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How-- and why-- is our culture shifting? "The Obscure Media Theory That Explains '99% of Everything'" @dkthomp.bsky.social @weisenthal.bsky.social
(Plus- Encyclopædia Britannica)
Contemplate culture: https://roughlydaily.com/2026/03/13/technologies-are-not-mere-exterior-aids-but-also-interior-transformations-of-consciousness-and-never-more-than-when-they-affect-the-word/
Sage advice on a currently hot topic: abundance should be a goal, not an agenda "We need usable futures" @himself.bsky.social @adamtooze.bsky.social (Plus- John Warne Gates)
Opt for optimism: https://roughlydaily.com/2025/05/08/the-test-of-our-progress-is-not-whether-we-add-more-to-the-abundance-of-those-who-have-much-it-is-whether-we-provide-enough-for-those-who-have-little-2/
How has the pandemic changed your attitude toward work? Derek Thompson wrote for The Atlantic, “…the basic terms of employment are undergoing a Great Reset. The pandemic thrust many families into a homebound lifestyle reminiscent of the 19th-century agrarian economy—but this time with screens galore and online delivery.” Thompson, who writes about economics and technology, […]
I have in front of me a curious article by Derek Thompson titled, “Workism Is Making Americans Miserable: For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising transcendence and community, but failing to deliver.” While I appreciate Derek Thompson's observation that worshipping work is a dead end, I strongly disagree that Americans worship work because we have “shifted from ‘jobs’ to ‘careers’ to ‘callings.’”
Thompson's understanding of "calling" is simply inadequate to his analysis. To understand why, simply ask, "Called by whom?” Indeed, contrary to Thompson, the way to avoid the temptation to worship work, may be to understand how a "calling" can give work meaning while also saving us from idolizing it. Or to put it another way, we should understand that “faith in an intangible and unfalsifiable force of goodness” is a not a separate and tangential avenue for meaning but is deeply entwined in the tangibility of work.
In the American Protestant tradition, a "calling" gave work meaning by setting it in a larger framework of relationships and purpose. From this perspective, the “particular calling” of being a lawyer is not just "a job" where you make money, or a "career" where you make "partner;" rather, it is a way to serve God and neighbor. Lawyers should do more than serve their families by earning money and providing for them. They should also do more than serve the neighbor who is their client who pays them. Lawyers are called to serve God’s causes on earth through the practice of law. While the call to pursue justice is universal, lawyers, as officers the court, have a special responsibility to seek justice. Weaponizing the law to subvert or avoid justice is a violation of their calling, no matter how legal it may be or how meaningful a lawyer may personally find it.
The traditional concept of “calling” or “vocation” has many other important things to say about the purpose of institutions and a world in which people are unemployed, underemployed, work for starvation wages, and struggle to find meaningful work. I grant Thompson's larger point: that the American Protestant narrative has receded in the national imagination and that this evacuation has opened the way for “workism.” However, I continue find a “calling” or “vocation” as a meaningful way to work into a larger perspective without giving it ultimate significance. In fact, I don’t really see another way to find the balance he notes has been lost.
Hit Makers
Extract:
“Creative people often bristle at the suggestion that they have to stoop to market their ideas or dress them in familiar garb. It’s pleasant to think that an idea’s brilliance is self-evident and doesn’t require the theater of marketing. But whether you’re an academic, screenwriter, or entrepreneur, the difference between a brilliant new idea with bad marketing and a mediocre idea with excellent marketing can be the difference between bankruptcy and success. The trick is learning to frame your new ideas as tweaks of old ideas, to mix a little fluency with a little disfluency – to make your audience see the familiarity behind the surprise.”
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“ ‘I don’t like that man,’ Abraham Lincoln said. ‘I must get to know him better.’ It would be nice to treat ideas the same way. For example: to make a list of ideas you don’t like or understand and read something new on the topic every month to get to know them better. Content platforms like Facebook could purposefully offer disfluent feeds, so that a Jewish Connecticut liberal could see the media diet of an evangelical Texas conservative and vice versa. Music and theater are often meant to be cathartic, but information isn’t supposed to feel like therapy. Sometimes learning about the world should hurt.”
10 Best Cites - Anonymous
ÂJacqueline Kennedy Onassis, Ludwig Reiners In : Norbert Kutschki, Sandra Proto, Michael V Ivanov, I. Made Iwan Darmawan, Sue Nelson Buckley, Derek Thompson, De Philosopher DJ Kyos, Robert Michaels, Anonymous, inspiration, quotes, motivation, success, best, citation, top - https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCfq7BcmuuSkO9dao_g2ROlw
There is a science behind everything, and I do mean everything, thanks for the inspiration Derek Thompson, first book of the year, it took me a while, but I got to the end #hitmakers #derekthompson
