Rabbit Holes 🕳️ #102

From forging a post-capitalist self to crowded solitude, monopsony power, from self- to social development, attention as an art form, collective love, and growth²

Jan 15, 2025

Happy New Year Everyone! 🤗

My 2️⃣0️⃣2️⃣5️⃣ kicked off with me having what felt like three types of flu 🤒 in one…which is why I’m only sending out the first issue of the year today. I hope you had a better 2025 so far and I welcome all the new people who joined Creative Destruction during the break.

This newsletter has over 5,000 subscribers now!! 🥳 Thank you all so much for this!

Without any further ado, let’s dive into a killer new Rabbit Holes issue! Enjoy!

THIS WEEK ↓
🖼️ Framings: A Post-Capitalist Self // Crowded Solitude & Solitary Crowds // Monopsony Power
🌀 Re-Framings: Self-Development → Social Development // Attention As An Art Form // Collective Grief → Collective Love
🧬 Frameworks: Growth²
🎨 Works: Petal // Norrsken Impact 100 // Embroidery Journal

⏳ Reading Time: 10 minutes

Thumbnail of 5 Tweet Tuesday - January 7 2025 — 😅

🖼️ Framings

~~Naming~~ Framing it! Giving something we all feel more prominence in a way that promotes a deeper reflection.

🪞 Forging A Post-Capitalist Self

A new year often invites us to reorient our lives and careers. This to-the-point article by the always insightful Umair Haque explains what “late capitalism is eating itself” really means for your life and career and gives some important recommendations.

“If capitalism is eating itself, you have to get out of the way. You have to reorient your career away from all this now.
Let me make that concrete. If you’re young? Forget about a corporate job. Just forget about it. Don’t waste your time. What’s the point? It’ll take you until your late 30s to get anywhere in the hierarchy, but you’ll be forced out by your 40s. The old prize of staying at the top for a decade or two or three? Forget it. Doesn’t exist anymore.
The payoff does not exist anymore.
[…] If we understand that capitalism is eating itself, then you must now “pivot,” as we say these days, to Havens. Places and spaces beyond it. […] The time has come now for many, many people to forge post-capitalist lives, careers, professions, and futures. […]
We’re all panicked, afraid, and bewildered these days. It’s OK to feel all that. But now you must find strength, courage, and wisdom, too, and you do that by listening to yourself, and what you already know. Your gut, your intuition, already knows all this, and it’s your mind that argues. This conflicted way of living is what traps you in the system you hate. Like it traps millions upon millions. That is the paradox, too, of this age. Self-deceit and self-destruction are two of the characteristic features of “late capitalism,” as we discovered in the 1930s. […]
The systems that we expected to govern our lives sanely and stably are now all broken, and they will never be repaired. They are gone, over, finished, done. Perhaps new ones will rise, but we will be long gone by then. So now we must all find paths through their wreckage, and then beyond their ruins.”

» What "Late Capitalism is Eating Itself” Means For Your Life and Career by Umair Haque

🚶🏻 Crowded Solitude & Solitary Crowds

This excerpt is from one of those must-read-to-deeply-understand-a-key-zeitgeist-phenomenon pieces. The core problem of our increasingly self-imposed solitude, as explained below, lies in our modern technology’s always-open window to the outside world, which paralyzes our innate biological cue to spend more time with others.

“Self-imposed solitude might just be the most important social fact of the 21st century in America. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many observers have reduced this phenomenon to the topic of loneliness. […] But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans don’t seem to be reacting to the biological cue to spend more time with other people. […]
Friends require boundaries as much as they require closeness. Time alone to recharge is essential for maintaining healthy relationships.
Phones mean that solitude is more crowded than it used to be, and crowds are more solitary. “Bright lines once separated being alone and being in a crowd,” Nicholas Carr, the author of the new book Superbloom: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, told me. “Boundaries helped us. You could be present with your friends and reflective in your downtime.” Now our social time is haunted by the possibility that something more interesting is happening somewhere else, and our downtime is contaminated by the streams and posts and texts of dozens of friends, colleagues, frenemies, strangers.
If Carr is right, modern technology’s always-open window to the outside world makes recharging much harder, leaving many people chronically depleted, a walking battery that is always stuck in the red zone. In a healthy world, people who spend lots of time alone would feel that ancient biological cue: I’m alone and sad; I should make some plans. But we live in a sideways world, where easy home entertainment, oversharing online, and stunted social skills spark a strangely popular response: I’m alone, anxious, and exhausted; thank God my plans were canceled.”

» The Anti-Social Century by Derek Thompson

🎩 Monopsony Power

In our increasingly winner-takes-all economy, this concept is an important one to understand. But even beyond that, I invite you to think about monopsony power in terms of the lack of narratives, of futures in the world. Once a key narrative/future dominates, there’s a subservience to it forming as systems align with its values and goals. Consequently, ordinary people have to accept the shitty conditions that result from that one narrative/future because there are no (or only so few) alternatives.

“Once Walmart has become the major employer in town, it ends up with what economists call “monopsony power” over workers. Just as monopoly describes a company that can afford to charge exorbitant prices because it lacks any real competition, monopsony describes a company that can afford to pay low wages because workers have so few alternatives. This helps explain why Walmart has consistently paid lower wages than its competitors, such as Target and Costco, as well as regional grocers such as Safeway. “So much about Walmart contradicts the perfectly competitive market model we teach in Econ 101,” Wiltshire told me. “It’s hard to think of a clearer example of an employer using its power over workers to suppress wages.”
Walmart’s size also gives it power over the producers who supply it with goods. As Stacy Mitchell, a co–executive director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, recently wrote in The Atlantic, Walmart is well known for squeezing its suppliers, who have little choice but to comply for fear of losing their largest customer. Selling to Walmart at such low prices can force local suppliers to lay off workers and pay lower wages to those who remain. They also naturally try to make up for the shortfall by charging their other customers higher prices, setting off a vicious cycle that allows Walmart to entrench its dominance even further.”

» The Walmart Effect by Rogé Karma

🌀 Re-Framings

A few short reframings that I’ve recently stumbled across:

🤝 From Self-Development To Social Development

“The world doesn’t need more self-interested people. It needs more helpful people.
I think there’s a misguided belief that self-development makes us better people. But if we want to be better people we have to focus on others, not ourselves. At some point, I realized this and changed tack. Rather than ask what I needed, I asked what my community needed. At the time, there were a lot of disadvantaged and foster youth in my area and I decided to volunteer for a youth organization. I became the head leader and spent a few years hanging out with high school kids three times a week and taking them to camp in the summer.
Very quickly, I didn’t need self-development anymore. I stopped meditating, I stopped doing yoga, I deleted my blog. The anxiety and depression that had lingered despite therapy and self-help evaporated. I was more happy than I had ever been, and making much more of a direct difference in my community. I was focusing on the needs of others rather than whatever else I could find to work on in myself, and I felt a lot of meaning and purpose in my life. It’s been close to 15 years since then and I can still say with absolute certainty: The road to inner peace is actually outer peace. It’s focusing on others.
This might sound obvious, but I think we live in an era of “secure your own oxygen mask before helping others,” and while that might be a helpful mantra for airplanes I think many of us don’t seem to recognize when we are already wearing oxygen masks. We don’t need to keep adding even more oxygen to ourselves, we need to start directing our attention to others. We need to focus less on self-development and more on social development. On human welfare.”

» Social Development > Self-Development by Elle Griffin

👀 Attention As An Art Form

“Attention and perception are not brute facts of physiology.
They are skills you shape with your actions and practices. Both operate through your five senses, but also through your reasoning mind, your emotions, and your conscience. All learning to an important degree is perceptual learning, the process of shaping your skills of perception. […]
To say that attention is an art form, then, is to recognize that like any art, it involves both technique and creativity, discipline and spontaneity.
Just as an artist learns to see color relationships or a musician develops an ear for harmony, the scholar-contemplative cultivates modes of attention that bring new dimensions of experience into presence. This isn’t simply about sustained focus—though that’s part of it—but about developing the sensitivity and skill to let phenomena show up in increasingly nuanced ways.
Like any art form, attention requires practice, patience, and a willingness to remain open to what might emerge. The art lies in finding the right balance between active engagement and receptive openness, between the intention to understand and the capacity to be surprised.”

» Attention is an Art Form by Adam Robbert

💗 Collective Grief `→` Collective Love

“What we’re all feeling is grief. Not the tidy, private kind, but a vast, collective mourning that binds us together. We are grieving not just the world we’ve lost but the futures we were promised, the ones we dared to dream of and expected to inherit. […]
As we fight for the change we want, we also need spaces to grieve the change we’ll never see. I think the progressive movement has done a good job of channeling our anger, but I’m not sure it’s done a good job of channeling our pain. It knows what to do with our rage, but it doesn’t always know what to do with our tears. […]
How we collectively mourn this, will shape not just how we process the losses of today, but how effectively we organize and mobilize for the future we envision tomorrow. This grief might be a group project, and the irony is that recognizing it as such may be our greatest source of strength. Healing together, grieving together, we may find new ways to rise together.
And besides, what is grief, if not at its core, proof that we in fact did love? […] We grieve because we loved that imagined future. And that’s a beautiful, precious and rare thing. And perhaps, in that love, lies the foundation for what comes next, a new vision, forged from the ashes of our loss.
Maybe once we do collective grief, we will uncover our collective love.”