After a small break, I’m back! Lots to share this week, and tons of links that caught my attention.
Keywords: Kant on Happiness; Burnout; the end of the Internet as we knew it; on Rest; on Women’s health; on toxic workplaces; a feel-good housing story; nice photos; a video about urban development and human scale; a Korean recipe; interesting accounts to follow; lots of tech opinions; a graph JS library; color design.
TO READ
- The Happiness problem: “The problem with happiness, Kant argued, is that “happiness is such an indeterminate concept that although every human being wishes to attain it, he can never say […] what he really wishes and wills.” This is because all of the elements that we think constitute happiness are empirical and resolutely determinate. All the things we think make us happy — money, health, love — are finite and could always be a bit better. In Kant’s words, we can never hope to “attain the totality of a series of consequences which are in fact infinite.””
- You can’t fix Burnout with self-care: last fall, among all the health problems I had to resolve, I realized I also had a severe burnout, exhausted from all the stress of life and work, and I just had to take a pause from everything before it became worse. I was lucky enough to be able to take a break, and make changes to my life during that time, but at that moment, I felt quite helpless over everything: the rising cost of living, the gruesome job market being shit, the solitude being quite overbearing, and the health problems completely making it difficult to stay awake and well… it was a pretty intense period which I managed to get out of at the beginning of 2024. This text kinda reflects on the same observations that I came to have over burnout and self-care: that no matter what actions I took to take care of myself, it wasn’t enough. Self-care could not eliminate all the distress and misery that our modern world brought on all of us. “Burnout is not a medical diagnosis, though there’s overlap between burnout and conditions such as depression or anxiety. It’s a response to chronic conditions in which you are overworked and don’t feel like you’re making a difference or progressing. But here’s maybe the most important part that’s come out over the years: these feelings don’t come from you alone.[…] Burnout arises from your interaction with your circumstances and the environment. This is why individual interventions for burnout don’t really work. The solution to burnout is not, as I tried, to make a personal resolution about it. It’s actually to look outward and ask: Why am I experiencing this? What about my job or interactions is leading to this feeling?”
- Still on the topic of Burnout: the 6 causes of Burnout. Burnout is More than Just Being Tired. “Treating burnout as a purely individual problem, Maslach argues, is like dealing with dying canaries by trying to find more robust birds who will last longer down in the tunnels—it misses the point entirely. Instead of trying to toughen up the canaries, we ought to be working to fix the elements that make our work environment toxic.”
- Another excellent Ed Zitron text: “Are we watching the Internet die?“ “We’re at the end of a vast, multi-faceted con of internet users, where ultra-rich technologists tricked their customers into building their companies for free. And while the trade once seemed fair, it’s become apparent that these executives see users not as willing participants in some sort of fair exchange, but as veins of data to be exploitatively mined as many times as possible, given nothing in return other than access to a platform that may or may not work properly.”
- On rest, and its impossibility to truly rest in our capitalist society: “I will never question the merits of rest. But in the hands of liberalism, rest and self-care has become highly individualized, reduced to a choice, which shifts the burden away from the very institutions that steal our time, energy, and resources in the first place, and onto the backs of the global majority. The choice to rest is a luxury few can actually afford, and I want to hold space and discontent for that.” Rest is not resistance and that is ok
- Are workplaces inherently toxic? : We all have stories of toxic workplaces in our careers. This article gives an overview of toxic workplace, and how common it is in the workers’ lives. “Within a capitalist system, the dynamic of worker and boss is already set up to be toxic.” “It’s not clear whether toxic behaviour is on the rise or if increasingly open discussions about mental health, sexual harassment, and racism, among other forms of discrimination, are shining a light on some fundamental flaws in the way we work.”
- The feel-good story of the week: “The benefits of living in the same place for a long time“
- Women’s health: The unique toll of stress and depression on women’s hearts As women are more prone to depression and lots of stress in their lives, this article talking about women’s hearts is scaring a bit. Not enough studies have been done on women, and it’s only recently that there’s been an interest in women-focused health.
Quote of the week:
Pay it forward. If someone helps you, pay it forward by helping someone else. Don’t underestimate the power of a small act of kindness.
TO SEE
- Instagram account of the week: Karim Amr. Beautiful picture of my beloved Egypt, giving a romantic vibe to this region of the world
- The Human scale: A documentary about how to live in urban cities among problems of urban sprawl, climate changes, loneliness and health issues over our ways of life. “The Danish architect and professor Jan Gehl has studied human behavior in cities through four decades. He has documented how modern cities repel human interaction, and argues that we can build cities in a way, which takes human needs for inclusion and intimacy into account. ‘The Human Scale’ meets thinkers, architects and urban planners across the globe. It questions our assumptions about modernity, exploring what happens when we put people into the centre of our planning”
TO FOLLOW
- En Français: Le compte Instagram de frdgngrs, remplis de sagesse et de quotes inspirantes.
- A blogger I’ve been reading for a long time: The Bloggess. Dark humor, honest take on mental health, and taxidermy. I fucking love her!
RECIPES
CYBERSECURITY
- Tool of the week: if you need to search the online presence of a username on the web, What’s my name is your tool!
DESIGN
- Color palette web app: upload your image, and create your own color palettes by picking the colors in your pictures, creating a reusable palette that you can then use in your projects. Colors exported in HEX, RGB and HSL
TECH & WEB
- WordPress Studio: Just discovered this tool to develop local/test sites on WordPress on your computer. Under 5 minutes, you have all your setup ready to code and test your new website on your computer, without having to setup any local dev environment (like Wamp, Xamp ou EasyPhp, or all the dependencies). I really love how I can start creating new WordPress websites, create new themes or test new plugins in a test setup really under 5 minutes!
- A nice article that give good advices about how to view their job and daily tasks as a frontend developer: “Care beyond code: 7 best design practices for frontend developer” Despite the fact that designers are working on design, frontend engineers shouldn’t stay aside. An engineer’s involvement in the design side and their attentiveness to UX and UI is a recipe for a good project.
- An interesting take on Laravel and fullstack web development, giving pros and cons over the framework. Honest take from me: it’s one of the rare frameworks that I love working with! So easy to do any (front/back) web development with it! That and WordPress.
- Manifesto for a Humane Web: an manifesto about how the web should be constructed by humans FOR humans, and not for bots and AI.
- Javascript library of the week: Ogma, the library for large-scale interactive graph visualizations
