angela.epley

“We want to feel felt. We want to know that the other person is genuinely present with us, that they might share in our emotions, and that they care enough to put in the effort to actually connect.” psyche.co/ideas/why-we...

What technology takes from us – and how to take it back | Rebecca Solnit The long read: Decisions outsourced, chatbots for friends, the natural world an afterthought: Silicon Valley is giving us life void of connection. There is a way out – but it’s going to take collectiv...

Don’t just set boundaries, but cherish the alternatives. www.theguardian.com/news/ng-inte...

How To Think About AI: Is It The Tool, Or Are You? We live in a stupidly polarizing world where nuance is apparently not allowed. Everyone wants you to be for or against something—and nowhere is this more exhausting than with AI. There are those wh…

“Context is everything.” www.techdirt.com/2026/02/10/h...

AI fatigue is real and nobody talks about it | Siddhant Khare You're using AI to be more productive. So why are you more exhausted than ever? The paradox every engineer needs to confront.

“Context-switching is brutally expensive for the human brain.” siddhantkhare.com/writing/ai-f...

Walter Benjamin Explains How Fascism Uses Mass Media to Turn Politics Into Spectacle (1935) Image via Wikimedia Commons In his 1935 essay, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproducibility,' influential German-Jewish critic Walter Benjamin introduced the term “aura' to describe an au...

“Mass Media… turns us all into potential actors, critics experts… and takes art out of the realm of the sacred and into the realm of the spectacle.” www.openculture.com/2026/01/walt...

What is Nick Shirley? Slop doesn’t need to be AI-generated

"The main function of slop is to take something from you: your time, your attention, your trust… Slop is boring, repetitive, and often inexpensive to make — the natural evolution of an internet built for scale and ruthless optimization.” www.theverge.com/news/869824/...

Confessions of the influenced Behind every influencer is an army of the people mired in debt and mass-produced clutter.

"I always have this tension that I'm experiencing," she says. "Is this a choice that I'm making for myself, or am I being influenced...?"
www.theverge.com/cs/features/...

Philosophy in prison is a rowdy, honest and hopeful provocation | Aeon Essays With a class of college students and inmates, teaching philosophy in prison is a rowdy, honest and hopeful provocation

Spelunking Plato's cave with an Inside/Outside balance: aeon.co/essays/philo...

It seems like I'm seeing Socrates and Plato namechecked on the daily, but adding an Infinite Jest reference is such a perfect cherry on top ttps://www.noemamag.com/how-we-became-captives-of-social-media/

Interesting research from Dr. Elaine Aron (of the Highly Sensitive Person framework) on obsessive ranking as a more psychopathic trait (versus linking, which Riane Eisler might attribute to Partnership social dynamics): hsperson.com/revisiting-v...

Though I definitely prefer the moniker Geoism for animistic reasons this Georgeism 101 grounds our AI mania in context notion.moontowermeta.com/moontower-re...

I Never Understood Our Data-Saturated Life Until a Hurricane Shut It Down

"Disasters can sever us, for a time, from what McLuhan called humanity’s 'extended nervous system.' The process of slowly mending your connections to that network is an experience out of time." www.nytimes.com/2025/08/11/m...

I forget we're a minority, but 15-30% still feels low: psyche.co/guides/how-t...

The Alchemy of Embodied Uncertainty Why our best thinking happens when we embrace the unknown with our whole selves

Sat with this one for awhile financialosophy.beehiiv.com/p/the-alchem...

Does using AI dumb you down? A recent study shows that people using AI to write for them experience some negative cognitive effects. Why? Because there's something special about what writing does in your brain.

What if we measure not just brain activity but total body activity? All these studies focus on "mental effort" but there's a clear *embodiment* aspect at play, esp bc emotions and the subconscious are somatic (the body keeps the score), and the heart's exponentially stronger than the head EMFwise

After 5 years co-hosting the Damn Interesting Week podcast, I'm ready to flip the script and be the guest! If you know podcast hosts exploring consciousness, money, media, or systems change - or if you host a show yourself - I'd love to connect.

www.financialosophy.com/conversations

A domestic abuse presentation slide focused on technologic abuse, listing the following examples: rage texting, limiting access to technology, revenge porn/sharing intimate photos without consent, demanding access to social media, online accounts (bank statements, phone records, email, etc.), creating fake accounts to harass or stalk the survivor, making the survivor prove where they are, using apps or technology to track the survivor's location or online activity

Onboarding as a volunteer FinAbility mentor and this slide made me pause and consider how much of this might not be happening in my bodily experience, but the body politic is definitely going through this rn

I'm honored to share I've been accepted to volunteer as a Financial Mentor with FinAbility, a non-profit dedicated to unlocking financial security for survivors of domestic abuse.

It feels incredibly worthwhile to align my efforts with a cause near and dear to my heart: www.finabilityus.org

Tech leaders think AI is smarter than it is because it sounds exactly like what they think is smart, while to everyone else, it sounds exactly like a tech leader trying to look smart.

Wealth vs Capital: The Distinction That Changes Everything Part 1 of 3: The Prosperity Paradigm Shift

Getting geekier and gothier at the substack, this time with multiple dragon references, a money/abundance Thoth tarot deck spread, and my favorite Two Ton Boa track: financialosophy.substack.com/p/wealth-vs-...

"Graffiti and its corporate sanctioned sister art, advertising, are our modern day cave paintings. As Marshall McLuhan put it, 'ads are not intended to be seen but to produce an effect. The cave paintings were carefully hidden. They were a magic form, intended to affect events at a distance.'"

Unwavering Radiant: Keith Haring Graffiti as a folk art.

"So prolific was his artistic protest and promotion that he drew the envy of no less a contemporary than Andy Warhol. 'He was jealous of how Keith was like an advertising agency unto himself,' said the photographer Christopher Makos.'That was the cleverest thing any artist at the moment was doing.'”

The Media's Pivot to AI Is Not Real and Not Going to Work AI is not going to save media companies, and forcing journalists to use AI is not a business model.

"The actual pivot that is needed is one to humanity." www.404media.co/the-medias-p...

Maelstrom Escape Strategies III: Survive, Escape, Avoid

"in our rush to reach

we forget to face

the consequences

of scale and pace"

Maelstrom Escape Strategies II: Behold, the Vortex

"What strategies might we employ to notice what’s happening to us? What’s become habitual? Beneath our notice?"

Casino Lights Could Be Warping Your Brain to Take Risks, Scientists Warn Casino lighting could be nudging gamblers to be more reckless with their money, according to a new study, which found a link between blue-enriched light and riskier gambling behavior.

"The level of blue spectrum light may be activating specific eye cells connected to brain regions in charge of decision-making, emotional regulation, and processing risk versus reward scenarios."

Vanessa Machado de Oliveira on Outgrowing Modernity, AI, and Magic | Team Human Ep. 324 Playing for Team Human today, LatinX professor, and the author of Hospicing Modernity as well as the upcoming book Outgrowing Modernity, my favorite civilizational doula, Vanessa Machado de ...

A healing brew for these historic times: subject-subjectivity cradled in a context of ceremony.

The Wanting Monster: An Almost Unbearably Tender Illustrated Spell Against the Curse of Not Enough Wanting is the menacing margin of error between desire and need. It is the blade that vivisects your serenity, the hammer that shatters your wholeness — to want anything is to deem your life …

"... to want anything is to deem your life incomplete without it. It is a perpetual motion machine that keeps you restlessly spinning around the still point of enough."

Why ‘ocean time’ reveals new ways of seeing the world | Aeon Essays An appreciation of the immensity embedded in the ocean’s cycles offers a way to reimagine our relationship with time

"Thinking about -- or with -- the ocean can help connect us to the great cycles that sustain life on Earth and the pulse of living being and presence that surrounds us."

People are Lonelier than Ever. Enter AI. We’ve long connected through our machines—now we’re connecting to them. On this episode, Daniel Barcay, MIT’s Sherry Turkle, and Hinge’s Justin McLeod discuss AI’s growing role in love, therapy, and c...

Expanding into Context Strategy has never felt more timely.