Taste, gifts, and the blessing of quitting at the right time

Postcard #10

Fortepan / Kieselbach Tamás

Hello and welcome back to another edition of THE POSTCARD, Unregistered’s fortnightly roundup of recommendations.

Thoughts, tools, and treats

This week: five ways to live a better life.

• Taste

  If you care about „an aesthetic sensibility, intellectual flair, a gregarious joie de vivre,“ you will enjoy Marlowe Granados’ post on „Having Taste.“ It’s a lovely read that reflects on what it means to cultivate taste in an era of performativity: „The asinine conversations about what people signal by way of what they read or how they dress is really the death of what is beautiful about taste. The importance placed on symbols as a shortcut into creating an identity without any real lived experience, in fact, sells everyone short.“

• Gift-giving advice by one of my favorite psychologists

  The best gift, Paul Bloom argues, probably „is something that transforms a person’s life for the better“ or „speaks to a personal connection.“ He offers some heartwarming examples and makes a very concrete suggestion that I can only agree with.

• Decoupling pleasure from consumption

  The email marketing platform EcoSend estimates that an additional 86.7 billion marketing emails have been sent by businesses over the Black Friday weekend, bringing the total to 448.3 billion emails: „Like all of our digital activities, email has a carbon footprint because it requires energy to send, receive and store messages across the world.“ The company’s blog offers some ideas on lowering the carbon emissions created by your email. They also built a free email carbon calculator that helps you determine your email carbon footprint.

• Paul Jarvis retires

  I’ve never met Paul in person, and we‘ve exchanged only a few very short emails, but I owe him an awful lot. Paul pioneered the creator’s economy with his newsletter, podcasts, courses, and books. No surprise, Cal Newport featured him in his latest book as a successful example of „slow productivity.“ Ahead of his time, Paul has always been the no-bs guy at the intersection of culture and commerce: quirky, experimental, ethical. Recently, Paul sold his half of the privacy-first software company Fathom Analytics to his co-founder Jack Ellis and retired at 46. I will miss his voice, but I’m happy for him that he can now garden all day long on Vancouver Island, where he lives in the woods. Best of luck, man.

• Flour Power

  We’re living in dark times. If you’re about to despair, look no further than this outstanding Substack, where Felicity Spector, who began her TV career covering the Velvet Revolution in Prague and the fall of the USSR, shares stories about food and resistance in wartime Ukraine. She tells the stories of people „who get up after a sleepless night hearing Russian missiles exploding outside, to open up their shops and cafes and try to keep life going. Who drop everything to help out when there’s yet another emergency inflicted on their land.“ Felicity does not take a penny herself from her Substack. Instead, the money goes directly to Ukrainian bakers who provide free bread to those in need. Please consider supporting her cause.

Noteworthy

“Perhaps there’s wisdom in acknowledging that care, in its purest form, will always resist industrialisation. And maybe that’s exactly what makes it so precious. Amidst our dreams of unlimited scale and frictionless efficiency, the most meaningful connections still happen one human at a time.”

—Kai Brach, in the editorial to issue 317 of his newsletter Dense Discovery

A mystery link leading into the unknown

Four siblings from Vienna offering...

• ...04:27 minutes of relief.

As always,

Dirk

P.S.: Feel free to send me pointers to articles, books, sites, pods, tools, and treats that could be interesting for this roundup. While I cannot promise to link them, I read and appreciate every hint.