Members-Only Q&A: October
Joan Westenberg
Civilizations often last centuries and then transform or collapse, so sustainability is complex. Modern technology — climate, nukes, AI — speeds change and raises new risks we may not control. We might muddle through, or we might be the civilization that revealed itself and paid the price.
5 Nov 2025
The promise is that if you capture everything in the right system, you'll have perfect recall and infinite creative connections. The reality is that you spend more time organizing notes than thinking. Luhmann created the Zettelkasten method and wrote 70 books. But Luhmann was a sociologist whose job was writing. Most people who adopt his system write zero books. They just have really well-organized note cards.
People today spend hours tagging notes they'll never review, creating links between ideas they'll never pursue, building elaborate structures that feel productive but produce nothing. There's a deeper issue here about technological solutions to human problems. We want to believe that the right tool will make us smarter, more creative, more productive. Sometimes it does. Usually it just gives us another thing to maintain.
Kierkegaard wrote that life can only be understood backwards but must be lived forwards. If you can't remember living it, did you live it at all?