The Diviniti Journal
What we think, and why.
Seven arguments about choosing, proving, waiting and keeping. Each one is built on something checkable and the sources sit beside it. Coffee turns up in most of them, usually at the end, and never as the point.
The cost of everything being available
The jam-jar study is real and badly oversold. The useful part is the clause everyone skips: choice tires people out when nobody has done any sorting on their behalf.
ReadThe password at the door
Specialised vocabulary rarely excludes anyone rudely. It works by making you decide, in about a second, whether you are willing to admit you do not know a word.
ReadSay the smaller thing
A 1970 paper about second-hand cars explains why the vocabulary of virtue stopped working, and why a dull checkable claim is now worth more than a warm one.
ReadThe four minutes nobody is selling you
Herbert Simon named attention scarcity in 1971, before the web. Phones did not cause it. They industrialised it, and hustle gave it the language of virtue.
ReadWhat we keep, what we let go
Planned obsolescence was called alarmism in 1960. France put a repairability score on the label in 2021. Between those dates is an argument about what owning means.
ReadRitual, and its cheaper cousin
Routine and ritual look identical from outside. Durkheim thought the difference was assembly, which is the half a modern week has quietly lost.
ReadNobody counted the stairs
A choice nobody sees is better evidence about who you are than an intention you announced first. Bem's 1972 self-perception theory, a Shinto rite, and a statistic that doesn't hold up.
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