Overwork, Curiosity, and Sympathy: Technology and Modern Vices

Show Notes

Dan and I opened February feeling a little taxed — literally, given the week's tariff headlines — and that small joke turned into one of those threads we keep pulling on: the gap between the founder who can will a thing into existence and the professional brought in to keep it from breaking. We bounced it around through wartime versus peacetime generals, through Gates versus Nadella, Page versus Pichai, Bezos versus Jassy, and landed on the thing that's actually been on both our minds for 2025. We want to put a bow on this project — a website, a bit of a blog, real estate on the internet that's actually ours — and learn the new tools while we do it. I'd spent four or six hours flailing in Cursor, blown the whole thing up, and started over with nothing but a to-do file and a readme. Dan walked me through adding a .cursor rules file and pointed me at cursor.directory, which felt like exactly the kind of "a little illumination spawns more from you" moment this show is supposed to be about.

Then we hit the part I'd written down all week waiting to discuss: Nietzsche's three modern vices. Overwork, curiosity, and sympathy. I'll admit up front I can't tell you exactly where I lifted the framework from — but it was provocative enough that I scribbled it down, and it earned its keep. Curiosity sent me straight back to Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death, to that line about the telegraph letting a man in Texas learn the doings of a man in Denver — information that arrives without ever becoming relevant. You spend the mental energy chasing it, realize you don't care, and you've just beamed photons into your eyeballs for the dopamine drip. The fix isn't to stop being curious; it's to be deeply curious about the people actually in front of you instead of vaguely curious about every bot and stranger you'll never meet.

We saved sympathy for last on purpose, because it's the one that cuts. Sympathy for all is a refusal to rank good and bad — and Dan had lived a version of that this very week, sitting in management conversations about organizational changes where someone's name comes up and the room goes soft. He made the case cleanly: telling everyone they're equally great is its own quiet unkindness. There are levels of performance, and the kind move is honesty plus a path forward, not flattery. We tangled in the McGilchrist material here too — the divided brain, the broad-perceiving side and the focused side — and I want to flag that I openly wasn't sure which hemisphere was which when I said it. (For the record, it's the right that holds the wide view and the left that narrows in.) The gist stands either way: you need both, and the modern danger is letting the vague, unfocused one run the show.

The back half was just two guys trading books and toys. Overwork as self-negation — busyness as an emotion you get addicted to, a way to forget you have other feelings — led somehow to Queer Eye, which I did not see coming when I woke up. Dan's stacking up Machiavelli and a Duke professor's work on preference falsification off an Andreessen recommendation; I begged him to read Boom by Byrne Hobart, the same Hobart who writes The Diff. That book rewired how I think about bubbles: the booms that leave a path of destruction behind also lay the dark fiber, build the world-class freight rail out of railroad busts, and turn the Manhattan Project into the Apollo Project. Creation, even wasteful creation, compounds. We closed on John Mack's Abduction — a Harvard psychiatrist running hypnotic regression on abductees in the nineties — which Dan is reading alongside the Telepathy Tapes, and on the thing I actually can't stop thinking about: what happens when an AI's context window can finally remember years of you, not just the last four pages.

So that's where my head's at this year: radical acceptance and aspiring optimism, even in the chaos. Don't get too comfortable — find a way to install the discomfort, because that's where all the gold is.

— Sean