 |
| |
|
|
|
Can’t afford a house? Try a budgeting app. Burnt out at work? Perhaps your morning routine needs tweaking. Climate crisis? Recycle harder. Unaffordable healthcare? Have you tried meditation?
We’ve become incredibly good at turning collective challenges into personal shortcomings. The logic behind this thinking is comforting in its simplicity: if you’re struggling, you just need to find the right combination of morning routines, productivity systems and mindfulness practices. Success stories reinforce this narrative – tales of individual merit and grit that conveniently sidestep how our circumstances, privileges and communities shape every opportunity we encounter.
This fixation on self-improvement has become our cultural north star. Yet for all our careful self-examination, we’ve never been more fundamentally disconnected from one another.
Elle Griffin’s recent piece offers a good critique of this modern condition:
“I think there’s a misguided belief that self-development makes us better people. But if we want to be better people we have to focus on others, not ourselves. At some point, I realized this and changed tack. Rather than ask what I needed, I asked what my community needed.”
Her words touch on something crucial: the gap between understanding ourselves and actually showing up for others. While inner work has its place, Griffin argues against “the continual process of self-betterment at the expense of community-betterment. I’m against participating in too much theory and not enough action. We can focus on being more loving and more empathetic and more compassionate all we like but we won’t actually be any of those things unless we do something to help our families, our close communities, and even the world at large.”
Or as she quotes Hasan Minhaj’s perfect observation: “Therapy is like a haircut. You can’t tell me about it, I have to notice the difference.”
Maybe what we need isn’t another round of self-reflection, but a quiet revolution of small, meaningful actions: bringing dinner to a neighbour after surgery (and knowing them enough to be able to do so!), showing up at council meetings to advocate for better public spaces, or simply being there when our community needs an extra hand. These moments might seem small against our appetite for grand personal transformations, but they remind us of something vital: that our individual flourishing is inextricably linked to the wellbeing of those around us.
– Kai
|
| |
|
Level up as a Friend of DD →
With a contribution of less than $2 per month, you get access to the DD Lounge where Friends of DD discuss the weekly newsletter and meet other readers. Plus you can turn off ads, receive special discounts, get access to the DD Index (a searchable catalogue of past issues) and other perks.
Dense Discovery is a weekly newsletter with the best of the internet thoughtfully curated, read by over 35,000 subscribers. Do you have a product or service to promote in DD? Find out more about advertising in DD.
|
| |
Screen-Free Way to Start Your Day SPONSOR
|
Your calendar, reminders and weather – narrated
A little podcast just for you: start every morning with a quick, personalised audio briefing that brings together your schedule, reminders, weather and key updates so you’re ready for the day ahead. Pre-order today for free and get the app delivered automatically when it launches in a few days.
|
|
| |
Apps & Sites
|
|
This little macOS app lives in your menu bar and becomes a temporary landing place for files you’d like to move or process. Simply drag any file(s) to the drop zone to move or copy, resize or compress images, upload files to a server, and many other actions.
|
|
|
Solidtime is a beautiful open-source time-tracking app designed for freelancers and agencies, with built-in project, task and client management as well as billing. There are cross-platform desktop apps for macOS, Windows and Linux, and the ability to import data from tools like Toggl and Clockify. Solidtime gives you full control over your data – via self-hosting or their paid (EU-based) cloud plans. Friends of DD enjoy a 10% discount.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
|
|
Encrypted email, calendar & contacts
|
|
As a privacy-focused alternative to Gmail, tuta offers email, calendar and contacts hosting with end-to-end encryption, no tracking, GDPR compliance, and is open source. Data is stored on 100% green-powered servers in Europe. (‘No offices in the US’ is on the feature list. Ha!) Friends of DD enjoy a 66% discount on the first year.
Become a Friend to access specials like this.
|
|
|
|
| |
Favourite Books: Zachary Kai
|
|
Five book recommendations by writer, zinester and generalist, Zachary Kai
|
|
by Adam Grant
He has the hard-won, deep insights of an experienced professor, and the deftness of a great writer. This is all about unlocking the amazing possibilities we all carry inside ourselves.
by Katy Kelleher
As the aptly poetic title suggests, this essay collection explores our collective fascination with beautiful things, the lengths we’ll go to get them, and the light (and the dark) in everything we love.
by Fumitake Koga & Ichiro Kishimi
I found this recommended by Derek Sivers, and it couldn’t have been timelier. A life-changing introduction to Adlerian Psychology, explained through a lively discussion between a committed philosopher and a skeptical young man.
by Charlotte Wood
I went to a writers’ festival where this author talked about her latest novel, and I was fascinated by how her mind worked. The book gives a deeper look into how she views creativity, the writing process, and cultivating a rich inner life.
by Derek Sivers
This has to be one of my top favourites, ever. Nothing is true, unless you decide it is so. Initially this seems a terrifying (and ludicrous) proposition, but read it, and you’ll see how liberating it is.
(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Zachary Kai in one click.)
|
|
| |
Books & Accessories
|
Organising & the revolution of reciprocal care
A book for our moment: through personal narratives and practical wisdom, longtime organisers and movement educators Mariame Kaba and Kelly Hayes craft an intimate guide to transformative activism that frames political engagement not as a specialised calling, but as a deeply human response to challenging times. (There is also a companion workbook.)
|
|
A citizen’s guide to urban renewal
Written by urban scholar Paul Chatterton, How to Save the City presents an urgent examination of overlapping urban crises – from climate change to social inequalities – while offering practical strategies for transforming cities into more sustainable and equitable spaces. A tactical guide that invites readers to participate in reimagining and reshaping their urban environments through direct action and systemic change.
|
|
| |
Overheard on the Socials
|
|
The violence built into the system never counts as violence but the violence of resistance is always considered violence.
|
| |
Food for Thought
|
|
Elle Griffin shares her shift from focusing on self-development to prioritising social development and helping others. She believes that true happiness and meaning come from caring for our communities rather than being self-centered. “The world doesn’t need a bunch of enlightened people. It needs a bunch of helpful people.”
|
|
|
Leo Rogers argues here that the modern crisis is not just about masculinity but that reflects a deeper issue of low self-esteem affecting many people. As society shifted from rigid social roles to individual performance, competition for self-worth increased, leading many to feel inadequate. “Since we see our achievements as an expression of our uniqueness, constitutive of our whole identities, we experience normality (and especially poverty) as a personal failure and source of shame. In feudal societies, social mobility wasn’t part of the conceptual toolkit, because standards of success were so rigidly indexed to unchangeable social positions.”
|
|
|
An excellent assessment of the fracturing of the social media landscape by Renée DiResta. There is a shift happening from large social media platforms to smaller, ideologically aligned communities with the result of potentially making our polarisation worse. Even decentralised/federated tools like Mastodon come with major drawbacks, as they make it harder to address systemic issues like disinformation, harassment and illegal content, while placing heavy burdens on volunteer administrators who may lack resources to effectively moderate their spaces.
|
|
| |
Aesthetically Pleasing
|
|
Under the handle @hamacream, a Japanese high school teacher shares his incredible chalk board drawings.
|
|
|
The Uncomfortable is a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects by Athens-based architect Katerina Kamprani.
|
|
|
The art by Brasilian Michel Torres Costa combines metalworking and sculpture, transforming discarded metal pieces into unique, intricate, and often fantastical creations.
|
|
|
Font of the week: Ador Hairline is the high contrast, humanist sans serif, especially designed for contemporary typography and comes with 7 weights from extralight to black plus true italics and 293 ligatures and initial letters.
|
|
| |
Notable Numbers
|
|
By the end of 2024, 194 million US Americans had an active Amazon Prime membership. Amazon delivered 9 billion items on the same or next day in 2024.
|
|
|
Global explicit subsidies for fossil fuels amounted to around $1.5 trillion in 2022. For context, that’s equivalent to around 1.5% of the global gross domestic product (GDP) or the entire GDP of countries like Russia or Australia.
|
|
|
NASA’s observation and analysis of asteroid 2024 YR4 indicate that its impact probability with Earth has increased to 1 in 32, or roughly 3.1%, up from the previous estimate of 1.2%.
|
|
| |
Classifieds
|
|
Pagecord is a free, independent blogging app for a #NoSocial world. Post by email or the app – readers follow via RSS or email. No algorithms, no AI. Rediscover the joy of writing.
Nervous System Mastery will equip you with evidence-backed protocols to improve sleep, rewire reactivity and cultivate calm in 45 days. Enrolment doors close Feb 28. Apply today
Take your CSS and soft skills further than you ever thought possible with the Complete CSS course by CSS expert, Andy Bell. Save 20% when you use the coupon code DD20 at checkout.
Finding the right typeface for a branding or design project should actually be fun! That’s why Fontwerk offers their radically revamped and improved Trial Fonts free of charge.
|
|
Classifieds are paid ads that support DD and are seen by our 35,000 subscribers each week.
Book yours →
|
|
| |
The Week in a GIF
|
|
Reply with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.
|
|
| |
|
DD is supported by Friends and the modern family office of  .
|
| |
