And the thing we’ve found is that you can break Facebook and social media use into two categories. One is where people are connecting and building relationships, even if it’s subtle, even if it’s just I post a photo and someone I haven’t talked to in a while comments. That person is reminding me that they care about me.
The other part of the use is basically content consumption. So that’s watching videos, reading news, passively consuming content in a way where you’re not actually interacting with anyone or building a relationship. And what we find is that the things that are about interacting with people and building relationships end up being correlated with all of the measures of long-term well-being that you’d expect, whereas the things that are primarily just about content consumption, even if they’re informative or entertaining and people say they like them, are not as correlated with long-term measures of well-being.
Monthly Archives: April 2018
Jason Isbell’s lyrics on Southeastern
If you haven’t listened to Jason Isbell’s album Southeastern, I highly recommend it. I believe it’s one of the best albums of the last several years in any genre remotely adjacent to it.
His lyrics especially are just spectacular. He wrote much of this album during & after recovering from alcohol and drug abuse, and it shows. The lyrics are simple, eloquent, and often cutting.
I’m not sure why it strikes me so much, but if you want an example, check out “Elephant”. It’s a dark song about the impending death of a friend due to cancer. The lyrics are haunting:
I’ve listened to some of the Drive-By Truckers stuff since his departure and it just doesn’t compare. And Isbell’s subsequent album was unimpressive. I hope it’s not his last great work.
The End of Windows
Nadella’s shift to a post-Windows Microsoft is the right one; to have done the same a decade sooner would have been better. It also, though, may have been impossible, simply because Windows was still the biggest part of the business, and it’s not clear the markets would have tolerated an explicit shift before it was painfully obvious it was necessary; without a rising stock price, Nadella’s mission would have been much more challenging if not impossible.
from The End of Windows by Ben Thompson