring, then I’ll suddenly start writing something slightly angry. Naughty hand is like, “For [expletive] sake, Phoebe, just sort this out!” Really early on, I would deliver a script to a producer, and they’d go, “This is a bit —” and I’d go: “I know! I hate it! This is what I really want to write!” And I’d have another script: the naughty-hand script. I’d be like, “I meant to do that.” And they’d be like, “This one’s really good!” It was like I had to get the one that I thought people wanted out of my system and then be like: “Suckers! Here’s a much better one!”

🗯 Milan Kundera talking to Philip Roth about humor. Kundera:

“I learned the value of humor during the time of Stalinist terror. I was 20 then. I could always recognize a person who was not a Stalinist, a person whom I needn’t fear, by the way he smiled. A sense of humor was a trustworthy sign of recognition.”

💵 Up ahead for paid subscribers: Chuck Klosterman, Charlie Munger, How Jon Stewart Made Tucker Carlson, why TV writers are miserable, and more Quickies…...