Posts by Collin Jones

Government secrecy is real, and sometimes it continues long after the point of justification. 

Often, the most important victories in any conflict are the ones made internally, the ones that never make the news.

The turn toward vinyl, CDs, and film photography, for example, isn’t watermarks of cultural regression. In fact, it’s the opposite. It’s a sign that our culture – at least artistically – hungers for something more authentic. More imperfect. More human.

Writing is one of the last acts of sustained thought most people engage in. If writers hand even that over to the keyboard – and then, gradually, to AI – something structural is lost. Not just a skill. A habit of mind.

There’s a moment, familiar to anyone who has spent any time on social media, when the endless scrolling stops feeling like leisure and more like labor. The feed never ends. Neither does the unease.

If someone is willing to gossip with you, they’re willing to gossip about you.

Satan isn’t hiding out in the things that already make us uneasy. He’s working in the places where we’ve stopped asking questions.

At some point, irony stopped being a tool with which to diagnose the culture and became the personality of our culture. It crept into our conversations, our art, our politics, and eventually into the way we talk to those we love.

The world has always run amok. The wise person is simply the one who stops being shocked by it.

Refusing to engage with every issue is the real counterculture. And the truth is that most of the time, we lack enough information to take a well-informed position.

Digital minimalism isn’t about opting out of the world. It’s about meaningfully engaging with the real world again, leaving behind the decaying and corrosive Digisphere – a sad simulacrum of reality that has kept us chained to our devices for far too long.

The student loan crisis didn’t appear overnight, and it won’t disappear through denial or slogans. Borrowers deserve honesty, not false promises, and future students deserve a system that doesn’t trap them before their careers even begin.

When productivity is grounded in purpose, it creates something lasting. When it's just motion for its own sake, it collapses under its own weight.

The AI debate isn’t about embracing or rejecting it, but about learning enough to navigate a future where it can’t be ignored.

Screwtape’s commentary suggests that the most dangerous state isn’t ignorance but complacency. A person who believes they’re well-informed but has never examined their assumptions is especially susceptible to subtle influence.

Perhaps what we need in 2026 is to let go of the annual pressure to overhaul ourselves, and instead embrace the quieter but more powerful project of habit formation.

If we wait until external economic forces are perfect before we take our finances seriously, we’ll never achieve financial freedom.

As we progress through the Christmas season, I invite you to consider, as Solomon did – sitting comfortably in the midst of the paradise of his kingdom – that the material world, with all its appeal and shimmer, has an expiration date.