JA Westenberg
JA WestenbergLately, I've caught myself rolling my eyes at enthusiasm. I watch someone get excited about their new idea and my first instinct is to catalog the ways it will fail. Not maliciously - I tell myself I'm being helpful, realistic, saving them from future pain. But the truth is uglier than that.
5/16
JA WestenbergI've become addicted to being right about things going wrong.
6/16
JA WestenbergTo be the voice of reason in rooms full of dreamers.
But somewhere along the way, that voice got too loud.
4/16
JA WestenbergLately, I've caught myself rolling my eyes at enthusiasm. I watch someone get excited about their new idea and my first instinct is to catalog the ways it will fail. Not maliciously - I tell myself I'm being helpful, realistic, saving them from future pain. But the truth is uglier than that.
5/16
JA WestenbergThe ability to spot the flaws before anyone else. To see why things wouldn't work before they even launched.
3/16
JA WestenbergTo be the voice of reason in rooms full of dreamers.
But somewhere along the way, that voice got too loud.
4/16
JA WestenbergIt started as self preservation.
After enough disappointments, enough promises broken, enough grand plans that fizzled into nothing, I developed a knee-jerk cynicism that felt like wisdom.
2/16
JA WestenbergThe ability to spot the flaws before anyone else. To see why things wouldn't work before they even launched.
3/16
JA WestenbergI'm Exhausted By My Own Cynicism.
A thread. 🧵
1/16
JA WestenbergIt started as self preservation.
After enough disappointments, enough promises broken, enough grand plans that fizzled into nothing, I developed a knee-jerk cynicism that felt like wisdom.
2/16
JA WestenbergI'm Exhausted By My Own Cynicism.
A thread. 🧵
1/16
JA WestenbergPlato warned us. Over two thousand years ago, he told the story of prisoners chained in a cave, mistaking shadows on the wall for reality. They saw outlines and echoes, never the fire or the forms behind it. And when one prisoner escaped and saw the sun, he came back to free the others.
🧵
1/12
JA WestenbergThis year, I founded an indie news blog doing long-form Op-eds.
It's 100% free and 100% reader funded. No venture capital, no ads, no bullshit.
And it is unapologetically opposed to Nazi fuckery.
Read/subscribe and support:
https://www.theindex.media
JA WestenbergI miss the internet
I know this is going to make me sound old – but I miss the internet.
The real internet. The one we used to have. Before it all got so much less – and somehow so much more – complicated.
I went online for the first time around 2001. The 90s had ended, and the world was coming online while I was coming out of my shell and becoming more self-aware.