Exile Lifestyle

It’s been said (by many people, as it turns out) that’s it’s difficult and at times dangerous to make predictions about the future. Which is far from ideal, as the future is where we’ll spend the rest of our lives. I…

Back in 1960, the concept of paradigms was developed by Thomas Kuhn to refer to our framework of reality—what we seem to know, what seems to be true, the assumptions we make based on that seeming knowledge, and our resulting sense of…

I love the cold. Winter (and to a lesser degree Autumn) is when I can finally spend more time outside, because the sun isn’t persistently menacing my burn-prone skin and all the floral aggressors that trigger my seasonal allergies are…

The Google Effect, sometimes called Digital Amnesia, refers to our tendency to treat our tools (like search engines or archives filled with captured notes) as if they are our brains. If someone asks us what the capitol of North Dakota is,…

I use AI tools for development (in the sense of coding things), but not for much of anything else. I like to keep up with what these systems are capable of, the leverage they provide users, but I wouldn’t apply…

Something that wasn’t obvious to me (not consciously, at least) until the pandemic forced me to slow down and stay put for a few years is that while our contexts are informed by meaningless happenstance and historical dice-rolls, they’re also…

Just after sunrise and just before sunset, there’s a period often called the Golden Hour (or Magic Hour, depending on who you ask) when the light of the sun is just right—a little warmer, a little more diffuse and soft,…

For me, 2025 will be remembered as a year in which the wheels fell off many of the large-scale structures I’ve long taken for granted, and during which the world became more confounding and dangerous. Lots of interesting stuff happening,…

We’re rapidly approaching New Year’s, where we all make resolutions, many of which don’t stick, and we then castigate ourselves when our grand ambitions don’t persist for more than a few weeks (or days), or fail to materialize at all.…

There’s a tension between reinvesting in what we already have and investing in possible next-steps. You can think of this as ‘explore versus exploit,’ but I like to think in terms of planting seeds versus tending gardens. We have a…