STATUS // operational
Westenberg. | v1.0 | 2026
$ whoami

POSTS //
1
Essay

Comfort Food for the Thinking Class: The Great Intellectual Stagnation

Wander into any bookstore (I dare you.)  The non-fiction table will be all but dominated by the usual suspects: Malcolm Gladwell's latest exploration of how some counterintuitive thing

2025-12-20 13 min read
2
Update

My Year in Review

My year in review: Some things worked. Some things didn't. The kid grew taller. The work got harder. I wrote the words anyway. Drank the coffee. Paid the

2025-12-19 1 min read
3
Essay

Podcasting Could Use a Good Asteroid

I'm told there are now over 4.5 million podcasts in existence. The industry is worth 40 billion dollars, 158 million Americans tune in monthly, and the medium

2025-12-18 4 min read
4
Essay

Everything is Dead and We Killed It.

SaaS is dead. Punk is dead again, for approximately the four hundredth time since Sid Vicious actually died in 1979. Rock is dead. The novel is dead. Cinema is dead.

2025-12-17 4 min read
5
Essay

Uh Oh! The Infantilization of Failure

When apps fail, when software breaks, you'll likely encounter a message constructed from a specific vocabulary: "Oops!" "Uh oh!" "Whoops!" Sometimes you&

2025-12-16 1 min read
6
Essay

Thin Desires Are Eating Your Life

The defining experience of our age seems to be hunger.  We're hungry for more, but we have more than we need.  We're hungry for less, while

2025-12-15 4 min read
7
Essay

Growth is a Poor Man's God

We've built an entire civilization around a single metric: growth.  GDP must grow. Startups must grow. Your follower count, your revenue, your personal brand, your meditation practice. The

2025-12-13 1 min read
8
Essay

Is It a Metric or an Obsession?

I’ve been thinking about why some people can track their progress on goals without going insane, while others turn into the guy who weighs himself four times a day

2025-12-12 1 min read
9
Essay

I Have Declared Feed Bankruptcy.

2025-12-10 5 min read
10
Essay

On Brainrot

The conservative commentator Erick-Woods Erickson observed on his Substack this week that Twitter has now convinced large swaths of the American right that Europe has been completely overrun by Muslims,

2025-12-09 14 min read
11
Essay

Don't Become a Connoisseur.

One of the great pleasures of my life is a bacon double cheeseburger. The simpler the better. Meat, cheese, a good pickle, a lug of ketchup and some sizzling bacon.

2025-12-08 5 min read
12
Essay

The Harvest Will Come

I spent most of my twenties believing that purpose was something you found once and then held onto. A winning lottery ticket you kept in your wallet forever. The self-help

2025-12-06 3 min read
About/// Self/// RSS/// Tools/// YouTube/// Forum/// About/// Self/// RSS/// Tools/// YouTube/// Forum/// About/// Self/// RSS/// Tools/// YouTube/// Forum/// About/// Self/// RSS/// Tools/// YouTube/// Forum///