Anxiety tends to feel one or more of: rushed, urgent, and in the form of questions rather than facts ("did I lock the door??" not "I forgot to lock the door")

It often skips between objects to worry about ("is there someone behind that car? or in the alley up ahead? or behind me? what was that sound?" - that's free-floating anxiety looking for something to attach to).

Intuition tends to come as a calm, settled certainty - calm even about objectively terrifying things - and focused on a single, specific piece of information.

Noah sends an essay he wrote about the modern loss of community, which he correctly blames on the built environment and especially cars. See also Ivan Illich on Cars.

A thread in the Reality Shifting subreddit, Does anyone else feel like something's off? Personally I don't get those kinds of feelings, but my intellectual curiosity about weird stuff leads me to expect a lot more of it. Related: Peak sunspot activity expected in 2025

And some music. I keep putting off my own Christmas playlist for another year, but here's a great one, Christmas Apocalypse 2024.

Thus the perpetrators do not stage their expanded suicides in remote places, but in the midst of peaceful everyday life, in the place where the break with reality appears most glaringly: in schools, businesses, pedestrian zones, libraries, office buildings or churches. It is here, in the zones of public order, that the amok runner can take on and play out his final role as the negative instance. He alone designates where and when his sudden theater of cruelty will begin and whom it will strike. Just as with regular theater, his theater only works with an audience. When the media report live from the scene of the crime, the amok runner momentarily becomes completely unified with his image. As the protagonist of his own fiction, he transfers his inner scenario onto the victims. Analogously, many survivors describe their experience of such massacres with the total loss of their sense of reality.

It's like the space in this room. Once it knows itself, it doesn't feel separate from the space outside the room, or indeed the space in your kitchen. From the point of view of the space there's one space so likewise from the point of view of awareness there's just itself, infinite without borders and without divisions. There's no separation, there's no otherness in it, and this absence of otherness is the experience that we refer to as as love. That's why love is sometimes said to be the nature of reality.

But mules are not stubborn simply because they feel like; they refuse to do things if they think it's a bad idea, or if they do not trust the human commanding them. I think it's really interesting that for many centuries, humans have been able to get horses (and humans, for that matter) to charge into battle to meet violent deaths. You simply can't get a mule to do that, because mules know better.

And a Reddit thread with lots of good stories, What's the strangest but completely legitimate reason you've ever made a decision?

Always seemed pretty strange to me that you can build and oversee an organization widely perceived (whether fairly or not) as evil, host what those evil-perceivers will view as Bad Rich Guy Conference in public, in a country where anyone can get as many guns as they want, and there isn't more violence like this. Seems like an unstable operating point for a society.