Idea Surplus Disorder #138
This week: why friendship frays when life becomes a project, how likability may be your future superpower, what an Italian cashmere king can teach us about work, and why your internal worrier is a terrible forecaster.
Welcome to another edition of Idea Surplus Disorder. With the holiday approaching, I've added just a bit more innovative goodness into this one since I'm taking next week off.
This week: why friendship frays when life becomes a project, how likability may be your future superpower, what an Italian cashmere king can teach us about work, and why your internal worrier is a terrible forecaster.
Plus, a mix of fun finds, inspiring quotes, and a question about all the things you measure that maybe you shouldn't.
As always, I'm Matt Homann, and I'm glad you're here!
My Favorite Find:
I read hundreds of blogs and dozens of newsletters every week, and I always find more ideas than I can share. My favorite this week is an essay about the fraying of adult friendships:
Today’s young professionals live inside systems that quietly erode friendship while pretending to celebrate connection. Work consumes emotional bandwidth. Cities stretch distances cruelly. Weekends become recovery periods rather than social spaces. Ambition transforms everyone into project managers of their own lives.
We are perhaps the first generation to possess uninterrupted access to each other while simultaneously becoming emotionally inaccessible. We maintain ambient awareness of one another’s existence without participating meaningfully in each other’s lives. I know what my friends eat. Which cafés they visit. Which things they complain about. I know when they get promoted because LinkedIn informs me before they do. And yet sometimes I hesitate before calling because I no longer know the emotional weather of their lives.”
Somewhere along the way, friendships too began absorbing the language of management. We now discuss emotional bandwidth like data plans. Even affection sometimes feels evaluated through invisible cost-benefit analysis: Who texts first? Who makes more effort? Who is emotionally available? Who drains energy?
Friendship, however, has always depended on a certain irrational generosity. A willingness to waste time together magnificently. To listen to the same anxiety for the fifth time. To sit through silence. To remain available without agenda.
A Few More Things Worth Your Time:
The competitive advantage of being likeable:
Who wins in this new world? I would put money on those who have strong social skills and are able to build parasocial relationships to accumulate cultural capital... Major transitions tend to reward people who are early to understand the new logic of value, not necessarily those best suited to the old one.
But if we end up in a post-abundance world and the scarce thing becomes simply human presence (not brilliance or not credentials, just being there) then the advantage will be, in some sense, universally distributed. Everyone is irreducibly human in a way that no one was irreducibly good at calculus.
This advantage likely won’t be evenly claimed. Arguably, knowing that humanness is now the game is itself capital – a form that will accrue first to those paying attention.
Some smart workplace rules from Italy's "King of Cashmere" Brunello Cucinelli:
No emails can be sent to more than two addressees, just one or two. No group mailing. Why must a single email be read by 10 different people, unless it’s the 10 people who are interested in that specific issue? In order to disperse responsibility?
Here, no meetings with mobile phones. No one is allowed to bring them into the meeting room. You must look me in the eye. You must know things by heart. You must know all of your business with a 1 to 2 percent error rate. It is also training for your mind.
The "Illusion of Explanatory Depth" suggests that we are overconfident in our understanding of the most common things that exist all around us like toilets, zippers, and piano keys.
People feel they understand complex phenomena with far greater precision, coherence, and depth than they really do; they are subject to an illusion—an illusion of explanatory depth
The researchers found that confidence consistently dropped after people tried to write out their explanation of the item. A lot of 7s turned into 2s.
In other words, people thought they knew a lot about the workings of these devices, but when confronted with their lack of knowledge by the written explanation, they had to adjust their inflated sense of understanding.
With fewer social encounters, workers in jobs that can be remote saw steeper increases in distress, mental health visits and prescriptions for antidepressants than other workers did. This increase in depression does not seem to reflect more recent fears, such as A.I. displacement. It began in 2020 and has not abated, which points to remote work as the driving force.
The pain was not evenly shared. People who lived with their spouse and kids saw their mental health hold fairly steady, while those who lived alone experienced a 20 percent decrease in mental well-being. Overall, we found that the rise of remote work increased distress by 7 percent, which accounts for a third of the total increase over the 13-year period we measured.
So why do so many people like remote work, even saying they would accept pay cuts of 4 percent to 10 percent to keep it? One reason is that remote work’s costs are subtle and slow. When loneliness sets in gradually, it is natural to blame other life changes: a new job, a breakup, a fight with a friend, aging. Another reason that some people like remote work is that a half-empty office is not an attractive alternative.
As a general rule… it turns out that ordering people back to the office full time is a power and status move. It’s a signature strategy of leaders who exhibit narcissistic qualities. They see any kind of remote work as a threat to their authority and admiration. They want to be worshiped at the office altar.
The only trait that consistently predicted objections to remote work was narcissism - the tendency to be self-centred and entitled. The higher the opinions of themselves leaders expressed, the more they coveted power and status - and the more they favoured return-to-office mandates.
Treat your worries like the predictions of a bad forecaster:
The most common outcome per person was a staggering 0% accuracy, meaning the majority of participants had not a single worry materialized into reality. Even more damning, participants’ expected likelihood of their worries coming true was dramatically higher than the observed rate. The anxious mind is confidently and systematically wrong. And most importantly: the more people recognized this inaccuracy during treatment, the faster their anxiety symptoms dropped.
But here’s the thing: even with all of that, most things are fine. Most of the worst-case scenarios your brain rehearses at 2am simply do not arrive. The data on this is clear: your brain is a catastrophizing machine making you consider worst case scenarios or stay in fight or flight because it’s wired for survival, and the modern attention economy figured out how to monetize that anxiety and pipe it into your eyes all day.
Worry feels productive or perhaps like preparation, but it’s neither. It’s expensive cognitive overhead burning your focus and peace on outcomes that, in the vast majority of cases never happen.
The practical move is simple once you understand the above: treat your anxious predictions like your favorite bad forecaster you’ve caught being wrong over and over. You wouldn’t keep listening to a pundit who was wrong 91% of the time, would you?
Taste is an interface behaviour:
A window is something you look through, the (digital) feed is something that watches you doing the looking. It’s an apparatus that observes you observing, then changes its own behaviour based on that observation, which in turn shapes the future view you see though the window. […]
Taste is not just what passes through you. It is what culture becomes after passing through you, via a particular interface.
Your org chart's power is not in the boxes, it is in the lines:
The traditional org chart is such an impoverished way of seeing an organization. The organization is not in the boxes. It’s in the lines — and mostly in the white space the lines can’t capture. The roles and teams and tools are real enough, but they’re not where the organization lives. It lives in the relationships between them: the in-order-to and the for-the-sake-of that no chart has ever managed to draw.
Remember when life felt real (video)?
“Now think about what it takes to get through a day with your guard at the right level. Is this email legitimate, or is it a phishing attempt? Is this product review real, or did the company pay for it? Is this news story reporting facts, or is it just designed to provoke a reaction? Is this company going to sell my information? Is this music AI generated? Is that photo real? It’s exhausting, and it’s constant.”
“Most of us have gotten so used to it, that we don’t even recognize it as a burden anymore. It’s just the way things are. But it is a burden, with attacks on your mental energy every single day. This background process of having to audit, verify, and second guess almost everything you interact with. I think the thing most people miss is not some perfect and innocent world that never existed. It's the ability to get through a normal day without feeling like you need to be a hyper vigilant detective about everything.”
This Week's Question:
This week's question is inspired by a bit of advice I'd bookmarked in Kevin Kelly's Excellent Advice for Living:
Don’t take it personally when someone turns you down. Assume they are like you: busy, occupied, distracted. Try again later. It’s amazing how often a second try works.
So here are the two questions:
- Who have you given up on after a single "no" or a non-reply – assuming they weren't interested — who might just have been buried when you reached out?
- And what requests landed in your inbox that you ignored or declined too quickly, but might deserve a second look now?
Random Things for Smart People
- Calvin and Hobbes and the Price of Integrity.
- If you were online at the dawn of the internet, check this out.
- Dialed.gg is a simple browser game that shows you a color, hides it, asks you to recreate it from memory, and scores you on how well you did.
- How computers work, 1971 edition.
- More than you thought it was possible to know about the Ferris Bueller Ferrari garage scene.
- Play music on Van Gogh's Starry Night.
Words of Wisdom
Anything that relieves something of its ordinariness is magic. – Carisa Hendrix
Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive. Because what the world needs most is more people who have come alive. – Howard Thurman
The art of progress is to preserve order amid change, and to preserve change amid order. – Alfred North Whitehead
When you meet someone better than yourself, turn your thoughts to becoming his equal. When you meet someone not as good as you are, look within and examine your own self. – Confucius
Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art... It has no survival value; rather it is one of those things which give value to survival. – C.S. Lewis
You don’t know what’s going to happen. Big things look like little things. Little things don’t have big signs on them that say, ‘This Is a Big Thing.’ They look like everything else. – Mike Nichols
While things rest, the world regenerates. – Heraclitus