Study Hacks Blog

In 2006, a high school student from Ontario named James Hobson started posting to a new platform called YouTube. His early videos were meant for his friends, and focused on hobbies (like parkour) and silliness (like one clip in which he drinks a cup of raw eggs).

Hobson’s relationship with YouTube evolved in 2013. Now a trained engineer, he put his skills to work in crafting a pair of metal claws based on the Marvel character, Wolverine. The video was a hit. He then built a working version of the exoskeleton used by Matt Damon’s character in the movie Elysium. This was an even bigger hit. This idea of creating real life versions of props from comics and movies proved popular. Hobson quit his job to create these videos full-time, calling himself, “The Hacksmith.”

Around the same time that Hobson got started on YouTube, a young British plumber named Colin Furze also began experimenting with the platform. Like Hobson, he began by posting videos of his hobbies (like BMX tricks) and silliness (like a stunt in which tried to serve food to moving cars).

Furze’s relationship with YouTube evolved when he began posting record breaking attempts. The first in this informal series was his effort to create the world’s largest bonfire. (“I collected pallets for over a year.”) He drew attention from British media when he supercharged a mobility scooter to drive more than seventy miles per hour. This led to a brief stint as a co-host of a maker show called “Gadget Geeks” that aired on the then fledgling Sky TV. After that traditional media experience, he scored a hit on YouTube by attaching a jet engine to the back of a bicycle. He decided to fully commit to making a living on his own videos.

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Between this newsletter, my podcast, my books, and my New Yorker journalism, I offer a lot of advice and propose a lot of ideas about how the modern digital environment impacts our lives, both professionally and personally, and how we should respond.

This techno-pontification covers everything from the nitty gritty details of producing good work in an office saturated with emails and Zoom, to heady decisions about shaping a meaningful life amid the nihilistic abstraction of an increasingly networked existence.

With the end of year rapidly approaching, and people finding themselves with some spare thinking time as work winds down for the holidays, I thought it might be fun to try to summarize essentially every major idea I discuss in one short primer.

So that’s what I’m attempting below! I’m sure I’m missing some key points, but this should nevertheless provide a useful road map to my esoteric mental wanderings.

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I’m writing this post about eighteen hours before the first polls open on Election Day, and it feels tense out there. The New York Times, for example, just posted an article headlined: “How Americans Feel About the Election: Anxious and Scared.”

Based on extensive interviews conducted over this past weekend, the Times concludes:

“Americans across the political spectrum reported heading to the polls in battleground states with a sense that their nation was coming undone. While some expressed relief that the long election season was finally nearing an end, it was hard to escape the undercurrent of uneasiness about Election Day.”

These results probably come as no surprise.

The question then becomes what to do with this anxiety. The first step, of course, is to vote — and not just vote, but to approach your decision honestly and dispassionately. By the time you read this, you’ve likely already completed this step.

But then what?

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Many predictions and concerns tumbled into the slipstream trailing ChatGPT’s dazzling, turbulent entrance onto the technology scene in late 2022. Few of these initial warnings felt more immediate than those of imminent disruptions to higher education.

“Could the chatbot, which provides coherent, quirky, and conversational responses to simple language inquires, inspire more students to cheat?”, asked an NBC News article, published only a week after ChatGPT’s initial launch. Several months later, a professor in the Texas A&M system took this warning to heart and failed his entire class after convincing himself that every one of his students had used AI to write their final assignments. (It turns out that his method of detection—asking ChatGPT itself whether it produced the submissions—was unreliable. He later changed the grades.)

“AI seems almost built for cheating,” explains Ethan Mollick, in his recent bestseller, Co-Intelligence. He predicted, in particular, that paper writing as a pedagogical tool might be on the way out, forcing institutions to adapt to other methods to teach composition: “In-school assignments on non-internet-enabled computers, combined with written exams, will ensure students learn basic writing skills.”

It’s hard to believe that it’s been almost two years since we first started hearing these concerns about ChatGPT providing students the perfect cheating machine. As a professor and writer myself, these issues interest me, especially when it comes to academic compositions. So in my most recent article for The New Yorker, published earlier this month, and titled “What Kind of Writer is ChatGPT?,” I set out to understand how these tools are currently being put to work by students tackling writing assignments.

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In 1973, an author named Alan Lakein published a book titled How to Get Control of Your Time and Your Life. It wasn’t the first book about professional time management — my library contains a first edition of James McCay’s 1959 classic, The Management of Time — but it’s arguably the first book to talk about the topic in a recognizably modern way, with a focus on personalized tools like daily to-do lists. It went on to reportedly sell more than three million copies, and was even shouted out by Bill Clinton, who cites its influence on his early career in his autobiography.

Revisiting Lakein’s advice today provides a glimpse into office life fifty years ago. And the encounter is shocking.

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Growing up in New York, first in the city and then later in Albany, a young Herman Melville made frequent trips to stay with his uncle, Thomas Melvill, who lived on a farm near Pittsfield, in the Berkshire mountains of Western Massachusetts. In 1850, Thomas decided to sell his property. Melville, now with a young family of his own, arrived that summer for what they believed to be his final visit to the area.

It was during this fateful trip that Melville learned that the Brewster farm, consisting of 160 acres abutting his uncle’s plot, was up for sale. Fueled by impulse and nostalgia, he borrowed $3000 from his father-in-law and bought the property. He would come to call it Arrowhead in reference to native artifacts he found in its fields.

Melville’s plan for his time at Arrowhead was to write. He had recently published a series of bestselling adventure novels, drawing from the half-decade he spent wandering the Pacific as a sailor. He felt confident that his literary success would continue and the time was right to fully invest in this vision.

A few days ago, I travelled down to Arrowhead, now preserved by the Berkshire Historical Society, to better understand the writing-centered life that Melville constructed.

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I’m writing this from a rental property, on a hillside overlooking the northern reach of the Taconic Mountains. A key feature of this property is a small outbuilding, designed and built by the current owner as a quiet place for visitors to work. Spanning, at most, twelve feet square, it features a daybed, a heating stove, and a desk arranged to look outward toward the distant peaks. A ceiling fan moves the air on muggy afternoons.

Here’s a view from the desk:

This rental property, in other words, includes a canonical example of one of my all-time favorite styles of functional architecture: the writing shed. (Indeed, as the owner told me, I’m not the first professional writer to use this space for this purpose in recent years.)

In my daily life in Takoma Park, Maryland, I don’t lack for interesting places to write. We designed the library in our house, which includes a custom-built Huston & Company library-style desk, specifically with writing in mind. (If you’re interested in what this looks like, the Spanish newspaper El País recently published a profile that includes a nice shot of me at my desk.) When I need a change of scenery while at home, I’ll also write on my front porch, where, during the grossest days of the DC summer, I’ll use a large floor fan to blow away the mosquitos and moderate the temperature. I also spend a considerable amount of time working amid the comforting din of our local coffee shop.

But as long-time readers of this newsletter know, I’ve always felt that there was something particularly special about the idea of writing in a quiet shed nestled in a quiet piece of natural property, such as what was enjoyed by Michael Pollan, David McCullough, and, perhaps my favorite example, E.B. White:

Which is all to say that I was excited, on arriving at this rental property, to spend a few weeks wrangling the early stages of a new book in a writing shed of my own.

When I visited London last month, a large marketing push was underway for the paperback edition of Chris van Tulleken’s UK bestseller, Ultra-Processed People: Why Do We All Eat Stuff That Isn’t Food…and Why Can’t We Stop? It seemed to be prominently displayed in every bookstore I visited, and, as you might imagine, I visited a lot of bookstores.

Unable to ignore it, I eventually took a closer look and learned more about the central villain of van Tulleken’s treatise: ultra-processed food, a term coined in 2009 as part of a new food classification system, and inspired by Michael Pollan’s concept of “edible food-like substances.”

Ultra-processed foods, at their most damaging extreme, are made by breaking down core stock ingredients such as corn or soy into their basic organic building blocks, then recombining these elements into hyper-palatable combinations, rich in salt, sugar, and fat, soaked with unpronounceable chemical emulsifiers and preservatives.

As Chris van Tulleken points out, the problem with ultra-processed foods is that they’re engineered to hijack our desire mechanisms, making them literally irresistible. The result is that we consume way more calories than we need in arguably the least healthy form possible. Give me a bag of Doritos (a classic ultra-processed food) and I’ll have a hard time stopping until it’s empty. I’m much less likely to similarly gorge myself on, say, a salad or baked chicken.

I was thinking about this book recently as Scott Young and I were prepared to re-open our course, Life of Focus, for new registrations next week. One of the three month-long modules of this course focuses on implementing ideas from my book Digital Minimalism to help you regain control of your attention from the insistent attraction of screens.

It occurred to me that in this concept of ultra-processed food we can find a useful analogy for understanding both our struggles to disconnect, and for how we might succeed in this aspiration going forward.

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