🔥 🪵 thought on our ancestors, ⛺️ Station Eleven on universes, 🧠 AI workers use their brains, ⛰️ being small
#69: a weekly 4-item newsletter created to inspire dads to use the challenges of fatherhood as fuel for building an incredible life & an antifragile mind.
Welcome to the 69th edition of the antifragile 4 🔥.
We bump around this week from thoughts on ancestors, to a quote from Station Eleven on appreciating your universe, to a piece of evidence I couldn’t help but share about those closest to AI making it a point to use their brains, and finally, after a week of high demands, a thought about being small.
Thank you for reading. I hope you enjoy.
With love,
Chris
—
Here’s this week’s antifragile 4 🔥:
a thought 🪵 about what our ancestors might think about us
Station Eleven ⛺️ on better & worse universes
AI workers 🧠 using their BRAIN FIRST
a thought
⛰️about being small
1.) a thought 🪵 about what our ancestors might think about us
Do you ever think about what your wood-chopping, butter-churning, coyote-chasing, diphtheria-suffering great-great-great-great-grandfather would think of your struggle to look at Reddit less?
I do, sometimes.
And for a while, it made me feel pretty insufficient.
I mean, this guy’s chopping up peat bogs for 14 hours a day, and I’m here sipping a dark roast french press, pecking away at a magic box that connects with everything man has ever known or created in my 72-degree, beautifully lit kitchen in the middle of winter while I complain about how hard it is to live in the modern world.
I can’t even remember the last time a coyote tried to steal one of my organic honeycrisp apples.
But here’s a question: Do you really think our great-great-great-grandpappies wouldn’t have been just as consumed by modern technology as we are?
Do you really think just because our ancestors got molded into hard MF’ers by their times, that they wouldn’t have struggled to pull their monkey brains away from the dopamine faucet in our time?
They were, after all, humans. Just like us.
And to think that we’re the weak ones is a mistake. We are shaped by the conditions we’re born into, just like they were.
They didn’t choose coyotes and diphtheria any more than we chose iPhones and infinite scroll.
But these are the waters we inherited.
They inherited a world optimized to break their backs.
We inherited a world optimized to hijack our brains.
But it’s just different environments with the same human wiring.
Which means the challenge isn’t to shame ourselves for being soft. It’s to recognize the environment we’re swimming in…and choose how we want to live within it.
Because our great-great-great-grandpappies weren’t morally superior.
They were just dealing with a different kind of water.
2.) Station Eleven ⛺️ on better & worse universes
If there were better universes, then there were probably much worse ones.
Emily St. John Mandel, Station Eleven
There might be better universes, there might be worse. But this is the one we do have.
3.) AI workers 🧠 using their BRAIN FIRST
Dong sometimes uses Copilot to revise emails but prefers to write her own drafts because no one knows what she wants to say better than she does. This is the reverse of many professionals who edit—or copy and paste—whatever an AI tool composes in response to a prompt.
WSJ Article: Why AI Workers Won’t Let Bots Do the Most Basic Tasks
Use your own damn brain FIRST! Don’t let it melt 🫠
4.) a thought ⛰️ about being small
Sometimes I ache to feel small. To be reminded of how insignificant I am.
This usually happens when life’s demands threaten to flood the boiler room.
Mountains, oceans, and big empty places do this exceedingly well.
They tell me all I need to hear. Until the next time.
Two last things for you this week:
Be fire and wish for the wind 🔥
With love,
Chris
—
Did this edition resonate with you? Sharing is caring. Send to a fellow antifragile dad.