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Once upon a time, the power of a strong social media following could make a career. It still can, of course, but to a much, much lesser extent. I won't bore you with a recycled narrative of the shitty algorithm effect, although relevant in this case. Suffice to say, a follow count is only worth a fraction of what is portrayed—especially today. This is down to visibility in feed (or lack thereof), attention diversity, content delivery type, output frequency, and the need to constantly adapt to platform trends. When once a following of 10,000 could turn your life around with organic reach, today a following of 100,000 barely even makes a dent in the pursuit of success. Obviously you can take this with a pinch of salt, as subject matters vary widely—commercialism vs. the arts vs. social and societal endeavours. But there are dark arts you can master if you're armed with the right knowledge, time, money, and commitment—such as engagement hacking, ad spending, and algo manipulation. Problem is, most people don't have that armoury or budget to experiment because social media is considered a supplementary ingredient to their work. So if social followers and gatekeeper platforms are unreliable, what’s the alternative? The answer lies in building something more direct—where your audience isn't at the mercy of ever-changing platform rules. The humble email. The most underrated, yet most reliable way to reach an audience—through the direct, unfiltered power of a newsletter. No interference, no restrictions, no risk of vanishing from their feed. Sure, there's always a chance of landing in a junk folder—but if someone subscribed intentionally, you're already miles ahead of fighting for visibility in a cluttered feed. An email list grows slowly, but it's built to last. Unlike social platforms, where a tweak in the algorithm can wipe out years of effort, your email list is yours. Even if you switch newsletter providers, you can take your entire audience with you—no loss, no setback. And I'd take one engaged email subscriber over 100 passive social followers any day. I know this isn't some revolutionary take—it's just a gentle reminder that your value isn't measured by follower counts or social media engagement. Platforms come and go, algos shift overnight, and attention is more fragmented than ever. But what remains consistent? Email. And there's a lot to love about it. It's focused, distraction-free, and completely yours to shape however you want. Whether it's a single plain-text paragraph or a visually rich marketing message, you have full editorial control. And if email isn't your thing? Newsletters can also be followed via RSS, making them even more accessible to those who prefer an open-web, no-inbox approach. If you're curious to see this in action, I'm experimenting with my new project FFF®. I don't even know what it's going to include yet, but you can nevertheless subscribe here: buttondown.com/fff
I've been mulling over my presence on social media for a while now. There's only three platforms I actively use, but honestly, it feels like there should only be one — and that one, Are.na, breaks the mould of a typical social media space. You can find me on Instagram, X, and Are.na. My excuses for sticking around on the first two are pretty weak. Instagram is where I have the most personal connections, but those connections would probably survive just fine if I stepped away. Mostly, it's a massive distraction and a bit of a time sink. X (Twitter), on the other hand, has always been more of a professional tool to connect with the design industry. But lately, it's become less inspiring and more of a chore: endless political noise courtesy of Elon, generic web and SaaS trends that are neither original nor distinctive, and product designers churning out the same tired formula — Figma, React, dark mode, gradients, neon colours, animations, animations, and more animations. And then there's the onchain chatter, which tries so very hard to sound revolutionary and edgy. That said, I'm not writing off the onchain space just yet; I'm just unconvinced by, well, any of it. OK, X rant over. Safe to say, I should probably leave that place sooner rather than later. That leaves me with Are.na — the best place on the internet today. Sure, there's other tools that let you save and organise content, but Are.na hits different. It has character, a good energy, and feels like a mindful space brimming with creativity that inspires me every single day. It feeds my research and design over time, and connects me with people, ideas, and knowledge from often-overlooked corners of the web that I can then collect either privately or publicly. Even if I check the site multiple times a day, there might only be about two new things for me to discover in my feed, but I can be led down a rabbit hole just the same — it's full of surprises. I love that Are.na has no algorithms and no incentive to post anything other than what you genuinely want to save to a channel. It could be a fleeting thought, an idea you're circling, something you've made yourself, a useful tool, a website that's been nicely designed, or a product you've wish-listed. There's no ego and no dopamine hit encouraged by other socials. It's just about unobtrusively sharing good stuff with structure, devoid of noise you can't control. And because it's strongly supported by its community, Are.na feels like it's here to stay — free from pandering to money-hungry goblins. Here's to channel-hopping.
As the year draws to a close with gloomy December days compensated with lots of artificial lighting, it's not surprising that many people take the time to reflect on their recent past — what we've managed to achieve, what we learned, what we failed in, where we went, and what we experienced. Did you take steps forward this year — or even strides? Did you regress? What did you get up to? I'm genuinely curious, so feel free to email me. For me, it was a positive, albeit unspectacular, year — one I'm very grateful for. I'd like to share some highs and a few lows with you before I begin to focus on the year ahead. I visited Iceland for the first time, explored incredible landscapes, and soaked in the hot springs. I travelled to Trentino in northern Italy with a small group of friends where we climbed, dined, and yapped under the sun. I visited Mallorca with my partner for a very relaxing trip on a beautiful island. I saw the aurora borealis for the first time, which happened to be in my home city (and not Iceland). I made a small breakthrough with my climbing by sending my first 7A+/V7 boulder. 099 SPLY had its best year to date in terms of sales and product releases. I received a double digit pay rise. I made a decent profit when I sold my Bitcoin. I saw friends thrive. My grandmother turned 95. I archived Minimalissimo® (not sure if this is a good or bad thing — but it's an end of an era). I missed out on several career opportunities. I caught myself comparing my progress to others too often — something I'm working on. I started a new creative lab named FormFeelingFunction®. I became an uncle for the second time (hello, Kobi). I started learning to swim properly (and I'm still trying!). Looking back, I've realised it's often the small successes and simple joys that stick: travelling, family milestones, or breakthroughs in climbing and swimming. Next year, I'm hoping to focus more on those types of moments, evolve my design career, and worry less about the comparisons.
Lately, I've been thinking about my inner compass — the one that guides me through work and daily life. I've touched on my design ethos before, but this feels like something more personal. It's a lightweight breakdown of who I am, both as a designer and a human, shaped by the values, mantras, principles, people, and quotes that influence what I create and how I try to live. But consider this compass a living thing — subject to change always and forever. Values in design Intuition Simplicity Lightness Accessibility Utility Experimentation Values in life Patience Perseverance Compassion Community Slow living Self-discipline Self-care Trustworthiness Mantras Less, but better. All limits are self-imposed. Love the process more than the result. Respect doesn't require shared beliefs. Learn something from every person and every moment. Courtesy costs nothing. Principles in design Form follows feeling, just as form follows function. Create for clear and intuitive experiences. Craft with care for the details. Be influenced by taste, not by trends. Design for tomorrow, not today. Build for people, not for plaudits. Always question additions — only include what is necessary. Principles in life Before the how and when, ask why. Be translucent, not transparent. Get mud on your shoes. Practice saying no. Invest in what is living. Cultivate habits that nurture your growth. Comparison is the thief of joy. Live within your means. Give back as often as you move forward. Exercise your freedom of expression. Quotes in design "Design is not the act of amazing an audience with the novelty of forms or materials; it is the originality that repeatedly extracts astounding ideas from the crevices of the very commonness of everyday life." – Kenya Hara "True design lies in a realm counter to trends." – Sori Yanagi "Good design is a matter of discipline. It starts by looking at the problem and collecting all the available information about it. If you understand the problem, you have the solution. It's really more about logic than imagination." – Massimo Vignelli "Things get more refined as you make mistakes. I've had a chance to make a lot of mistakes. Your aesthetics get better as you make mistakes. But the real big thing is: if you're going to make something, it doesn't take any more energy—and rarely does it take more money—to make it really great. All it takes is a little more time. And a willingness to do so, a willingness to persevere until it's really great." – Steve Jobs "Minimalism is not a style, it is an attitude, a way of being. It's a fundamental reaction against noise, visual noise, disorder, vulgarity. Minimalism is the pursuit of the essence of things, not the appearance." – Claudio Silvestrin "We need to aim at essential things, removing every redundant effect, every useless flowering. Elaborating a concept on mathematical bases, on fundamental ideas, on elementary structures. We strongly need to avoid waste and excess." – A G Fronzoni "A designer who wants to achieve good design must not regard himself as an artist who, according to taste and aesthetics, is merely dressing up products with a last-minute garment. The designer must be the creative engineer. They synthesise the completed product from the various elements that make up its design. Their work is largely rational, meaning that aesthetic decisions are justified by an understanding of the product’s purpose." – Dieter Rams Quotes in life "One day or day one. You decide." – The Minimalists "I do believe that you don't need more than is essential, and that is hard to define. It depends on how you live — you need a certain amount of things for life to go smoothly, though if you have more than you need it gets in the way." – John Pawson "There's an infinite amount of materials with which to build our lives — but sometimes the best way to build is to subtract." – Joshua Fields Millburn "Structure isn't a rule — it's a rhythm." – The Minimalists "Don't use an excuse for every stupid thing. There is not too short, too tall, too heavy, too warm, too wet, too humid. There is just one excuse: too weak. So don't use excuses, try harder." – Alexander Megos "Successful communication depends on how well we listen, rather than how well we push our opinions on the person seated before us." – Kenya Hara "Obey the principles without being bound by them." – Bruce Lee Where does your compass point to? Send me an email to yours. I'd love to read it.
More in life
One small but meaningful shift to make hard conversations a little bit easier
I apologise that the site has been a bit slow since it suddenly turned into a travel blog. My plan was to roll out my poor man’s CDN before we left, but I ran out of time. It’s definitely not just a nginx GeoIP lookup that refers image requests to a different cloud instance running in Toronto depending on where you’re coming from. I’m trying to use the computer less on this trip—if you can believe it—but I’ll see what I can do to improve this a bit. By Ruben Schade in Sydney, 2025-04-24.
Theanine is an amino acid that occurs naturally in tea. Many people take it as a supplement for stress or anxiety. It’s mechanistically plausible, but the scientific literature hasn’t been able to find much of a benefit. So I ran a 16-month blinded self-experiment in the hopes of showing it worked. It did not work. At the end of the post, I put out a challenge: If you think theanine, prove it. Run a blinded self-experiment. After all, if it works, then what are you afraid of? Well, it turns out that Luis Costigan had already run a self-experiment. Here was his protocol: Each morning, take 200 mg theanine or placebo (blinded) along with a small iced coffee. Wait 90 minutes. Record anxiety on a subjective scale of 0-10. He repeated this for 20 days. His mean anxiety after theanine was 4.2 and after placebo it was 5.0. A simple Bayesian analysis said there was an 82.6% chance theanine reduced anxiety. The p-value was 0.31, but this is a Bayesian blog—this is what you'd expect with a sample size of 20. A sample size of 20 just doesn’t have enough statistical power to have a good chance of finding a statistically significant result. If you assume the mean under placebo is 5.0, the mean under theanine is 4.2, and the standard deviation is 2.0, then you’d only have a 22.6% chance of getting a result with p<0.05. I think this experiment was good, both the experiment and the analysis. It doesn’t prove theanine works, but it was enough to make me wonder: Maybe theanine does work, but I somehow failed to bring out the effect? What would give theanine the best possible chance of working? Theanine is widely reported to help with anxiety from caffeine. While I didn’t explicitly take caffeine as part of my previous experiment, I drink tea almost every day, so I figured that if theanine helps, it should have shown up. But most people (and Luis) take theanine with coffee, not tea. I find that coffee makes me much more nervous than tea. For this reason, I sort of hate coffee and rarely drink it. Maybe the tiny amounts of natural theanine in tea masked the effects of the supplements? Or maybe you need to take theanine and caffeine at the same time? Or maybe for some strange reason theanine works for coffee (or coffee-tier anxiety) but not tea? So fine. To hell with my mental health. I decided to take theanine (or placebo) together with coffee on an empty stomach first thing in the day. And I decided to double the dose of theanine from 200 mg to 400 mg. Details Coffee. I used one of those pod machines which are incredibly uncool but presumably deliver a consistent amount of caffeine. Measurements. Each day I recorded my stress levels on a subjective 1-5 scale before I took the capsules. An hour later, I recorded my end stress levels, and my percentage prediction that what I took was actually theanine. Blinding. I have capsules that either contain 200 mg of theanine or 25 mcg of vitamin D. These are exactly the same size. I struggled for a while to see how to take two pills of the same type while being blind to the results. In the end, I put two pills of each type in identical looking cups and shuffled the cups. Then I shut my eyes, took a sip of coffee (to make sure I couldn’t taste any difference), swallowed the pills on one cup, and put the others into a numbered envelope. Here’s a picture of the envelopes, to prove I actually did this and/or invite sympathy for all the coffee I had to endure: After 37 days I ran out of capsules. Initial thoughts I’m going to try something new. As I write these words, I have not yet opened the envelopes, so I don’t know the results. I’m going to register some thoughts. My main thought is: I have no idea what the results will show. It really felt like on some days I got the normal spike of anxiety I expect from coffee and on other days it was almost completely gone. But in my previous experiment I often felt the same thing and was proven wrong. It wouldn’t surprise me if the results show a strong effect, or if it’s all completely random. I’ll also pre-register (sort of) the statistical analyses I intend to do: I’ll plot the data. I’ll repeat Luis’s Bayesian analysis, which looks at end stress levels only. I’ll repeat that again, but looking at the change in stress levels. I’ll repeat that again, but looking at my percentage prediction that what I actually took was theanine vs. placebo. I’ll compute regular-old confidence intervals and p-values for end stress, change in stress, and my percentage prediction that what I actually took was theanine vs. placebo. Intermission Please hold while I open all the envelopes and do the analyses. Here’s a painting. Plots Here are the raw stress levels. Each line line shows one trial, with the start marked with a small horizontal bar. Remember, this measures the effect of coffee and the supplement. So even though stress tends to go up, this would still show a benefit if it went up less with theanine. Here is the difference in stress levels. If Δ Stress is negative, that means stress went down. Here are the start vs. end stress levels, ignoring time. The dotted line shows equal stress levels, so anything below that line means stress went down. And finally, here are my percentage predictions of if what I had taken was actually theanine: So…. nothing jumps out so far. Analysis So I did the analysis in my pre-registered plan above. In the process, I realized I wanted to show some extra stuff. It’s all simple and I think unobjectionable. But if you’re the kind of paranoid person who only trusts pre-registered things, I love and respect you and I will mark those with “✔️”. End stress The first thing we’ll look at is the final stress levels, one hour after taking theanine or vitamin D. First up, regular-old frequentist statistics. Variable Mean 95% C.I. p theanine end stress 1.93 (1.80, 2.06) vitamin D end stress 2.01 (1.91, 2.10) ✔️ difference (T-D) -0.069 (-0.23, 0.083) 0.33 If the difference is less than zero, that would suggest theanine was better. It looks like there might be a small difference, but it’s nowhere near statistically significant. Next up, Bayes! In this analysis, there are latent variables for the mean and standard deviation of end stress (after one hour) with theanine and also for vitamin D. Following Luis’s analysis, these each have a Gaussian prior with a mean and standard deviation based on the overall mean in the data. Variable Mean 95% C.I. P[T better] end stress (T) 1.93 (1.81, 2.06) end stress (D) 2.00 (1.91, 2.10) difference (T-D) -0.069 (-0.23, 0.09) 80.5% ✔️ % diff (T-D)/D -3.38% (-11.1%, 4.71%) 80.5% The results are extremely similar to the frequentist analysis. This says there’s an 80% chance theanine is better. Δ Stress Next up, let’s look at the difference in stress levels defined as Δ = (end - start). Since this measures an increase in stress, we’d like it to be as small as possible. So again, if the difference is negative, that would suggest theanine is better. Here are the good-old frequentist statistics. Variable Mean 95% C.I. p theanine Δ stress 0.082 (-0.045, 0.209) vitamin D Δ stress 0.085 (-0.024, 0.194) ✔️ difference (T-D) 0.0026 (-0.158, 0.163) 0.334 And here’s the Bayesian analysis. It’s just like the first one except we have latent variables for the difference in stress levels (end-start). If the difference of that difference was less than zero, that would again suggest theanine was better. Variable Mean 95% C.I. P[T better] Δ stress (T) 0.0837 (-0.039, 0.20) Δ stress (D) 0.0845 (-0.024, 0.19) difference (T-D) -0.0008 (-0.16, 0.16) 50.5% ✔️ % diff (T-D)/D 22.0% (-625%, 755%) 55.9% In retrospect, this percentage prediction analysis is crazy, and I suggest you ignore it. The issue is that even though Δ stress is usually positive (coffee bad) it’s near zero and can be negative. Computing (T-D)/D when D can be negative is stupid and I think makes the whole calculation meaningless. I regret pre-registering this. The absolute difference is fine. It’s very close (almost suspiciously close) to zero. Percentage prediction Finally, let’s look at my percentage prediction that what I took was theanine. It really felt like I could detect a difference. But could I? Here we’d hope that I’d give a higher prediction that I’d taken theanine when I’d actually taken theanine. So a positive difference would suggest theanine is better, or at least different. Variable Mean 95% C.I. p % with theanine 52.8% (45.8%, 59.9%) % with vitamin D 49.3% (43.2%, 55.4%) ✔️ difference (T-D) 3.5% (-5.4%, 12.4%) 0.428 And here’s the corresponding Bayesian analysis. This is just like the first two, except with latent variables for my percentage prediction under theanine and vitamin D. Variable Mean 95% C.I. P[T better] % prediction (T) 52.7% (45.8%, 59.6%) % prediction (D) 49.3% (43.4%, 55.2%) difference (T-D) 3.3% (-5.7%, 12.4%) 77.1% ✔️ % diff (T-D)/D 7.2% (-10.8%, 27.6%) 77.1% Taking a percentage difference of a quantity that is itself a percentage difference is really weird, but fine. Discussion This is the most annoying possible outcome. A clear effect would have made me happy. Clear evidence of no effect would also have made me happy. Instead, some analyses say there might be a small effect, and others suggest nothing. Ugh. But I’ll say this: If there is any effect, it’s small. I know many people say theanine is life-changing, and I know why: It’s insanely easy to fool yourself. Even after running a previous 18-month trial and finding no effect, I still often felt like I could feel the effects in this experiment. I still thought I might open up all the envelopes and find that I had been under-confident in my guesses. Instead, I barely did better than chance. So I maintain my previous rule. If you claim that theanine has huge effects for you, blind experiment or GTFO.
Insiders worry that Hollywood is the next Detroit—but it's actually much worse than that