WESTENBERG
Field Notes on the Machine Age. Click to read WESTENBERG, by JA Westenberg, a Substack publication with tens of thousands of subscribers.
- Posts
- 179 from 24 Jan 2026 to 7 Nov 2026
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- about daily (179 in the last year)
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- personal blog
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2026 179
- Price Your Work for the Shit You’ll Actually Want to Do
- When Did Open-Source Become a Twitter Grift?
- Why I'm Building Now (Even If It Gets Wiped Out)
- Why You Can't Admit You're Wrong (Even When You Know It)
- Rockets vs. Todo Lists
- The One About my Agency
- Why I’m Building a One-Person, Billion-Dollar Agency
- Never Underestimate What Someone Will Do to Protect Their Ego
- How to Face the Long Later
- As God Is My Witness, I Shall Hope for the Best
- English Is a Shitty Programming Language With No Compiler
- My First Weekly Update!
- Agents Are Cheap. Agency Is Everything.
- The Second Ambition
- How to Give Up Your Life’s Work
- Why Normal People Still Laugh at AI
- Ambition is a Moral Virtue
- It’s Not That Deep
- The Time Is Never Right
- How to Like Things on Purpose
- For the Love of God, Don't Become Dashboard-Brained
- Death by Upholstery
- Optimism Is a Moral Obligation
- The Pain Is Coming. Choose When You Pay.
- Would You Still Want It If No One Could See?
- How to Stop Being Outraged
- The Spotlight Rule: Nobody Is Thinking About You as Much as You Think
- How to Decide What Not to Do
- Unbruised Prosperity Makes You Weak
- The Next Breakthrough Is Probably Already Fifty Years Old
- You are not the exception to the arc
- Outrage is Our Last Campfire
- Don't Read Everything You Believe
- Your Edge Is Patience, Not Genius
- The Death of Sincerity (And How to Reawaken It)
- Why We Need a Return to Élan
- We Live in an Age of Miracles and We're Too Bored to Notice
- The Age of the Third Brain
- The Orchestrator's Dilemma
- Congratulations on Your Unprecedented Crisis
- The Art of Agency Laundering
- How to Build a Roadmap for the Life You Actually Want
- You Are Not An Idiot for Believing Things Can Get Better
- The Intellectual Circle Jerk and Why We Can't Stop
- Neo-Etiquette Basics: The New Rules of Being Human
- Kant’s Adult Is Extinct.
- Epictetus Ran a Better Productivity System Than Any App You’ve Bought
- A Mind That Stops Beginning Starts to Decay
- The Tyranny of “Ongoing Harms”
- Don't Become a Productivity Tourist
- The Heretic's Guide to Conviction
- I Deleted My Calendar Link. And I’m Never Going Back
- 5 Rules for a Second Brain You’ll Actually Use
- Heretics for Hire
- Why 500 Words Beats 5,000 in the Age of AI
- Your Book Body-Count Is Worthless
- Never Let Yourself Graduate.
- You Are a Peach Tree. Beareth Thou Peaches.
- You Won't Make It. It Makes You.
- The Case for Minimum Viable Faith
- Avoidance Is a Short-Term Loan with Predatory Interest
- Stop Trying to Build a Unicorn. Start Cockroachmaxxing.
- Everything is Lonely
- Burn the Origin Story They Gave You
- Fuck you. Pay me.
- Hating Marvel Movies is Not a Personality
- Nobody Wants Your Newsletter. You Should Write it Anyway.
- Hating Marvel Movies Is Not a Personality
- The Indie Hacker Economy is a Pyramid Scheme
- How to Make Something People (Actually) Give a Shit About
- Read More. Read Often. Read Every Day.
- The Great AI Double Standard
- Why the Internet Finally Turned on Naval
- The 4-Hour-Work-Week is over
- The “Permanent Underclass” is a myth
- You are not a product
- Your best thinking shouldn't stay trapped in Slack
- Humans Don't Want Infinite Content. We Want Common Ground.
- Don’t pick a writing niche. Find the one only you can own.
- Infinite choice is the curse of the AI era, and you already hate it
- How to escape the Guru x Simp trap and actually learn
- How to journal like a Roman Emperor (the Audience of Zero method)
- I built Kerouac: GitHub contributions for writers
- The 4,000-year-old lesson on how to accept death
- The bread paradox: why convenience always wins, and why SaaS isn’t doomed
- You can actually buy happiness. You're just buying the wrong crap.
- The performance of busyness is the dumbest Ponzi scheme of all time
- Given the alternative, I find myself quite ready to die
- Pascal would have thrown away his iPhone
- Why keeping your options open is making you miserable
- The Question Luxury Brands Don't Want You to Ask
- The Two Longevity Hacks Silicon Valley Can’t Sell You
- I'm Begging You to Leave Your AI Note-taker at Home
- Good Taste is Free. Insecurity is Expensive.
- In 5 years, nobody will give a damn about AI-detectors.
- The Extreme Is the Easy Way Out
- Defensibility Through Giving a Shit
- How to Live Without Options - and Why It's the Key to Happiness
- Comparison is a con
- Video: "Fucked" does not exist.
- There is no such thing as f**ked.
- The “Don’t Have Kids” Argument Has Been Wrong for 1,800 Years
- You Should Just Be Normal (About Everything)
- Can You Still Build a 100-Year Company?
- Just Be Normal About Things
- The Real Imposters Don’t Feel Like Imposters
- In pursuit of desirable difficulties
- AI-indecision is a recursive trap. Don't get stuck.
- Why SaaS Will Outlive Your Obituaries
- Be thou not pilled
- The Costco theory of the internet
- How I Run a Solo 6-Figure Agency Using a Moleskine Notebook
- Why I can't stand the word "driven"
- Nobody is destined for greatness.
- How to be inspired without copying
- Position or Perish: The Narrative Blueprint
- Position or Perish: The Narrative Blueprint
- Fear is information.
- On Pseudo-Markets
- NVIDIA Goes to Zero.
- The war between fast and legitimate is here
- Emotional regulation is a dying art.
- Outrage is letting someone else set the frame
- On wintering.
- Only the Obsessed Should Ship
- The Loop: everything has happened before, and everything will happen again
- Warren Buffett's Schedule Is Useless To You
- The Tier-1 Supplier Problem
- Why prediction markets are a sure sign that our civilisation is in decay
- Why Every YouTube Channel Looks the Same Now
- Why Your Second Brain is Dead Weight
- The Present Moment Is Gone. Here's Exactly When We Lost It.
- How we lost the living Now
- Generative Overload Is Killing Your Productivity
- Stoicism Has a Fatal Flaw Nobody Talks About
- Competitive Pessimists are the Dumbest Smart People in the Room
- The Noble Path
- Sometimes powerful people just do dumb shit
- The Internet Is a Content Mill and We're All Inside It
- Optimism is not a personality flaw
- Denialism Is Not Skepticism. Here's the Difference.
- Why I quit "The Strive"
- Collaboration Is a Lie. Ownership Is Dead. And Your Standups Are Theater.
- I Run a Business With Zero Employees and AI Does the Boring Parts
- The VC-Funded Company Is an Obsolete Organizational Form
- "Passive Income" Destroyed a Generation of Entrepreneurs
- The AI writing witch hunt is idiotic
- Notes on going solo: celebrating 6 years of Studio Self
- The AI writing witchhunt is idiotic
- This is your life. You only get one. Automate it at your peril.
- Marc Andreessen is wrong about introspection
- Everything's Casino
- Why Sweat Equity Doesn't Work for AI Startups
- The Noble Path
- A soft-landing manual for the second gilded age
- The GTM Engineering Playbook
- Your anonymity set has collapsed and you don't know it yet
- Everything is (going to be) awesome: why Citrini is wrong
- Everyone in AI is building the wrong thing for the same reason
- The unbearable weight of cruft
- Git slop means we need to bring back guilds
- The empire always falls
- AI twitter's favourite lie: everyone wants to become a developer
- "Won't Fix" self help
- Communities are not fungible
- The pitch deck is dead. Write a pitch.md instead.
- Your personality has been focus-grouped into mediocrity
- Working Notes on Software Marketing
- The return of the wax seal
- The Coherence Premium
- Your Life is the Sum Total of 2,000 Mondays
- The Gutenberg Parenthesis is Closing
- Your Brain Is a Server. The Discourse Is a Botnet.
- AI Tools Won't Fix Your Life
- Living Next Door to Moloch
- Why Intelligence Is a Terrible Proxy for Wisdom
- How to Read More Books in 2026
- Elden Ring Solved a Problem Nietzsche Identified 150 Years Ago
- How to Debug Your Life