Hey Everyone,
Welcome back to The Chomp—your weekly dose of the best content from the internet and beyond, designed to expand your mind and get you thinking. If you’ve been sent this email and you’re not a subscriber, you can join by clicking on the blue button below. With that, let’s dive into it.
Quick Bite
Three Waves of In-Home & On-Demand Fitness Screenshot Essay: Recently, screenshot essays have been catching fire on Twitter and across the web. Eric Stromberg, the Founder of Bedrock Capital, started the trend with the launch of his ‘Screenshot Essays’ newsletter last month. Patrick O’Shaughnessy’s Invest Like the Best podcast has further popularized them under the moniker ‘BizCards’.
Designed to be succinct and to the point, screenshot essays have quickly become one of my favorite new mediums for learning. In place of an article this week, I created the below as a follow-up to my recent essay on the in-home and on-demand fitness market. This is an area that I’m continuing to get more and more excited about.
Let me know if you’re a fan of this format by commenting at the bottom of the post, and I’ll create more screenshot essays in the future.
Deeper Dive
Six Ways to Think Long-term: A Cognitive Toolkit for Good Ancestors: “The tug of war for time is the defining struggle of our generation. It is going on both inside our own minds and in our societies. Its outcome will affect the fate of the billions upon billions of people who will inhabit the future. In other words, it matters.”
The need to think long-term is far and away one of the most popular pieces of advice for living a ‘successful’ life. No matter what industry you point to, there is someone at the top who will attribute their success to playing the long game. Shortsighted thinking doesn’t get you where you want to go—you need to structure your decisions around long-term goals. There’s a reason this advice is so common. It’s because it works.
Yet, despite the common acceptance of this advice in our personal lives, our society as a whole struggles greatly with long-term thinking. Our digital world is structured on the short-term gratification of clicks, likes, and shares. Centuries before the digital boom, short-term thinking propelled the Industrial Revolution. The endless push to expand GDP and increase our quality of life has pushed our planet over critical thresholds of carbon emissions, biodiversity loss, and other planetary boundaries.
However, this obsession with the here and now has led to remarkable advancements in technology, healthcare, and many other facets of life. I'd wager that most people wouldn't be willing to trade in modern conveniences like running water, electricity, and the internet for life prior to the Industrial Revolution. There’s a compelling argument to be made that our short-term thinking over the past couple of centuries was worth it.
This struggle over short-termism and long-term thinking has led us to what Roman Krznaric has dubbed the 'tug of war for time'. In his eyes, this is the defining struggle of our generation. If we press forward with a short-term mindset we could find ourselves in a civilizational freefall. As famed historian Jared Diamond has argued, ‘short-term decision making’, coupled with an absence of ‘courageous long-term thinking’, has been at the root of civilizational collapse for centuries.
To avoid this fate, we need to start thinking long-term. And there’s no better time than now. COVID has created immense hardship and numerous challenges across the globe; however, it’s also presented us with a unique opportunity to pause and reset some of our long-established societal habits.
In this timely article, Krznaric walks us through his list of six ways to think for the long-term. By adopting this mindset at a societal level, we can positively impact the lives of the billions upon billions of people who will inhabit the earth from us in the future.
Chum Bucket
Antitrust Politics (Stratechery)
Oatly: The New Coke (Divinations)
Tweet of the Week
Song of the Week
Apple Music Link
Books
Currently Reading
Recently Read
With finishing Master of the Senate, I’ve now made it through ~2,750 pages of Robert Caro’s masterful The Years of Lyndon Johnson series. Clocking in at 1,200 pages, Master of the Senate is one of the most detailed and impressive chronicles of the U.S. senate ever published. While I encourage, and highly recommend, reading the entire series, Master of the Senate can easily be read on a standalone basis. It’s a phenomenal read that will leave you with a working knowledge of how our legislative system truly works. As I have said before, and I’ll say again, Robert Caro is the best biographer to ever put pen to paper. (5/5)
Parting Thoughts
This Week in History
On August 6, 1945, the United States became the first and only nation to use atomic weaponry during wartime when it dropped an atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The blast was equivalent to the power of 15,000 tons of TNT and instantly killed ~80,000 people. (Source)
“A wise man rules his passions, a fool obeys them.”
— Publilius Syrus
If you found something that piqued your interest this week, please help me out in expanding the reach of The Chomp by forwarding it along to a friend or sharing it with others in your network. Until next week.
-CM
This newsletter is created and authored by Cody McCauley and is published and provided for informational purposes only. The information in the newsletter solely constitutes Cody’s own opinions. None of the information contained in the newsletter constitutes—or should be construed as—investment advice.