The human behaviour behind the work. Decision-making, attention, identity, performance, and the everyday observations that explain how people live and work inside the technology economy.
856 articles · Mind
The standard explanation for why high achievers feel insecure is impostor syndrome. But for many, competence was never about pride or achievement. It was a strategy a child invented to avoid being examined too closely — and the strategy outlived its usefulness decades ago.
In 2006, the usability researcher Jakob Nielsen put a number on something most people online had felt without naming.
There is a certain kind of person who keeps their plans to themselves.
When someone strikes us as classy, the first explanation that arrives is usually money.
Around 1750 BCE in Ur, a customer named Nanni complained in clay about the bad copper sold to him by the merchant Ea-nasir. It is the oldest known written customer complaint, and several others were found in Ea-nasir's house. The behaviour behind a one-star review, nearly four millennia early.
I typed it out plainly: "Based on everything you know about me, why does reaching my goals still leave me feeling flat?
I let my phone die one Friday evening and, on a whim, decided not to charge it again until Monday.
Forgetting a name seconds after hearing it is usually an encoding failure, not a character flaw. Names are arbitrary labels with no meaning to hook onto (the Baker/baker paradox), and they arrive at the worst moment for attention (the next-in-line effect). What actually helps, and what it does not excuse.
Somewhere on campaign, probably in a tent on the Danube frontier, Marcus Aurelius wrote a note to himself about wanting to be elsewhere.
In 1910, a young Ernest Oppenheimer wrote a private memo arguing the only way to raise diamond prices was to deliberately restrict supply. The doctrine built De Beers, shaped a century of engagement rings, and quietly underwrites how luxury still works today.
The company’s historical market share concerns rough diamond production and supply, rather than ownership of every diamond on Earth.
Frances Gerety scribbled 'A Diamond Is Forever' late one night in 1947 at a Philadelphia ad agency. The four-word line reshaped marriage across 40 countries. She never married.
