The Uninvited

The Descent Part 1

It Follows

Nightbooks

The Descent Part 2

Twitches Part 2

Greta

Twitches Part 1

Battle Royale

Wishmaster

Squid Game

Community

The End of Average

By Todd Rose

The average doesn’t just influence how we see ourselves—our entire social system has been built around this average-size-fits-all model. Schools are designed for the average student. Healthcare is designed for the average patient. Employers try to fill average job descriptions with employees on an average career trajectory. Our government implements programs and initiatives to serve the average person. For more than a century, we’ve believed that the best way to run our institutions is by focusing on the average person. But when you actually drill down into the numbers, you find an amazing fact: no one is average—which means that our society built for everyone is actually serving no one.

Quote Habit

I'm thinking of starting a new habit that should encourage me to pay more attention and be more reflective of the things that I consume. The habit would simply involve me trying to find one quote I'd like to takeaway from everything I watch.

Checkpoint Check-In Best & Worst

In addition to ending my days by summarising the best and worst moments, I've been doing the same thing with each of my daily checkpoint check-ins. I'm hoping that by doing this I'll become more attune to the smaller things in life that I appreciate and detest.

New Job

Speaking of major lifestyle changes, this month I got a new job as a frontend developer at a mental health and wellness startup. I'm still learning how to balance the lines between personal and work time as a remote worker, but hopefully all will fall in line in time.

Option Q

"If you think about it, every time you make a choice, you're not just making it on your own. You're selecting from a list, a menu, of choices that was designed by someone or something else. And whatever freedom you have in that choice is necessarily constrained by social structures, customs, and history that provide the context for that selection" [8:55-9:22]

This one is a fun naming convention, where we can call "off the beaten path" options "option Q". The shape of the Q is symbolic of thinking outside of a confined option set.

In how many of our daily decisions aren't we even considering that there could be a potentially more beneficial option Q?

Example 1: Ordering outside of a menu at a restaurant.

Example 2: Desire paths in urban planning as an analogy for the potential advantages of not defaulting to being compliant with the clear paths set out for us — we might be able to find a more optimal path on our own.

I've realised that I'm no longer a fan of the YouTube trend showcasing million dollar properties. I don't understand why we tend to put these unaffordable properties on such a pedestal. Wouldn't it be better to showcase more accessible homes that people can feel inspired by?

Looking around my room and considering which things bring me joy, I realise that most of the items on that list are things that have been crafted. It makes me recognise that crafting is a practice that I should probably be intentional about doing more often.

The immense value that we place on visual data, while neglecting our other senses (we hear about visual literacy, but rarely about sensory literacy).