Month: July 2026

The year is 2063 and you were never interesting.

Somewhere around your mid 20s, the memories stop. The window has become the door has become the room has become the entire house has become a window again. You have a portal in your pocket full of apps that are designed within an inch of their lives to take the best of you – your attention, your ability to focus, your time.

Your life is an orchestrated shuffle of technology. Your days are spent at work with the medium screen and you come home to unwind with the big screen; reflexively grabbing for the small screen every 2 to 7 minutes. Your screen time is 4 hours per day, 6 hours on the weekends, 7 if you’re hungover (you often are). It’s the midwest, after all. Fridays are for going out, Sundays are for boozy brunch. And repeat.

— Read on lizleatrice.substack.com/p/the-year-is-2063-and-you-were-never

Greatness and the Machine – by Brendan McCord

We face a condition no people has faced before: a tool that acts not on the world but on the will itself. Such a tool endangers things that a tyrant never could.

The first thing it risks is autonomy: the cultivated capacity to author your own reasoning. This means framing the question, weighing what matters, and then owning your judgment. This is not the same thing as agency. Agency is about getting things done. Like Elena, you can simultaneously be highly agentic, but devoid of all autonomy.

The second loss is older and grander. Tocqueville feared that equality would cost us the potential for greatness. He arrived in America, half-afraid that the democratic age had extinguished thumos – what the Greeks called the part of the soul that loves honor, contest, and daring.

Tocqueville, however, found it on the merchant ship. At the end of volume I in Democracy in America, he tries to solve the mystery of how American merchants were able to offer cheaper rates and dominate transatlantic shipping. He finds the answer in temperament.

The American leaves Boston to buy tea in China, is gone two years and touches land once, lives off brackish water and salt meat, runs into the storm under full sail and mends the ship as he goes. He does all this to sell a pound of tea for a penny less than the Englishman. He does this because, as Tocqueville writes, the Americans put a kind of heroism in their manner of trading. The old fire does not die in a democratic age, it changes address.
— Read on blog.cosmos-institute.org/p/greatness-and-the-machine