[This post was originally written in September 2022. But, update: Yum. My third order just arrived in the mail yesterday.]

The coffee at work has been—for most locations of my training and attending career—terrible. From the burnt “Parks and Coffee” drip sitting for hours on the hot plate during residency to the cheapest K-cups at the imaging center. It doesn’t matter what sweetener or creamer you might add, it was rare to finish the cup once it was cold enough to taste. I’m not a coffee snob. I’m really more of a pragmatist. I don’t have the time or inclination for a long ritual even when working from home let alone the desire to do anything elaborate at work. Visiting the hospital Starbucks is slow and expensive. It’s a treat on the way for an early call shift morning but not something I enjoy doing routinely.

One of my residents shared Cometeer with me. It’s a variation on a coffee subscription (which is itself a variation on the incredible number of subscriptions available these days). I generally don’t like these sorts of things (who wants to remember to pause or cancel?), but I enjoyed the one I tried at work so I gave it a try.

The twist is that it’s a small recyclable cup of liquid-nitrogen flash-frozen coffee concentrate. Add your liquid of choice, hot to the frozen puck or cold after thawing, and you have instant coffee that isn’t, well, instant coffee. I predominantly use it as an espresso shot equivalent for making ice lattes, and for this purpose, it is effective and efficient. And it’s easy to slip in my bag and use on-site. On the enjoyment scale, I put it way above Starbucks’ regular iced coffee and just underneath their shaken iced espresso.

I honestly don’t know if I will continue to subscribe in the future, because it’s not the cheapest. You can cancel at any time and thankfully it’s also easy to spread out deliveries and pause them for months, because there’s no way I would want tons of coffee piling up in my freezer at any given time. I just don’t drink that much. With the new $20 new member coupon, the per cup cost is about $2 per pod (more than Nespresso, less than a coffee shop, and also more expensive than nothing, free tea, or the burnt brown caffeinated sludge otherwise available).

So, if you happen to be in the market for a new caffeine source and are interested in trying something new, you can try Cometeer and get $20 off (and subsidize my coffee consumption by the same amount!). Note that this is not a sponsored post; I just wouldn’t mind having cheaper coffee in the future. Also, note that I have literally never done a post like this in this site’s 13-year history. And finally, note that I can only use one referral bonus per order, so alas no matter how many of you choose to buy some I won’t be getting any coffee for free.

Lina Khan, in an op-ed for The New York Times:

Noncompete clauses systemically drive down wages, even for workers who aren’t bound by one. Every worker stuck in a job represents a position that isn’t opening up for someone else. And if employers know their workers can’t leave, they have less incentive to offer competitive pay and benefits, which puts downward pressure on wages for everyone.

F.T.C. economists conservatively estimate that noncompetes suppress American workers’ income by roughly 3 percent to 4 percent, or $250 billion to $296 billion.

Perhaps this would be more forgivable if noncompetes really did spur innovation, helping companies take big swings and bold risks. But here, too, the real-world evidence reviewed by the F.T.C. undermines the theory. As the name implies, noncompete clauses tend to make markets less competitive. Rather than encouraging dynamism and new ideas, they can enable stale incumbents to lock out new rivals.

Her essay is well worth reading. Khan makes a compelling case for the FTC’s proposed rule.

Competition is supposed to be a good thing.

From Nobel-laureate Daniel Kahneman’s Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgement:

More broadly, our sense of understanding the world depends on our extraordinary ability to construct narratives that explain the events we observe. The search for causes is almost always successful because causes can be drawn from an unlimited reservoir of facts and beliefs about the world.

[…]

This continuous causal interpretation of reality is how we “understand” the world. Our sense of understanding life as it unfolds consists of the steady flow of hindsight in the valley of the normal. This sense is fundamentally causal: new events, once known, eliminate alternatives, and the narrative leaves little room for uncertainty. As we know from classic research on hindsight, even when subjective uncertainty does exist for a while, memories of it are largely erased when the uncertainty is resolved.

Noise is a good book. It’s not an exciting book–though neither is Thinking, Fast and Slow for that matter–but it’s an important book. Bias is important, but human noisiness and our imperfect and very noisy systems are also important: Judgments (predictions, decisions) are hard to get right, and so much of the world’s punditry is just storytelling.

Doctors make dozens if not hundreds of little and big decisions every day. And I know that not only I am noisy, but I’m noisy in a variety of ways. A big part of my deliberate practice as it pertains to radiology is to try to limit how much noise distorts my decision-making and the quality of my reports.

We want to be not just good but consistently so.

Jason Kottke, a true OG blogger, on taking a sabbatical:

Does what I do here make a difference in other people’s lives? In my life? Is this still scratching the creative itch that it used to? And if not, what needs to change? Where does kottke.org end and Jason begin? Who am I without my work? Is the validation I get from the site healthy? Is having to be active on social media healthy? Is having to read the horrible news every day healthy? What else could I be doing here? What could I be doing somewhere else? What good is a blog without a thriving community of other blogs? I’ve tried thinking about these and many other questions while continuing my work here, but I haven’t made much progress; I need time away to gain perspective.

I love good curation. With my two young kids, personal wants and need, and professional demands, I don’t personally have the bandwidth to really produce a filter+share site myself, but I really appreciate when someone can steadily put a high-quality narrative or personal spin on *waves hands vaguely in the air* all of this.

Kottke is an excellent blogger, and he’s been doing it since 1998.

Some highlights from the essay “How to Want Less” by Arthur C. Brooks in The Atlantic.

Homeostasis keeps us alive and healthy. But it also explains why drugs and alcohol work as they do, as opposed to how we wish they would…It’s why, when you achieve conventional, acquisitive success, you can never get enough. If you base your sense of self-worth on success—money, power, prestige—you will run from victory to victory, initially to keep feeling good, and then to avoid feeling awful.

My thought: Like the two factory theory of motivation and hygiene, success (especially monetarily) may help you be less dissatisfied (being impoverished is hard), but the absence of dissatisfaction is not satisfaction.

“The nature of [adaptation] condemns men to live on a hedonic treadmill,” the psychologists Philip Brickman and Donald T. Campbell wrote in 1971, “to seek new levels of stimulation merely to maintain old levels of subjective pleasure, to never achieve any kind of permanent happiness or satisfaction.”

Professional self-objectification is a tyranny every bit as nasty. You become a heartless taskmaster to yourself, seeing yourself as nothing more than Homo economicus. Love and fun are sacrificed for another day of work, in search of a positive internal answer to the question Am I successful yet? We become cardboard cutouts of real people.

We become cardboard cutouts of real people is an amazingly clear description of what the current form of meritocracy, conventional “acquisitive success,” and social media has wrought.

In truth, our formula, Satisfaction = getting what you want, leaves out one key component. To be more accurate, it should be: Satisfaction = what you have ÷ what you want

Our mental state rests in the balance between reality and expectation/desire.

It is the wanting, for which there is always more, that binds us to the Sisyphean futility of the hedonic treadmill.

And getting off is hard.

“Revenge bedtime procrastination describes the decision to sacrifice sleep for leisure time that is driven by a daily schedule lacking in free time.”

Or, as described by Anne Helen Petersen:

You stay up binging a mediocre show. You can’t stop scrolling Instagram or Twitter or a dating app. You’re reading some overly-detailed breakdown of a sporting event, past or present or upcoming. You’re playing whatever dumb game you play on your phone.

We all want some me time.

When you stay up late talking with friends or dancing or playing D&D, you are procrastinating going to bed, but you are also making a pretty good deal with yourself: the fun I’m having now is worth whatever suffering I’ll endure later. But most of the activities performed while revenge procrastinating don’t really compensate for the exhaustion they cause. They might feel essential and non-negotiable in the moment, as some semblance of “alone time,” but they’re really a double fuck you: they kinda suck in the moment, and they really suck in the cascading after-effects. You might feel like you’re soothing yourself, but maybe you’re just….punishing yourself?

Don’t punish yourself.

In an ideal world, deliberation would easily trump the reflexive patterns of self-sabotage.

Alas, if simple clarity was that easy and powerful, then infinite scroll wouldn’t so easily fill the cracks of our days.

Ben Thompson of Stratechery talking about why he’s becoming more bullish on virtual reality than augmented reality during an interview with Mark Zuckerberg about the Metaverse:

I do have to say, the last couple of years, particularly the COVID era, has changed my perspective a little bit as there does seem to be more and more of sort of a bifurcation between your online reality and your offline reality. It’s something I wrote about in the context of work, where people call it working from home, but I actually think that’s a misnomer: it’s actually working online, and you can work online from anywhere but when you go online, you’re in a different place cognitively speaking than you are when you’re at home or playing with your kids, or you’re seeing your friends or whatever it might be.

I get to work from home sometimes, but I think there is a key nuance here. One of the hardest things about working online from home is that the people around you don’t want or feel like you are somewhere else, cognitively speaking. Frankly, getting to that other cognitive place in the first place can be quite difficult when surrounded by the context of all the non-work things around you.

Does a future where you can slip further into the internet make it easier or harder to be productive online?

Well, it depends on how you define productivity. In the interview, Zuckerberg claims that fostering human connection is his life’s work. He then goes on to freely admit that ruining meaningful unadulterated human connection is a “killer use case”:

Although I do think that for augmented reality, for example, one of the killer use cases is basically going to be you’re going to have glasses and you’re going to have something like EMG on your wrist and you’re going to be able to have a message thread going on when you’re in the middle of a meeting or doing something else and no one else is even going to notice. Think about what we’ve had over the last couple of years during the pandemic where everyone’s been on Zoom, and one of the things that I’ve found very productive is you can have side channel conversations or chat threads going while you’re having the main meeting. I actually think that would be a pretty useful thing to be able to have in real life too where basically you’re having a physical conversation or you’re coming together, but you can also receive incoming messages without having to take out your phone or look at your watch and even respond quickly in a way that’s discreet and private. So I think that there are going to be those use cases. I think that there are going to be easier ways to get in and out of experiences where you’re experiencing that deep sense of presence.

The problem with social media on cell phones is that your kids, friends, and colleagues know you are being rude and self-absorbed when you ignore them. The problem–of course!–is not the behavior and our inability to be fully present in our interactions. The problem is being so transparent in informing others that they are insufficiently interesting to hold our full attention.

This is the promise of the coming metaverse.