Issue #12

David Brooks wrote eloquently in The Atlantic last week:

Andreessen's worldview still comes with a few problems. In the first place, he is an ignoramus of epic proportions. The idea that it would not have occurred to people to introspect before the 20th century would have been news to, say, Marcus Aurelius, Augustine, Ignatius of Loyola, Montaigne, Jane Austen, or George Eliot. Each of them produced stunning insights into the heart of human nature.

[…]

Andreessen’s second problem is that he is scientifically illiterate. The cognitive revolution of the past 30 years has shown that “feelings” are not passing fancies that get in the way of forming an objective view of reality. Emotions are vital to all rational thought. Our feelings help us assign value to things, and if you can’t do that, your decision-making landscape will be hopelessly flat.

A fitting response by a veteran columnist to some pretty ridiculous comments made by billionaire Marc Andreessen on a podcast that introspection is a waste of time only invented in the 20th century. Andreessen claimed to have “zero introspection” in his life, and seemed to prescribe others do the same. Brooks’ surgical commentary puts this sort of “thought leadership” right where it belongs.

If I had to compose a response to Andreessen’s very limited understanding of history & culture, it would really be one question: ever heard of The Bhagavad Gita, Marc Andreessen?

It’s no doubt that right now, America is saturated, perhaps more so than anytime in history, by powerful men who seem to achieve stratospheric new heights of absurd megalomaniac speech. You will find these same sorts of people selling a techno-utopian vision of human progress or a truly unilateral version of international security.

Cal Newport, whose book Slow Productivity I’ve written about in Issue #7, sheds light on our decreasing ability to do deep thinking in a piece for The New York Times published a couple of weeks ago:

In an era when technologies relentlessly disrupt our lives, it can seem that this cognition crisis is a fait accompli — a side effect of innovations that cannot be stopped. But do we really have to accept this steady loss of our thinking ability as inevitable? In a short time, we transformed the way we thought about health. I’ve come to believe that a similarly rapid revolution is possible in how we respond to our diminishing ability to think.

He observes that half a century ago, the need for cardiovascular exercise for optimal health wasn’t understood well by the Western public until certain events of the 1950-60s such as President Eisenhower’s cardiac struggles, Paul Dudley White (whose student S.I. Padmavati was India’s first woman cardiologist) and Ancel Keys’ publicized research on diet and heart connection as well as Kenneth Cooper’s book on aerobics. Following this series of developments, the West became more educated and conscious about heart health.

Newport argues that we are at a similar juncture in the current era defined by the trifecta of smartphones, social media and AI. Like the cardiovascular exercise movement of the 60s, Newport proposes we regain our thinking abilities through a revolution that takes a strong stance against ultraprocessed content like we do against ultraprocessed foods:

In the same way that you’re unlikely to eat Twinkies as a regular snack or still believe that Pop-Tarts provide a balanced breakfast, stop consuming ultraprocessed content. Don’t use TikTok. Don’t use Instagram. Don’t use X. Their sugar-high benefits aren’t worth the costs.

He then goes on to pushback on mindless AI adoption:

Use of A.I. that mainly serves to make core business tasks cognitively less demanding should be treated with caution. Here’s a simple rule that reinforces this idea: Your writing should be your own. The strain required to craft a clear memo or report is the mental equivalent of a gym workout by an athlete; it’s not an annoyance to be eliminated but a key element of your craft.

I certainly resonate with lots of these opinions of the author. I don’t produce the content of this newsletter with AI — it’s handwritten and always will be. Writing is how I connect ideas together and make sense of them — it’s a form of deep thinking for me. The “writing” part of writing this newsletter is what’s fun and why I take hours from my week to write these editions. Generating any part of this newsletter with AI would be antithetical to its purpose.

In my design work, I speed up the execution & engineering with Claude Code, but I don’t use AI to do the designing for me, except purely for prototyping, or when a problem simply requires standard components. I certainly wouldn’t have come up with the unique interface of my productivity app Solarday if I had done so.

Nevertheless, I struggle with Newport’s overall suggestions around detaching from the smartphone, or cutting down on things like Instagram. My wife’s reminders help and so does listening to advice from authors like Newport or Dr. Chatterjee.

As you will notice if you are reading this, I’ve decided to move my newsletter from Kit to Substack.

I started this newsletter in November 2025. After around nine editions, I struggled with writer’s block. Every week, I’d sit down for hours but struggle to write a new edition. I started to question whether I have something worthwhile to say, or whether it’s simply noise. I wondered if it wasn’t encased in a design-forward layout, would it even be worth subscribing to. I questioned the credibility of my recommendations in Product Discoveries — especially the ones I don’t own myself.

I also felt like I was veering away from my original intentions of writing a design topics-only publication to a newsletter with a cornucopia of threads, observations and opinions on my mind lately. My subscription inbox was starting to fill up with tons and tons of opinions on AI & design from countless blogs. A good chunk of that writing about AI frankly felt AI-generated or heavily edited by AI (after working so closely with AI for the last 2-3 years, I find that AI writing has some pretty tell-tale signs.)

Amidst this cacophony, I felt a slight Dieter Rams-like intention of going “back to purity, back to simplicity” in what I write about — more authentic thoughts from the unique day-to-day experiences of existing as me.

Then, four weeks since my last issue, I conjectured that a migration from the clunky editing interface of Kit to the more “software that gets out of the way” interface of Substack was what I needed to write more frequently. I was also struggling with growing my newsletter on Kit, and Substack promised to be better on that front. The migration comes at a cost: 1) without paying Substack 50 bucks, it won’t point to my subgrid.design custom domain; 2) The emails will lack the design customizations that I painstakingly made on Kit, and will look like most other Substacks, unless read on the web which I’ve tried my best to customize.

But, writing authentically and consistently is what matters the most, and I’m willing to compromise on some things for that.

So, thank you for being a subscriber and sticking around. If it gets boring, you can always unsubscribe.

—Siddharth

This Sears, Roebuck & Co catalog of modern homes from the early 1900s is fascinating. At that time, Sears was still a mail-order company. In 1906, Sears became the first major retail company to have an IPO (initial public offering). During that era, it continued operating as a humble, but successful catalog business, with lots of major ups and downs along the way. Looking through these homes that are advertised as custom-built, it’s astonishing that you could get a nice custom house with high-quality parts built for about $1000. In today’s dollars, that would be just about $30,000. You could barely get your windows or landscaping done at that price today (in Canada at least!)

Note that the average wage of an employee in 1914 hovered around $800, so you would be expected to spend 1-1.5x your salary on a decent house. Today that’s not possible pretty much anywhere in the Western world. It goes to show how much we have inflated the price of certain assets in our current economy in proportion to wages, despite major technological improvements.

~ That's it for this edition. “Be yourself, as everyone else is already taken.” ~