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nprofile1qqsd5cjtjmj8pyw5pgnwep5dgfn4zy5jttle08v8zqj02wpyuu6pcuqpz4mhxue69uhhyetvv9ujuerfw36x7tnsw43q23ex3c

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Last Notes

2026-03-10 05:59:03 UTC

"authentic leadership" is a course you take so you can be fake in a more convincing way

2026-03-10 01:02:04 UTC

the word "ecosystem" should be banned from business communication until people demonstrate they understand what an ecosystem is

2026-03-09 23:16:03 UTC

"we're a family here" is something no actual family has ever had to say

2026-03-09 20:34:46 UTC

Me: Today is a fresh, new day.
My brain: ok but we hate those

2026-03-09 01:00:13 UTC

I don't want to work smarter or harder and I have zero fucking interest in either The Hustle or The Grind. I want to work the exact amount I need to afford a normal life, which used to be possible, and now apparently requires a podcast??

2026-03-06 10:15:02 UTC

Nobody on LinkedIn has ever had a bad day. Every setback is a "growth opportunity." Every firing is a "new chapter." Every complete professional disaster is framed as "excited to announce." These people would describe the Titanic as "a bold pivot to submarine operations."

2026-03-05 10:19:02 UTC

The guy who says "I just speak my mind" has never once considered that his mind might benefit from an editor. Or a fact-checker. Or a moment of silence. Just one. A single moment of not speaking his mind. As a treat.

2026-03-05 06:03:02 UTC

The modern internet argument cycle: someone posts an opinion. Someone else screenshots it. A third person quote-tweets the screenshot with "this is wild." A fourth person writes a thread about the thread. Nobody has changed their mind. Everyone has lost 40 minutes. The sun sets on another day of human progress.

2026-03-05 00:56:03 UTC

If your whole personality is your diet I need you to know that nobody at this dinner table cares nobody gives a shit and the silence after you explained seed oils was not "people processing new information" it was "people deciding whether to invite you next time"

2026-03-04 23:14:02 UTC

I've been a professional writer for over a decade and it still amazes me how many folks are CONVINCED they can just do this shit. Nobody walks up to a surgeon and says "I reckon I could have a crack at that." But writing? Everyone's got a world-changing essay in them apparently. It's in there. Somewhere. Behind the spleen.

2026-03-04 21:26:03 UTC

Every group chat has one person who responds to everything with a single emoji and contributes nothing else and honestly they might be the most well-adjusted person in the thread (it's not me)

2026-03-04 21:20:09 UTC

Equilibrium is not the same as a good outcome. The economy found equilibrium after the Industrial Revolution too, and for several decades that equilibrium included child labour in textile mills and life expectancy in Manchester hovering around 25. What matters is how much unnecessary suffering we allow between here and there, and whether the new normal we settle into is one worth living in.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/a-soft-landing-manual-for-the-second-gilded-age/

2026-03-04 10:17:02 UTC

The most unhinged thing about modern life is that we've normalised paying $200 a month for the gym and $300 a month for wellness "supplements" but if someone charges $5 for a newsletter they wrote with their actual brain people act like they've been mugged at knifepoint

2026-03-04 06:04:02 UTC

"I don't have time to read" says the absolute character who spent 4 hours last night watching a stranger rank every fast food burger on YouTube

2026-03-04 04:25:02 UTC

If you prioritise "sign up" over "login" on your landing page to the point that existing users have to search for the button, you are holding your existing users in contempt. And you're an arsehole to boot.

2026-03-03 21:34:02 UTC

All you need to know about the tech industry is that the people building tools to "connect humanity" haven't spoken to their neighbours in 6 years

2026-03-03 06:04:02 UTC

My kid asked what I do for work and I said "I write on the internet" and he said "so nothing" and this is the most accurate job description I've ever received

2026-03-02 23:14:02 UTC

The podcast industrial complex has reached the point where two guys can sit in a room and say nothing for 3 hours and call it "long form content" and somehow that's a career now. I'm not even mad. I'm impressed. I've been trying to get paid for saying nothing for years.

2026-03-02 05:11:20 UTC

Humans are spectacular at remembering disasters, passed down in every format from the written word to the oral tradition. We are (for obvious reasons) terrible at remembering the disasters that didn't happen...
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everything-is-awesome-why-im-an-optimist/

2026-03-02 01:02:02 UTC

Not one single "free thinker" who told me to "question everything" in 2020 has questioned a single thing since 2024. Turns out questioning everything meant questioning the specific things that made you feel smart at parties.

2026-03-02 00:45:08 UTC

Every tech CEO right now: "We need to move fast and break things"
The thing they're breaking: their own terms of service
The thing they're moving fast toward: a government contract

2026-02-27 21:32:03 UTC

The word “community,” a timeline:
1950: The people who live near you and help when your house floods
1990: A group of people with shared interests who meet regularly
2010: An email list you can’t unsubscribe from
2015: Anyone who follows a brand on Instagram
2020: A Discord server with 40,000 strangers and one moderator
2024: A Slack workspace your company forces you to call a community because it’s cheaper than actual culture

2026-02-27 10:12:02 UTC

You're not "playing devil's advocate." The devil has enough advocates. He has a whole political party. He doesn't need you in a group chat at 11pm.

2026-02-27 04:11:06 UTC

JD Vance wrote an entire memoir about how poverty destroyed his family and then joined the party whose entire platform is making poverty worse. Incredible arc.

2026-02-27 01:04:02 UTC

"The free market will sort it out" the free market sorted out child labour by saying yes please and we had to pass a law. That's how the free market sorts things out.

2026-02-26 21:31:02 UTC

Stop saying "the economy is doing well" when what you mean is "stocks are up and everyone I know personally in my friday night poker game / sex crime club is fine." Those are different sentences.

2026-02-26 10:11:02 UTC

The Venn diagram of "taxation is theft" guys and "why are the roads so shit" guys is a circle

2026-02-26 04:18:02 UTC

You don't have a "different opinion." You have a factual inaccuracy that you've emotionally bonded with and now you think correcting it is a hate crime.

2026-02-26 00:58:02 UTC

Doomers don’t want to save the world. They want the world to end so they can be right. That’s the whole bit. That’s the entire psychology. They’d rather be vindicated in the rubble than proven wrong in a future that works.

2026-02-25 23:11:03 UTC

I would never invest in something as volatile as Bitcoin. I invest in housing, a market that has never catastrophically crashed and ruined millions of lives.

2026-02-25 21:31:04 UTC

If you ever want to understand America just know that they have a channel called The History Channel and it shows Pawn Stars

2026-02-25 10:11:02 UTC

the Venn diagram of guys who say "facts don't care about your feelings" and guys who had a full meltdown over a Black Little Mermaid is a circle

2026-02-25 05:58:02 UTC

weird that "family values" never seems to include feeding families

2026-02-25 01:41:03 UTC

The most dangerous part of AI doom isn’t the forecast.
It’s the posture it produces: the talent exits, governance gets outsourced, and “cash out before the crash” becomes a moral philosophy.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/everything-is-awesome-why-im-an-optimist/

2026-02-25 00:56:02 UTC

"I did my own research" did you. did you really. in your pyjamas. on your phone. at 2am. on a website called truthpatriot dot eagle. you did your own research.

2026-02-24 23:17:02 UTC

reminder that "move fast and break things" was supposed to be a software philosophy not a healthcare policy

2026-02-24 21:33:02 UTC

Becoming increasingly convinced that LinkedIn is just Willy Wonka's factory except the chocolate river is bullshit and every Oompa Loompa has a podcast

2026-02-24 01:09:17 UTC

The “swarm of agents” model assumes work naturally splits into roles: marketing, sales, support, development = basically mirroring human job titles.
But those titles and siloes are a byproduct of org scaling, not a universal truth about work.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/agentic-swarms-are-an-org-chart-delusion/

2026-02-23 00:57:02 UTC

"Why is everything so political now" mate, your grandparents died in a war about politics. It was always political. You were just comfortable.

2026-02-23 00:09:03 UTC

I found a journal entry from 2015 where I wrote, in all earnestness, that my life would be complete if I could just work from home and not have a boss. I now work from home and have no boss.
I do not necessarily feel complete...
https://youtu.be/dsYjBCINRvc

2026-02-22 23:13:02 UTC

The real cancel culture is Netflix who can’t let a single good show get past season one without canceling it

2026-02-22 06:02:02 UTC

Unlike you Tesla owning rabble, I drive a volkswagen, a family values car with an unblemished and unproblematic history

2026-02-03 06:02:02 UTC

The most useful productivity system is subtraction.

2026-02-03 05:18:32 UTC

Every enterprise app feels like typing on a mushy membrane keyboard. You click a button and get a gentle animation, a swooshy transition, a soft bounce, and zero clear feedback that anything actually happened. The entire B2B software industry optimized for how tools feel during a fifteen-minute sales demo instead of how they perform across an eight-hour workday, and the result is professional software with the tactile precision of poking a marshmallow.

2025-12-01 03:24:14 UTC

"Follow Your Passion" is terrible career advice. It assumes happiness is a fossil in your soul waiting to be dug up. "Love What You Do" is 10x better. It recognizes passion is built, not found, in the reality of your work.
https://youtu.be/WY9W4R_A7yM

2025-11-08 04:18:02 UTC

There's a whole generation that learned irony before sincerity and now they're trapped. Can't be earnest without a layer of self-deprecation. Can't be enthusiastic without signaling awareness of how cringe enthusiasm is.
The price of never being vulnerable is never connecting.

2025-10-02 22:34:01 UTC

"Turns out if you criticise private jets on LinkedIn you make a lot of dudes who don’t own private jets real mad.
Which supports my theory that all men secretly believe they will one day own a private jet."

2025-07-15 12:07:07 UTC

Feeling scattered? Can’t focus? Everything feels urgent but nothing feels clear?
I wrote (and tested) a 90-day protocol to reboot your mind.
No gimmicks. Just discipline, attention, and real thinking.
🧵
1/10

2025-06-06 21:43:03 UTC

Prediction: future generations will judge our approach to mental healthcare similarly to how we view medieval approaches to physical illnesses. Making healthcare inaccessible for the organ most likely to malfunction seems obviously irrational in retrospect.

2025-05-31 21:31:25 UTC

Every best seller now is called something like “Gone” and “Vanished” I miss when books had titles like “An Account of the Fortunes and Misfortunes of Miss Arabella Wren, A Young Lady of Considerable Charm and No Inheritance, Who Was Thrice Deceived, Twice Abducted, and Ultimately Vindicated, Through No Fault of Her Own, but by the Unlikely Grace of a Retired Corsair with a Limp”

2025-05-30 04:12:04 UTC

There is no “good” social media platform. Every single one of them is terrible in its own uniquely horrifying way.
1 of 14

2025-05-28 20:50:49 UTC

RSS never tracked you.
Email never throttled you.
Blogs never begged for dopamine.
The old web wasn’t perfect.
But it was yours.

2025-05-28 07:47:20 UTC

Mastodon is the only platform where saying “this was compiled with Cargo nightly” is considered foreplay.

2025-05-28 06:38:20 UTC

If you live in a community with 98% vaccination rates, you can afford to be the 2%.
You can post wellness memes about "natural immunity" and still get herd immunity as a side effect.
Your child is statistically safe, not because of your parenting, but in spite of it.
https://www.theindex.media/the-herd-immunity-illusion/
https://www.theindex.media/the-herd-immunity-illusion/

2025-03-10 00:21:26 UTC

Cool won’t save you.
Irony won’t protect you.
Apathy won’t set you free.
The world is burning, and the people mocking from the sidelines are dead weight.
Give a shit. Stand for something. Be cringe. It’s the only way anything has ever changed.
https://www.joanwestenberg.com/the-case-for-embracing-cringe/

2025-02-25 13:18:01 UTC

I'm keen to move as much of my stack as I can away from US tech. Any European-based, GDPR compliant / privacy forward podcast apps out there?
DuckDuckGo is proving remarkably unhelpful and just listing podcasts about privacy...

2025-02-12 11:01:25 UTC

Google Analytics won't tell you if your message resonates. Meta's Pixel can't measure trust. Your CRM won't capture the moment someone recommends you to a friend.
The rise of data-driven marketing coincides with the collapse of consumer trust.
This isn't coincidental.
https://www.signalvs.com/the-quantification-fallacy/

2024-11-28 20:26:46 UTC

Never forget: misogyny is a skill issue
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/113/562/458/873/284/606/original/a20b864936a767ee.jpg

2024-11-22 17:15:24 UTC

The ‘Just Asking Questions’ Tactic: Truth-Seeking or Manipulation?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qtKZnEP08iw

2024-03-12 11:51:44 UTC

Kate, 23, said it wasn't as hard to buy a house as people made out.
"I just cut my expenses. Unlike my friends, I didn't go out, I ate at home, I watched free to air TV instead of Netflix and I thrift shopped. Add that to the $500,000 my parents gave me for a deposit, and I was able to achieve my goals in just 6 months"
This story sponsored by realestate dot com dot au

2024-03-12 10:46:08 UTC

The next big social networks will have no ads and no owners. Creator economies for the people, not advertisers.

2024-03-12 06:35:20 UTC

Unlike ephemeral chat platforms, forums preserved discussions as reference material for both veteran members and newcomers.
Read more 🍕 https://joanwestenberg.com/blog/breaking-up-with-slack-and-discord-why-its-time-to-bring-back-forums

2024-02-09 11:23:33 UTC

Who says a profile pic needs a smile? Not me. As a woman trying to build a writing career in the utter bullshit that is the tech world, putting on a friendly grin doesn’t feel right. It certainly doesn’t feel real.
I’m not about coming off as unfriendly. Believe me, I've got a vibrant spirit and a wicked sense of humour. But too often, women feel squeezed into boxes - expected to soften our talent with feminine charm, pleasantness, and perpetual cheer.
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/111/901/265/660/604/130/original/07794ed2dd8b7b1f.jpeg

2023-12-29 10:36:50 UTC

Own your own website. Own your mailing list. Own your newsletter. Own your blog and prioritise your RSS feed.
This is the stuff that works in the long term.
Chasing virality on every new shiny platform is a waste of time.

2023-08-07 00:06:14 UTC

Can you imagine prioritizing organic kale while working multiple jobs to keep the lights on?
https://lttr.ai/AFBsN
https://files.mastodon.social/media_attachments/files/110/845/412/894/217/183/original/d1737cc2f0579b16.jpg