Dima reads #3
As always at the end of the year, I finish reading what's left in the reader and company reports. The article about link blogs caught my eye - and again a spark of motivation to share my links and recommendations. I'm going to try it again.
Links
The pattern that sticks out is socialisation and its importance in 2024. Strava began its report by saying that running clubs are the new nightclubs, with 58% of survey respondents saying they made new friends through fitness groups. In parallel, Playtomic notes that the number 1 reason (59% of respondents) to start playing padel is socialisation. Then it's Headspace with their mental health report that according to 53% of respondents the number 1 job ‘benefits‘ is ‘Helped me find a community of people with similar backgrounds or lived experiences’. And rounding it out is Duolingo with reasons to learn languages: number one reason to learn Spanish, number two reason to learn English and number three reason to learn French is ‘connect with people’
I used to always look forward to Mary Meeker's reports on internet trends, now they're gone. Dan Frommer is trying to fill the void. The latest report literally screams about the acceleration of social commerce on Tiktok example. Tiktok Shop is bigger than Shein and Sephora (!!!). I realise that this trend is passing me by - as a user I am apparently out of the target audience.
Books
Andrej Karpathy from Tesla posted a list of books he mentally returns to the most. And on his recommendation I immediately started reading ‘Flowers for Algernon’. A cool, unusual scifi (?) about the role of the intellect intersecting with the experience of trauma - while I'm concurrently reading ‘The Body Keeps the Score‘. A perfect book-pairing.
The truth ‘in a healthy body a healthy spirit’ is revealed. The author of the book Brain Energy proves on the basis of numerous studies that this is not just a consequence, but an equality. Metabolism and mental health are more closely linked than it may seem: physical health affects the psyche just as much as the psyche affects the body. Example statistic ‘People diagnosed with depression are 60 per cent more likely to develop diabetes. People with diabetes are two to three times more likely to develop major depression’