the essentials
10 insights from 25 weeks
Welcome to the 25th edition of Culture Carrier.
From the beginning, I’ve had one quiet reason for writing every week: to find out what I actually think about things I care about. Each issue has become a way of discovering where I stand, where I’m uncertain, and what still needs exploring.
I’m a sucker for milestones, so for #25, I went back through the archive and pulled the insights that stood out. The stuff I’d hand to someone trying to navigate this moment without losing their mind or their hope.
Here are 10 ideas that shape how I see the world (for now) – and how I try to move through it.
To everyone who shows up here – thank you.
1. Joy is not a betrayal. Multiple things can be true: you can care deeply about the world’s problems and still celebrate the beauty of existence. Guilt about feeling good doesn’t help anyone – it just drains the energy you need to contribute.
2. Your media diet is the soil your worldview grows in. Make it nourishing. If you don’t curate your inputs, someone else will.
3. The overwhelm of keeping up with the latest crisis keeps us from doing what we’re actually here to do. Stop carrying it all. Carry what’s yours, and carry it well.
4. The conversation infrastructure is broken, and it’s the bottleneck on everything else. Our capacity to solve big problems depends entirely on our capacity to talk about them coherently. We need people thinking about how we think together, not just what we think about.
5. Change is about creating and communicating compelling alternatives, not trying to win the same stale debates.
6. We mostly need more people being different things, not just doing different things.
7. We’re standing on the edge of dissolution and reinvention. The systems and institutions that got us here won’t get us to 2050. That’s the story of our time.
8. We’re living through the most rapid expansion of human capability in history. The raw materials are right here: you can learn anything, build an audience, fund a project, organize a movement – all without asking permission.
9. Optimism is a choice – and it’s a discipline. It’s not convincing yourself everything will work out; it’s choosing to act like it could, then doing your part to make that true.
10. If you believe you’re alone, that it’s all random, then controlling outcomes makes sense. Or checking out does. Both are logical responses to meaninglessness. But if you believe you’re embedded in something larger, you can release the death grip and focus on silly being present to what’s yours.
Here’s to the next 25. Thanks for being here.
If not us, who?
j