Up Periscope!

This tickled me!

Came across this art installation, Liza Lou's Kitchen, at the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC. It's a kitchen made of tiny glass beads, that artist Liza Lou did, taking 5 yrs. to complete, from 1991 - 1996.

My favorite part is the sink.

pesach

rosh hashanah

simchas torah

sefirah

after the nine days

lag baomer

tu bishvat

bonus: purim

when you need those 18 minutes on Friday

entering the holiday season

2) this is a very badly-conceived question unless you're literally only asking like. KIDS. Because that is such a HUGE gap to the point of the question being laughable. A 13yo, the youngest age someone can have an account on tumblr to vote on this poll, would need to have a 52yo friend to vote "yes". By the time they're 16, they'd need to have a 64yo friend. the 18-24 demo is (i believe) the largest on the site. I don't think most 18-24yos have friends in the 72-96yo range.

I'm not saying that's impossible, obviously, but like... it's VERY unlikely. Plus once you pass 29, you officially can simply no longer have a friend 4x your age, given that the oldest (age independently verified) living person is 116.

(side note but shout out to Jeanne Calment of France, 1875-1997, oldest recorded and independently verified person to ever live, at 122 years. She lived on her own until she was 110, met van Gogh when he moved to her hometown of Arles, France when she was a teenager, and recorded a spoken word musical album shortly before she died. Absolutely fantastic.)

Somewhere along the line, we decided that any repeated behavior, any source of pleasure, any coping mechanism, any habit that isn’t monk-like and productivity-optimized must be labeled an addiction. You like scrolling art before you create? Addiction. You watch comfort shows after work? Addiction. You check your phone in line at the grocery store? Addiction. You drink coffee with breakfast? Addiction. The word has been stretched so thin it barely means anything anymore, except “a behavior I personally disapprove of.”

Addiction is not “I enjoy stimulation.” It is not “I have habits.” It is not “I seek input before I produce output.” Addiction is a specific, devastating pattern of compulsion, harm, loss of control, and often self-destruction. It dismantles relationships. It corrodes trust. It hijacks the reward system so thoroughly that survival itself becomes secondary. It is not equivalent to liking Pinterest boards or needing music to focus.

When everything becomes addiction, nothing is. The language gets diluted, and with it, the gravity of what actual addiction is. People who have clawed their way out of substance abuse know the difference between compulsion and preference, between destructive dependence and deliberate engagement. Collapsing those distinctions into a trendy moral panic about “dopamine” is not enlightened. It’s sloppy. Unserious, even.

There’s also something deeply puritanical about it. The 2020s seem obsessed with pathologizing pleasure. If something feels good, it must be suspect. If it captures your attention, it must be hijacking your brain. If it isn’t explicitly productive, it must be rot. We’ve replaced older moral frameworks with neuroscience-flavored shame, but the tone is the same: you are wrong for enjoying things.

What bothers me most is how casually the word is thrown around in creative spaces. If you gather inspiration through music, images, movement, conversation, suddenly you’re “stimulus addicted.” If you can’t brute-force a novel in a silent white room with no input, you lack discipline. Never mind that many artists throughout history have relied on immersion, community, environment, and cross-media inspiration. Now it’s framed as weakness, as though the only legitimate art is produced under self-imposed sensory austerity.

This framing flattens nuance. There is a difference between avoidance and incubation. There is a difference between doomscrolling to numb out and deliberately engaging with material that fuels your imagination. There is a difference between compulsively chasing a hit and consciously choosing input that enriches your work. But nuance doesn’t trend. Alarmism does.

There’s also a strange individualizing move happening here. Instead of asking why people are exhausted, overstimulated, underpaid, isolated, or burnt out, we zoom in on their coping mechanisms and label them addictions. Instead of examining structural monotony, economic precarity, and social fragmentation, we scold individuals for having “bad dopamine habits.” It’s easier to diagnose people’s scrolling than to confront the conditions that make endless scrolling appealing.

Calling everything an addiction also erases agency. It suggests that people are perpetually hijacked by their brains, incapable of intentional choice unless they purge all sources of easy stimulation. That’s not empowering. It’s infantilizing. Adults are capable of enjoying things without being enslaved by them. Adults can have rituals, comforts, and creative processes without it being pathology.

When I hear the word “addiction” tossed around to describe normal human behavior, it doesn’t sound like insight. It sounds like moral grandstanding dressed up in pop psychology. And for those of us who have actually lived through the wreckage of substance abuse and fought to reclaim control, it feels like watching something serious get turned into a meme.

For public libraries, one of the ways we secure funding year to year is lending. Governments don’t want to fund more books if they’re not being used and the way we measure use is by issues. Regardless of whether you read it or not, whether you have it for a day or a month, if you issue it to your library card, we get the stats! It makes the library look good!

When people discuss the importance of using things, such as special plates, candles, special clothes- they will say that it's best to use them all the time, and that this makes each day special or something like that.

Which is only part of the picture if you ask me.

It's good not to hoard things forever, but if you use everything all the time, it also leaves certain special times as kind of indistinct from anything else. Like having a Christmas tree up all year kind of takes something away from it.

So here's my rephrasing: special things should have a concrete time of use, not an abstract one.

If you have an outfit you love but have it dedicated to only wear once a year on a specific day? Totally fine! You are using it, and it is contributing something to your life.

If you have plates that you'll only use 'for a special occasion' but haven't touched them in years? Evidently you don't know how to recognize a special occasion and should try and think of more specific qualifiers.