Hyperpleasures, The End Of iPhone, And More
5 cracking ideas to open your mind
Hello there,
A warm welcome to the hundreds of curious ladies and gentlemen who recently joined the LM community!
This is the place for learning fascinating ideas and feeling like you’re the smartest person in your 2 BHK every Sunday morning.
Every first weekend of the month, I write an article on 5 intriguing ideas, and today’s version is packed with alpha.
But I don’t want to risk losing 69% of the audience because of a never-ending intro, so here’s the juice you came for:
Hyperpleasures: The reason we’re not enjoying things like sports, sex, or having good conversations (which have been our deepest pleasures throughout history) is due to the rise of hyperpleasures. We are replacing each of those with gaming, porn, or social media- they remove all the effort & pain associated with the conventional pleasures (sports can be exhausting and hard to organize) and get us directly to moments of extreme pleasure on-demand. A brilliant comparison: former meth addicts say they take a long time to adjust to life without drugs because doing them led to a 1000/10 experience, so living with an 8 or 9/10 is suddenly so difficult!
Starbucks Is a Bank: Fun fact: Starbucks may seem like a coffee place, but it’s a bank in disguise. The company got a staggering $10B in customer deposits on its app last year. This is a higher level of deposits than 85% of US banks! The best part? Starbucks doesn’t have to maintain reserves like a bank, because they only have to promise that they can provide coffee whenever a customer encashes these points. Two, they don’t have to pay interest. And three, many people don’t use these funds (maybe because they forget, or got too busy trading Dogecoin). This earned the company a cool $215M last year.
Climate-Driven Collapse: We worry about how climate change can end civilization. The sad truth is that this shit has happened before. Over and over again. The Harappan civ collapsed because of drought. The mighty Chola empire also went down because of flooding, and the Gupta empire was sacked when the Huns came in, probably because volcanic eruptions displaced them and forced them to find new lands. The past holds clues for us, but we’re too busy watching Alt Balaji.
End of the iPhone?: The copywriter who worked with Mr. Jobs to come up with the name “iPhone” says it is high time we retire that idea. It was relevant at a time when the internet was new and everything was transitioning into the cyber world, but now the name is starting to give some low-key dinosaur vibes. Will the brand do it soon? Maybe not, unless they come up with a new device that’s so distant from the functionalities of an iPhone that they can justify a move away from convention. Till then, it makes sense to stick with the current name- it holds enormous equity, enough to make young hippies take multi-century EMIs to buy this toy.
15 versions ago The origin of “Vernacular”: Where does this word come from? Turns out it has racist origins and was first used by the great India-hater Thomas Macaulay. Deriving from a Latin word, it means “tongue of the homeborn slave”. It’s funny how the origin of so many ideas in our language, customs, and policies have colonial roots that were designed to work against us. For a deep dive, read the piece I wrote last year on decolonizing the Indian mind.
That’s it for the day, mitron. If you enjoyed this one, post it on a Whatsapp group and watch how nobody responds.
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