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That which feels "rebellious" in 2026 reveals a lot about the current state of technology, society, and life. I've recently noted a handful of actions that make me feel like a rebel, which in previous decades would have been incredibly mundane. A non-exhaustive list: Long-form reading Especially a physical book. Spending time reading anything longer than a few hundred words feels like you are…
Caleb Hammer is Dave Ramsey + Jerry Springer for Zoomers. The concept of the crazy popular YouTube show is simple: Caleb sits down with someone who's struggling with their finances, goes through their credit card statements and spending, and builds a budget for them to get out of a financial hole. Along the way he ridicules their inability to take responsibility for poor spending habits, and they…
So much has been written and said about inflation that adding to discourse seems almost pointless. But I subscribe to the theory that much of the current discontent across the U.S. is—and will continue to be—the result of inflation. Some might argue that it stems more from the current presidential administration, the corruption of government in general, or rising inequality. Those all play a part.…
What happens when no one has the chance learn the nuance between good ideas, bad ideas, and ideas in-between? We're about to find out.
Ditching Spotify helped me fall in love with music again. I grew up on CDs, then like most of us, jumped headfirst into the world of MP3s and iPods. I moved to streaming pretty early on. Only it was Rdio . I liked Rdio because it was based on albums and building a library—basically the iTunes model for streaming. But Rdio died, Spotify didn’t. So I switched. Spotify’s app got increasingly…
Like many millennials, I have witnessed the evisceration of newspapers. I can remember when a paper would be waiting on our doorstep every morning after I woke up, wrapped in plastic to protect it from the elements. I remember shuffling through the voluminous Sunday edition in search of the comics, and how the number of pages would swell with ads every Christmas shopping season. But one day…
I already shared a short post about why, in the year 2026, I decided to return to blogging. The natural follow up question is "Why Bear?" Media theorist Marshall McLuhan is famous for claiming “the medium is the message.” In other words, the medium used to convey something is often just as important as what is being said. Additionally, the constraints of each medium end up shaping the message in a…
The internet used to be decentralized magic. It was filled with "givers." People that would share their words and art and ideas just because they could. Because attention and community was a reward in itself. Now everything is monetized. Calculated. And increasingly, generated by an LLM under the guise of being human created. The internet is dying, but it is not dead. This blog is my attempt to…