Skip to content

Essays

No cookies. No analytics. No infinite scroll. Just text.

  1. Slow Tech in a Loud World

    · ~ 7 min read

    Slow tech isn’t theory. It’s refusal. It’s choosing one thing at a time. It’s remembering that tools serve us — or they don’t deserve to exist.

  2. The Art of Scaling

    · ~ 6 min read

    Scaling always changes what it touches. From gods to languages, from restaurants to corporations, every example shows the same truth: what grows wide loses its essence.

Fragments

  • The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live. Carl Jung
  • —
  • The social contract is dead. Zoom calls in coffee shops, music aloud on the subway, texting in movie theaters, toes out on airplanes, etc. Everyone has "main character energy" now and thinks the rest of the world is a bunch of NPC's. The more you stare at a screen, the more you feel like you can do anything you want IRL since other humans just wind up seeming like avatars you can ignore, commenters you can mute, or gang members you can run over in Grand Theft Auto. @anuatluru
  • —
  • A steady drip of minor changes leads to fatigue and ultimately is overshadowed by a single, transformative breakthrough from another source. @rakyll
  • —
  • The old world is dying, and the new struggles to be born; now is the time of monsters. Antonio Gramsci
  • —
  • I think the most depressing fact about humanity is that during the 2000s most of the world was handed essentially free access to the entirety of knowledge and that didn't trigger a golden age. @erikphoel
  • —
  • The word "priority" came into the English language in the 1400s. It was singular. It meant the very first or prior thing. It stayed singular for the next five hundred years. Only in the 1900s did we pluralise the term and start talking about priorities. Greg McKeown
  • —
  • Their design used to be based on essentialism, not minimalism. Design should be driven by a desirable user experience, not the pursuit of pure aesthetics. @TylerMauer4
  • —
  • Capitalism has truly killed the art of having a hobby and doing an activity for the sole purpose of enjoying it. Now everything has to be a side hustle or you feel like it's a waste of time. People don't even bother getting good at their craft before they even start selling a product or service. That's why we have people wanting to charge crazy amounts of money for lazy, rushed work. @nonbinarybooty

All essays by topic

Prefer a feed? Subscribe via RSS. Email? hello@thedarkesthour.co.

About

The Darkest Hour is a personal site. Posts are rare and heavily edited. If a page appears here, it exists because it’s worth saving.

This site follows the Brutalist Web Design guidelines: content is king, links look like links, everything works without JavaScript, and your privacy is respected.

Archive