CS Lewis predicted the impact of social media 50 years prior to its existence:

> And if in your spare time you consort simply with the people you like, you will again find that you have come unawares to a real inside: that you are indeed snug and safe at the centre of something which, seen from without, would look exactly like an Inner Ring.

Wisdom truly does transcend time and generations.

Then as a young adult, I happened across abolition of man by accident (honestly, it might even have been HN where I first came across the link). This is one of the most fantastic things that I've read. And this was the start of my discovery of cs lewis' serious writings.

It's been a while since I read them, but I would put forward: the abolition of man, screwtape letters, the great divorce, and the problem of pain.

As a christian, I don't really buy all of lewis' arguments. And he even goes on record in one of his essays about how you shouldn't read too deeply into what his actual beliefs are based off his essays (which feels kind of like a cop out, but whatever). However, he was able to take a line of reasoning and then build a compelling body of text around it. The experience is impressive.

Even if you have very little sympathy towards christianity, I would suggest at least giving abolition of man and screwtape letters a shot. Abolition is all about the possibility of society becoming a machine to destroy humanity, and screwtape letters spends a lot of time trying to convince you that a non-human intelligence is going to be non-human.

[1] - I think the idea was that this was christian fiction that children should be happy to read. No necessarily that anyone was excited per se. But more like, youngish christian families wanted to build up a wholesome peer environment for their children and this was a christiany media that they didn't have to worry about.

- Erich Fromm, The Art Of Loving. It's about how love (romantic, interpersonal) is not rosy but hard, hard work. All of Fromm's writing is amazing, but this one (for me) had the most personal impact. Another great one is Fromm's The Sane Society.

- Kishimi/Koga's The Courage To Be Disliked. It's classified as self-help, but it's more a pop-psychology summary of Adlerian Psychotherapy. We can choose not to be the product of trauma, or our surroundings. We may get pushed into negative corners by our upbringing, but then we get too comfortable in those negative corners to push ourselves out. The title alludes to a person who has no friends and has a negative image of himself, maybe he's that lonely because he is afraid of being rejected/disliked. He is lonely and miserable, but he is comfortable in the loneliness. It takes courage and hard work on yourself to move out of those holes.

- Hillman/Ventura's We've had a Hundred Years Of Psychotherapy And The World's Getting Worse. In a nutshell, the problem is not always with the individual, often it's just the environment; mindfulness will only get you so far if the house is on fire.

- Becker's The Denial Of Death. We know we die but we don't realise that. How do we generate meaning in the presence of death? There are 'good' (a life project, pushing societies' boundaries) and 'bad' ways (hedonism, drugs etc.). What are the necessary illusions we should create for ourselves to keep pushing?

Everything (really) by Erving Goffman. A beautiful synthesis is [1] which I might recommend over the original material (sacrilege!) if you were only going to read one thing.

We (as Western Civilization, maybe) have still (imo) not come to terms with the bounty that is William James. I had negligible interest in religion, but if you're into the weird mix of psychoanalysis, sociology, and deep thought, I cannot recommend [2] enough. I read it over the course of a year, annotated the margins like the faithful annotate their holy texts (do they do that?) and many evenings still open a page, read randomly, and ponder.

I had never really considered what an institution really was, or how it came to be, or what was implicit / assumed in interacting with it. This classic prompted much fruitful imagining [3] although it's the most difficult reading of them all.

Given your tastes, you may have slogged through a bunch of philosophy and hated it. The good news (or maybe the bad news) is that this is super fun and easy to read and gives you most of the same nutrients [4] as certain schools, and has obvious contemporary relevance besides.

This scratches a proximate itch [5].

I'm a little sheepish bc all of these (except for maybe [5]) are deep classics and are, in a sense, obvious for that reason. And yet I have a PhD in a related field and never actually _read_ any of them, so maybe they won't be obvious to you either :)

[1] https://www.amazon.com/Goffman-Reader-Charles-Lemert/dp/1557...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Varieties_of_Religious_Exp...

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Social_Construction_of_Rea...

[4] https://www.amazon.com/Supersizing-Mind-Embodiment-Cognitive...

[5] https://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/alien-phenome...

Another rec: Mark Fisher's Capitalist Realism, on how we can't imagine alternatives to capitalism any more.

Byung-Chul Han's Psychopolitics, on how modern neoliberalism turned us into self-exploiters. There's no 'upper class' suppressing the 'lower classes' anymore, we've moved to self-exploit, to push ourselves as our own horrible boss, without a structure to rebel against, with no chance of escape.

https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/11/21/the-categories-were-ma...

https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2011/12/a-muscu...

Specifically, it starts by assuming that in the face of challenges like being born in poverty, the average person would not overcome them through will or effort alone. As a result, it cultivates empathy for those who fail to transcend their circumstances. It then implies that the solution is changing the environment, not the individual.

But this is circular reasoning. It assumes that it's all the environment, and concludes with it being all the environment.

What the authors is doing is pointing out is that assuming you would act different is unhelpful. It is far more helpful and interesting to look at a situation, and examine what are all the things that would cause you to to end up in those circumstances despite your best effort. What this does is forces you to overcome the human minds tendencies towards lazy evaluation, to really break down all the forces acting upon the situation these individuals encounter.

This is actually very similar to a technique useful for startups. Assume you have failed some number of years from now. What are some of the reasons you might have failed?

I would concur. Three ways out of poverty would be sports, art/music and crime (bad idea). Knowledge, luck and the right mindset and are important too. There is the book Rich Dad Poor Dad about the mindset part.

It's something I think about often: what does it take to convince millions of people to walk into a graveyard? It just completely flies in the face of self preservation, kind of like the Aztec sacrifices

It's hard to think about this and not turn into a cynic

https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2009/10/07/the-gervais-principle-...