How Social Media Shortens Your Life, AI Defensibility, and Building Enduring Companies

Unspoken expectations.

Good morning

In today's edition, among other things:

• How Social Media Shortens Your Life

• AI Defensibility: From Speed to Staying Power

• Enduring Companies in the Age of AI

• The Paradox of Expertise

• Open-Weights vs. Open-Source Models

• AI Is Polytheistic, Not Monotheistic

• Incompetency Framework: The Truth About Skills-Based Hiring

Onwards!

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How Social Media Shortens Your Life

We rarely think about time as a consumable good. Yet it’s perishable, non-renewable, and unlike money you can’t earn it back. Pretty obvious. This makes it strange how casually we give it away. Social media doesn’t just take your time; it changes your sense of what time is.

The theft is very subtle. You don’t notice a few seconds disappearing in a checkout line, so why notice a few minutes in an app? But the architecture is deliberate. As Sean Parker put it when describing Facebook’s original design philosophy:

How do we consume as much of your time and conscious attention as possible?

This is why a half-hour on Instagram feels like a sip of water: you don’t remember taking it. Gurwinder calls this the 30-minute ick factor, “the sickly feeling you get after looking up from your phone and realizing that 30 minutes have passed without you realizing it.” He adds:

A social media feed is like the Lethe, the mythological river of forgetfulness, in whose waters lost souls sought absolution—and received it in the form of oblivion.

There’s another trick: what you remember isn’t the time you spent, but the moments that broke the pattern. Narratives and novelty stick; the rest is blur:

The way you perceive the passage of time depends less on the actual amount of time that’s passed, and more on the amount of your experience that your brain remembers… when you can’t remember much of what you did, your brain concludes that not much time passed, and so it seems like your life was shorter.

Scroll long enough and you erase the peaks and valleys that mark time in memory. Life starts to feel shorter because fewer days stand out. And when time feels short, the brain often misreads it as time well spent.

This is one of social media’s most insidious tricks: the more of your life it takes, the more it makes you feel like it’s giving you.

The result is a kind of mental inflation: each unit of time buys you less experience. Worse, the damage doesn’t end when you close the app. Constant interruptions fragment your ability to pay attention to anything else, corroding the quality of your off-screen hours. As he writes:

If you spend enough of your attention on that which you’ll quickly forget, you’ll end up quickly forgetting your life.

The fix isn’t simply “less screen time.” It’s adding back texture: right-angle turns in your routine, conversations with real stakes, activities that will be remembered next year.

You can’t store time. But you can store moments. And moments, unlike hours, are what actually add up to a life.

Source: Gurwinder.

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AI Defensibility: From Speed to Staying Power

One of the most interesting discussions I had this year was with Aydin Senkut, founder of Felicis. Very inspiring and smart. Here’s from his Linkedin post:

Abundant capital doesn’t get evenly distributed, it gets concentrated. Ruthlessly !!

Escape velocity attracts capital gravity. It no longer matters whether a company is public or private. If you're growing fast enough – 100x user growth, $0→$100M ARR in a year, redefining categories – capital will find you. From every direction. VCs, crossover funds, strategics, sovereigns. The laws of capitalism guarantee it.

The total pool of companies that reach that threshold is shrinking. The ones that breakaway are shipping in beast mode. A year of progress now takes months. What took months now takes days. And days will soon collapse into hours.

So, it’s ruthless, fast-growing, sharp-elbow market out there. it’s not enough to scale fast — you need to build a fortress, not just sprint through the gates. How?