Jonathan

[𐌁𐌉Ᏽ 𐌕𐌉𐌌𐌉 @OrevaZSN]

The fact that billionaires still want more money should be studied by the same people who study serial killers.

[Camus @newstart_2024]

Steve Jobs famously said his kids didn’t use iPads.

Brené Brown highlighted this on Steven Bartlett’s Diary of a CEO. She’s been in rooms with tech billionaires and platform founders. When they’re asked what kids should study today, the answer is coding and physics. But when the same people reflect on their own success? They credit deep reading of philosophy, the Stoics, history, and the liberal arts.

Her concern: a quiet divide is forming — one group protecting deep thinking for their own children while the rest of us are encouraged to just keep scrolling.

In the age of AI, experts across the board are saying critical thinking, philosophical reasoning, and liberal arts skills are becoming even more essential — not less. AI can generate answers, but it can’t replace the human ability to ask the right questions, understand context, ethics, and meaning.

The people building our digital future seem to understand this deeply for their own families, yet design systems that often pull everyone else in the opposite direction.

Do you think we’re creating a two-tier system — deep thinkers at the top and scrollers below?

[MP Arizona☀️🏳️‍🌈💙🌵🐕🐕‍🦺🫂💦🏜🐟🌴🎙🌎🌻♍️🌊 @AzPetrich]

I just want to point out....

The amount of money the United States has spent on war in the last 67 days, is roughly the same cost that Bernie Sanders proposed for universal college. So the real question is never can we afford it, it's what we choose to prioritize.

[James Tate @JamesTate121]

You see this kind of thing in struggling lower-income Southern households, and it tells a very specific story.
When life hasn't delivered much.... no wealth, no power, no real social standing.... some folks discover that white supremacy is basically a free membership card to a club that makes them feel superior without requiring any actual achievement.
It's the world's laziest status symbol.
The starter kit is always the same:
*A Confederate flag honoring a war their ancestors lost badly 160 years ago.
*A gun they'll never actually need.
*A Bible they've never actually read.
*And Fox News running 24/7 telling them they're REAL Americans.... unlike those fancy elitist Democrats who are secretly importing an army of replacement voters to steal their....
Their what exactly? Their Dollar General? Their 1987 Camaro on cinder blocks in the yard?
FOX found the formula, and they never let go of it: Take a man who has nothing, tell him the reason he has nothing is because those people are taking it.... and suddenly he's not a struggling nobody.
He's a soldier in a cultural war. He matters. He's relevant. He becomes a MAGA Warrior!
And THAT.... ladies and gentlemen.... is precisely how a twice-impeached, four-times-indicted, 34-time felon, bankrupt New York con man who golfs at his own resorts became the hero of the working man.
You genuinely cannot make this stuff up.
And I write this so that hopefully they will recognize what they have done and what they are doing and snap out of it.....
I was born and raised in Appalachia ... These very people could be my relatives ..... but ... I .... got common sense from my granny ----- "question everything". VIA~Lee Murphy

[Softboy @softboywin]

My mom was really serving us home cooked meals every single day…… younger me didn’t realize how much work and how much of a blessing that is

[Melanie D'Arrigo @DarrigoMelanie]

The Starbucks CEO can write-off the cost of his private jet on his taxes because it’s considered a business expense.

But Starbucks baristas can’t write off the clothing they have to buy to adhere to the Starbucks dress code.

This is what an anti-worker tax code looks like.

[Harry Fisher @harryfisherEMTP]

I literally know a guy that made millions selling his cure for prostate cancer to big pharma. He cured himself and had a “98%” success rate in curing prostate cancer. He told me that the FDA and big pharma just kept slapping him with red tape to the point where he finally gave up. He was also worried about losing his life. So he sold his technology to big business. For millions. They buried it. He moved to a ranch. And gave up on most of humanity.

Sadly this is true. We are being murdered in many different ways.

God bless

[Asanwa.sol @Chizitere_xyz]

The internet loves to measure a man’s love by how well he performs "romance," but nobody wants to admit that for a man, modern romance is almost entirely unpaid event planning and financial pressure.
We do not view romance as a beautiful emotion a man gets to experience and enjoy; we treat it as a hospitality shift he has to clock in for. If he isn’t spending money, coordinating logistics, or meticulously directing a cinematic experience for his partner’s aesthetic, he is instantly accused of "losing the spark." We have completely stripped the actual intimacy out of dating and replaced it with an expectation of customer service.

We don't actually want to share romantic moments with men; we just want them to continuously fund and facilitate our entertainment so we can post the aesthetic on Instagram.

[smoothie @shedrinkswater]

Men who are asked to endure humiliation as though it were proof of their moral maturity are being initiated into a civilisation that no longer recognises masculine pain as fully human.

This is followed by a broader cultural disorder; the present moral atmosphere increasingly tilts in favour of women, in the sense that female misconduct is more readily aestheticised, excused, or even applauded. Masculine structure is treated as suspect, while feminine chaos is romanticised as liberation. nd so we arrive at a social order in which a woman may dehumanise a man, speak to him with contempt, or reduce him to a caricature, and still remain insulated by the rhetoric of victimhood the moment she is challenged.

This is where grievance turns into impunity because to have suffered does not absolve one of the responsibility not to inflict suffering. If you are inhumanely treating another human being, the language of victimhood still places you within the moral judgment.

We cannot dismiss this phenomenon as accidental as it is being cultivated through social platforms, popular media, web series, and the broader symbolic machinery of contemporary culture, all of which increasingly train people to interpret men through a vocabulary of suspicion, disposability, and moral inferiority. The result is a pendulum swing so extreme that it has started to resemble ideological inversion.

This leads to gender wars where men and women are taught to view the other as an enemy because contempt is now passed for intelligence and hatred leads to earning social reward.

But you are not above the other gender or even being merely human, the current culture which is trying to teach us dignity through degradation is decomposing.

[‏ً @BALUCIAGA]

that’s bc they truly understand the price of community is inconvenience. some people in our generation treat connection as something to be offered only when it’s easy, when they feel like it, when they’re free or when they have the capacity. our grandparents showed up regardless.

[Whemïmor @hy_wemmy]

Full grown adults that can’t swim, cycle, skate, backpack, take a gap year, vacation, play instruments or speak multiple foreign languages.
Just a lifetime of hustling and trying to leave survival mode. These are subtle poverty metrics that no one is ready to talk about.

[M-Jay🪅 @Jamesoflife]

No let me rephrase. Men caught two pedophiles and instead of reporting and taking their asses to jail, they organized a fun fist match for content purposes. Men’s disposition to sexual violence of girls really saved me from engaging in “false accusation” rhetorics because even the identified predators are offered freedom and used to crack jokes because victims’ lives hold no value to them except when the victims are men and even at that, it is reduced to homophobia

[Off the damn loud @ounceofmid]

I’m starting to doubt the conclusions of race science

[redpillbot @redpillb0t]

Percentage of Americans who are married and own a home at age 30:

1960: 52%
1970: 48%
1980: 45%
1990: 43%
2000: 35%
2010: 25%
2025: 12%

Insane.

[Kyle Harrison @kwharrison13]

Anyone surprised that Jeff Bezos’ New Years Eve party looks like a janky crypto influencer’s Miami weekend must have forgotten when William Shatner tried to have a human moment with him about his experience in space and Bezos went to shake a bottle of champagne instead…

[𝙷𝚒𝚌𝚔𝚖𝚊𝚗 @shagbark_hick]

The whole "we don't build beautiful things anymore" problem is a lot bigger than just building beautiful things.

Even if you manage to build, preserve, or restore a beautiful place -- it will be full of people with no self-respect, and the architecture of the corporate slop we're all addicted to will also take over.

People will mill around in their jammies, gulping great big cups of sugary coffee drinks, scrolling on their cell phones, and strung-out vagrants will mill around with impunity -- because we no longer live, dress, eat, make policy, or sit in public with even the barest trace of self-respect.

In essence, in order for beauty to exist in a public way, the dominant cultural mode has to be one of universal self-respect. Those who exhibit none must be reprimanded or removed from sight. And so far as cultural modes go, this one is notoriously hard to inculcate or enforce.

Once someone has degenerated at all, they become rabidly defensive, as if accused -- they vehemently defend their ghastly sweatpants, their Big Gulp cup of syrupy latte, their penchant for slack-jawed idling on TikTok in public. They are offended at the idea of enforcing basic social standards in public, because it would be "mean" to do so. The very defensiveness such people exhibit is the real obstacle to public beauty before anything else.

"Build beautiful buidlings again" at your own peril until this attitude is somehow erased from the cultural canon.

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

The idea that “reading” is in and of itself an intellectual activity, regardless of what one reads, is of course a symptom of our civilization’s growing illiteracy.

[Roman Helmet Guy @romanhelmetguy]

One reason young men are depressed is that even life at “the top” is so lame. The richest man in Normandy in 1096 was a killer who sold everything to conquer the Holy Land in the face of certain death. The richest guys in the USA in 2025 are dorks doing this.

[Vivian @suchnerve]

Empathy is worked out like a muscle when you read fiction, because all those characters’ internal monologues teach you how other people think. You don’t get that level of information with other media formats.

The decline in readership is part of why we’re in an empathy shortage.

[scott 🌞 @scottdomes]

one of the most valuable emotional skills is letting people project onto you: allowing others to have their own narrative about who you are & what you're doing, without feeling the need to change it

ideally everyone would meet you with curiosity & empathy, of course, but that's so often not the case, and without realizing it we can spend a lot of time trying to "manage" other people's narratives of us... but we can also just let that go

"okay, they have a particular story about me. okay, that's not true. I'm going to keep moving forward"