Happiness is vastly overrated. We wanna do something worth the doing.

 --- Rebecca Newberger in conversation with David Edwards about Mattering, Philosophy Bites podcast, June 2026

Four major strategies:

1. Socializers
2. Transcenders 
3. Heroic strivers
4. Competitive mattering

Cf. recent book, Competitive mattering

From the transcript

Host 1 [David Edwards]: And in your own case, you said that you abandoned transcendental mattering and you took up learning mattering. The idea that the more that you learn, the better, and perhaps you can even contribute to the corpus of knowledge. And you’ve never had any doubts about that, so you remain that this is a legitimate way of mattering.

Guest [Rebecca Newberger]: It seems worthwhile to me. I’ve certainly had doubts that I had anything to contribute, you know, and that’s another way that our mattering projects can fail us. They can fail us personally. They can make us feel like failures constantly. And I’ve often thought that that was true of my mattering project.

Guest: But of just trying to at least learn everything and trying to fit it together coherently even without making any contribution, that seems to me worthwhile. Knowledge seems to me of value. You know, justice, knowledge, compassion, beauty. These are things that are worthwhile if your mattering project is to either cultivate the appreciation of these things or maybe even to add to them. That’s a good thing.

Guest: And it might lead to a tremendous amount of frustration and disappointment. I mean, look at Wittgenstein’s life. The heartache, the misery that he went through, even though he contributed a great deal. And then he says at the end of his life, Tell them I’ve had a wonderful life. Because he was doing what he thought mattered and struggling and and that’s what we’re really after.

Guest: We’re not after happiness. Happiness is vastly overrated. We wanna do something worth the doing. We don’t wanna waste our lives.

Power is actually value neutral. It just makes us more of what we already are.

 --- Sally Adee, in a New Scientist review of Poisonous People by Leanne ten Brinke, March 2026

Excerpt

Ten Brinke doesn’t promise low-effort approaches to rooting out liars. “If lying were so easy and straightforward to detect, there would be little point in doing it,” she reminds us.

But it can be done if you pay attention. If a minority of “bad apples”, as she calls them, ruin the barrel, the rest of us have some choice in whether or not to let the rot set in. Indeed, ten Brinke hints there may be some personality types within the 80 per cent who can not only stop the rot, but reverse it. These people pair dark traits with qualities that we don’t normally associate with them, like empathy and conscientiousness.

Their mere existence explodes another uncritically accepted axiom among the 80 per cent, that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. In fact, this only holds true for the worst among us, says ten Brinke. Taking responsibility for your barrel of apples may require being more disciplined and honest about your own character. But there are rewards. Power is actually value neutral. It just makes us more of what we already are.

Reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public

 --- Jasmine Sun, in The independent writer’s advantage in the age of AI, Jun 2026

Subtitle

Jasmine Sun on why secrets, live presence, and a distinct voice matter more than ever in an AI-saturated world, and what independent creators need to build careers that machines can't replace

Excerpt

I’m going to introduce four ideas, or provocations, that have shaped the way that I think about AI and my own media career.

One: The value of summary will go down, and the value of secrets will go up.

Reporting is the act of taking private knowledge and making it public. The things that people have not said, things in whisper networks, the tacit knowledge, the open secrets that have never been put in the public domain—the journalist manages to pluck them out and make them public. When you persuade a source to tell you about some corporate malfeasance, or you venture to a remote town that few people have ever written about, or you sneak your way into a tiny underground party and talk about all the people who are there, you are working in a space where there is no training data.

the arc of AI bends toward demoralization

 --- L.M. Sacasas, in Do Not Resign From Life, The Convivial Society: Vol. 7, No. 3 (2026)

Excerpt

Oddly enough, it turns out that loudly and frequently touting your product as a potential threat of world-historical proportions to human well-being was a bad marketing strategy. Human beings, after all, have no particular obligation to cheerfully cooperate with our own purported immiseration.

This purported immiseration would have both economic and psycho-social dimensions, but it is with the latter that I am mostly concerned right now. My working thesis about the generalized impact of “AI” as it is currently deployed can be summed up in the observation that the arc of AI bends toward demoralization. . . .

I believe that one dimension of this sadness or demoralization can be attributed to the simple fact that we are increasingly invited to outsource a class of activities that grant us a measure of satisfaction, accomplishment, and purpose. But it is not only the case that we outsource these activities and thus fail to reap their existential rewards, it is also true, as Marc Watkins recently noted, that the demoralization can set in as a function of AI’s ambient presence in a social ecosystem, such as, in Watkins’ case, the university, where he suggests “the true crisis here is purpose.”