Ideas

Denis Diderot was broke. Properly broke. So when a wealthy admirer bought his entire book collection for what would now be roughly £200,000, it should have felt like relief. Clean relief. End of problem. It was not. He bought a new dressing gown with the money. That made his old desk look shabby. A new desk made the chairs look wrong. New chairs made the rug feel out of place. One purchase pulled the next one in after it, and then the next, until Diderot found himself surrounded by things he had not planned on buying and a mood he had not planned on feeling. ...

John Gall buried this observation in a 1975 book most people have never heard of. The book is Systemantics. The line is this: “A complex system that works is invariably found to have evolved from a simple system that worked. A complex system designed from scratch never works and cannot be made to work. You have to start over, beginning with a simple working system.” It takes a moment to land. Then it starts appearing everywhere. ...

My taste in films is difficult to explain. I’ve tried a few times. It never quite lands cleanly. It’s not a genre. It’s closer to a pattern, a film that feels like it’s asking something, not just showing you something. You finish it, and instead of moving on, you sit there for a minute. Sometimes longer. The pattern shows up most clearly in what I think of as “one-room films.” Small cast. One location, or close to it. No spectacle to hide behind. No world-ending stakes. Just people in a room and something unresolved between them that refuses to stay quiet. ...

Seneca wrote this in a letter to a friend: “Set aside certain days on which you will be content with the scantiest and cheapest fare, with coarse and rough dress, saying to yourself the while: ‘Is this the condition that I feared?’” He was not writing from comfort. The Stoics generally were not theorising from comfort. Epictetus was a slave. His philosophy was not developed in a seminar with good coffee and a whiteboard. It was developed inside conditions he could not choose, as a way of finding what was actually within his control when almost everything was not. ...

The setup is well known. A runaway trolley is heading toward five people on the track. You can pull a lever to divert it onto a side track, but there is one person there. Five die or one dies. Do you pull the lever? Most people say yes. The math is uncomfortable, but clear. Now the second version. Same trolley. Same five people. But this time you are on a footbridge above the track, and next to you is a large stranger. If you push him off the bridge, his body will stop the trolley. Five saved, one dead. The arithmetic is identical. ...