## Colophon tags:: url:: https://www.personalcanon.com/p/everything-i-read-in-february-2025?publication_id=2160572&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=dr99n&utm_medium=email %% title:: everything i read in february 2025 type:: [[clipped-note]] author:: [[@personalcanon.com]] %% ## Notes > This kind of reading-around an intimidating intellectual figure is very useful, I think—it’s a way of working up the courage to actually approach them. — [view in context](https://hyp.is/_jmPjP6TEe-MsocvQFka0Q/www.personalcanon.com/p/everything-i-read-in-february-2025?publication_id=2160572&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=dr99n&utm_medium=email) > everything i read in february 2025 — [view in context](https://hyp.is/Gbca1v6UEe-ey-fXofZeLA/www.personalcanon.com/p/everything-i-read-in-february-2025?publication_id=2160572&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=dr99n&utm_medium=email) ⬆️ date:: [[2025-03-11]] > So: What’s the book itself like? Well, it’s a hard book to sum up—she touches on so much (including: the problems of modernity; old/new definitions of privacy; the unpredictability of political action). But here are 5 memorable things I got from it:Arendt’s arguments are very rooted in Greek and Roman conceptions of the good life. She begins by criticizing the idea that the vita contemplativa (centered around introspective inaction) is better than the vita activa (which Aristotle and others treated as a negative example of being too restlessly active). Arendt champions the vita activa, which for her has 3 parts: labor, work, action.Labor is anything you do to sustain your life on a basic, biological level, like eating. Work is something you do to make a more durable, extrinsic thing: designing and building a chair, for example. Action, for Arendt, is specifically political action, and is inherently a public and social act. You can’t act in isolation; you’re always acting in situations full of other people, who can respond to your action by debating, agreeing, disagreeing, enacting, blocking, &c. For Arendt, labor is necessary but dull work that makes humans just like any other animal. Work involves more distinctive human traits and the creation of more enduring meaning—designing a chair, for example. But action, to Arendt, is to be the thing that makes human life significant and important.She has an extremely funny passage where she basically says: I’m about to criticize Marx, but I’m not like other Marx critics!2She also has a beautiful passage on how poetry, of all the art forms, is the “closest to thought.”3 — [view in context](https://hyp.is/Ib2QAv6UEe-E-wsXfHsVTA/www.personalcanon.com/p/everything-i-read-in-february-2025?publication_id=2160572&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=dr99n&utm_medium=email) > On Gen Z’s double disruption. kyla scanlon has an excellent deep dive on Gen Z’s perceptions of the economy, and how young people are reacting to the “double disruption…of AI-driven technological change and institutional instability” that makes conventional career paths much more unstable than a generation ago (or even a half a decade ago!). — [view in context](https://hyp.is/fQChIP6UEe-11ksK7X6NaA/www.personalcanon.com/p/everything-i-read-in-february-2025?publication_id=2160572&utm_campaign=email-post-title&r=dr99n&utm_medium=email)