Digital hygiene/The End of Children/How to Navigate the Weirdness
Recomendo - issue #457
Digital safety essentials
Andrej Karpathy's guide to digital hygiene has practical steps for protecting your privacy and security. Here are the essentials: Use a password manager (like 1Password) to create unique strong passwords for every service; get a hardware security key (like YubiKey) as your second factor authentication instead of text messages; and use Privacy.com to create credit card numbers that are locked to one specific merchant and can’t be used elsewhere, preventing unauthorized charges. — MF
Intro to global depopulation
Many people are having trouble wrapping their heads around the fact that global depopulation and not overpopulation is our challenge. The childless trend has been underway for 50 years but has accelerated dramatically recently. We are at the cusp of deaths outnumbering births on the planet, with no change in sight. I recommend this very, very long New Yorker article – “The End of Children” – as the very best introduction and explainer. It focuses on particular programs, people, and events in South Korea, which is leading the world in depopulation, much faster than the Japanese. The piece is beautifully written, expertly reported, and informed. I think everyone should read it; paste the article url link into 12FT to read it in full. — KK
How to Navigate the Weirdness
This two-part talk, How to Navigate the Weirdness by Erik Davis, gave me such great comfort and clarity on how to ground myself in the complexities of our current societal consciousness. The intention behind these talks is to honestly assess the present moment and share navigational tools for sanity, sense-making, and creative engagement. Davis gives historical context and talks about the transformative cultural shifts that have led us to this point, while also addressing the psychological impacts of media saturation, among other things. His strategies emphasize flexibility, mindfulness, and critical thinking. Here is part one and part two, and here is some of his advice (paraphrased):
Ground yourself in physical sensations and direct experiences to counterbalance the effects of media saturation and overwhelming information.
Use foxhole or gallows humor as a tool for resilience—find connection and levity even in difficult situations.
Embrace an "emotional remix," allowing opposite emotions like grief and joy to coexist, fostering a flexible emotional state.
Practice situational pluralism by recognizing that multiple valid frameworks exist for interpreting reality.
Deepen your capacity to embrace uncertainty, mystery, and doubt without searching for fact or reason—not everything fits into a fixed narrative.
—CD
Assisted backpacking
I love multi-day walks, but not hefting a loaded backpack the whole way. The solution is to have my luggage bag forwarded each day, so I only walk with a tiny daypack. This liberation is heavenly, and makes me glad to walk a week or more. Luckily there are outfitters that will arrange luggage forwarding in great places to walk in the countrysides of Europe and Asia. There are no guides; you pick the route you want, and the dates you want. They arrange modest lodging, the luggage forwarding, and then give you a map on your phone. The fees are very reasonable, not much more than the lodging itself. For example, last week I used MacsAdventures to help me walk the last 100km of the El Camino de Santiago in Spain. I’ve used the same outfitter to walk several self-guided week-long rambles in the Cotswolds, England. The arrangements and luggage pickups were flawless. — KK
Favorite Products
In Kevin Rose’s recent newsletter, he shares the results of his semi-annual survey of Favorite Things. With more than 27,000 votes across 24 categories, the results paint a clear picture of the top tools people are favoring right now. Kevin runs this survey to track the rapidly evolving AI landscape and keep his community informed on emerging trends and products. Like the results reflect, I still use most Apple and Google products for things like email, calendar, and browser, but I’ve permanently moved on from Google Search to a paid Perplexity plan, and I can’t imagine ever going back. — CD
USB-C to USB-A Adapter
These tiny Syntech USB-C to USB-A adapters let me connect my older USB devices to my newer laptops. The pack comes with two adapters that plug into the computer's USB port. — MF
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When I was born, the population of the world was ~2.5 billion people. Today the population is ~8 billion people. Meanwhile we've contaminated most of the water with microplastics and worse, killed off most of the birds, and heated the atmosphere by several Cº. Maybe it's time to slow down.
Great edition!