TheraGun Massage Gun. Well, my journey into the art of middle-aged manliness continues. For the past few months, I’ve noticed that I’ve been slower to recover after my heavy leg days. Quads have been particularly sore. I picked up a TheraGun deep tissue massage gun after reading a study in Michael Easter’s Two Percent newsletter about their effectiveness in helping recovery. Massage guns work better than sports massage and foam rolling. I’ll hit my quads with the TheraGun before my leg workout. The percussive vibrations are intense! But it hurts so good and seems to help loosen and warm up my muscles.
The Meaning of Anxiety by Rollo May. I’ve been doing a deep dive into books written by existential psychologists from the mid-twentieth century and recently finished Rollo May’s 1950 book The Meaning of Anxiety. While some of the book’s psychoanalytic language does feel dated, overall it’s surprisingly fresh and relevant; while we tend to think of anxiety as a distinctly modern problem, people were plenty anxious 70 years ago, too. Instead of treating anxiety as just a problem to be solved, May digs deeper, arguing that it’s fundamental to human existence and creativity. Through case studies and references to existential philosophers like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Tillich, May shows how anxiety can be both constructive and destructive. He makes the case that the goal in life shouldn’t be eliminating anxiety, but learning how to channel it towards productive aims. The core message that anxiety signals growth opportunities rather than weakness remains just as needed today.
L.A. Noire. I’m not a big video gamer, but when I do play video games, I’m typically drawn to games that line up with my tastes in literature. My favorite book of all-time is Lonesome Dove; consequently, my favorite video game is the Rockstar Western Red Dead Redemption II. (I even did a whole podcast about it!) Besides Westerns, I really enjoy hardboiled detective novels from the 1940s and 1950s. So it’s no surprise that my second favorite video game of all time is Rockstar’s 2011 detective game L.A Noire. In the game, you play a straight-arrow L.A. cop named Cole Phelps who solves crimes in 1947 Los Angeles. While the chase-and-shoot mechanics feel clunky by today’s standards, the moody atmosphere and intricate murder mysteries hold up beautifully. It’s like stepping into a Raymond Chandler novel.
Out of the Landscape, into the Portrait. Tech critic (and AoM Podcast guest) Nicholas Carr recently published an article exploring how smartphones may be changing our view of reality. While movies and human vision naturally favor wide, horizontal landscape-like frames, our phones force us into an unnaturally vertical portrait perspective. Think Instagram Reels or YouTube Shorts. Carr argues that horizontal views connect us to the bigger picture, provide context, and check our vanity and hubris, while the phone’s vertical frame isolates us, creating a kind of visual form of solitary, self-worshiping confinement.
Quote of the Week
A fool may be known by six things: anger, without cause; speech, without profit; change, without progress; inquiry, without object; putting trust in a stranger, and mistaking foes for friends.
—Arabian Proverb
