The 400-Song Playlist and the Three-Day Hangover
Old-growth Michigan. The family IT rubric. An Uber driver's ancient MP3 player.
The wine-tracking CEO. Start pages, again.
The Map
Michigan was once thick with dense, old-growth forests. White pines, maples, beech, cedar, and many other trees dominated the state.
Then came the logging frenzy of the latter 1800s, when Michigan became America’s prime timber supplier. It was as bad as you imagine. Vast forests, clear cut. The book Wicked Bay City is loaded with sordid tales about lumber workers blowing their earnings and reputations along a stretch of town called Hell’s Half Mile. Quite a read. Quite an era.
But the logger barons didn’t hack through everything. Areas of old-growth remain, like Hartwick Pines State Park.1
(Here’s a list of Michigan’s old growth forests, should you want to visit.)
Michigan’s regrown wild areas are beautiful, no doubt. But the old-growth areas are different. Without a forest reboot, there’s less sameness to the trees’ size and age. That creates a different look, and more resistance to disease and harsh weather.
The variance is a strength.
The Machine
I’m the de facto IT director for a few households these days. I set up routers, root out Sonos speaker issues, and tame misbehaving printers, Macs, and iPhones. I try to get wifi signals to bathe even the most remote corners of a home.
Most of the time, the fix takes just a few minutes2. I find the work oddly and intensely satisfying. Bringing just a little more order to the universe. Making someone’s tech experience a little less turbulent.
A rubric that’s emerging for me: the best use of tech requires pruning. Not more. Not “optimization”. Pruning.
Fixing annoying issues. Using tech that supports habits, goals, and interests, and discarding the rest. If we’re mindful, we don’t need most of modern tech offers. Just the trimmed down subset that serves us.
The Music
I was sitting in the back of an Uber on a steamy Tampa afternoon. The driver was a friendly older guy. He had an ancient MP3 player, plugged in the car stereo, that fired off a random assortment of his favorite songs. Chicago followed The Supremes, who followed Ozzy.
I imagined he plugs that thing in every day and happily lets it serve up what it will, as he battles inside the Thunderdome tournament that is Tampa traffic.
I’m a playlist junkie, collecting and pruning songs by all kinds of categories. Genre: Yacht Rock, Country, Classic Rock. Time: 1980s, late 1990s, 1960s. A lot of curation.
My driver was having none of that. He inspired me to create a 400+ song playlist of my own. Essentially, every song I like from my own music collection, spanning decades and genres. Morgan Wallen and Motley Crue. Marvin Gaye and Mumford & Sons.
The variety creates surprise, even pulling from my own music files, the old and new and disparate intertwined, creating their own ecosystem.
The Muscle
There’s an odd fragility to the health and fitness dialogue on X. Especially amongst men who post on the topic. A recent clip made the rounds in which a younger CEO said three glasses of wine cost him three days of productivity.
Seriously?
Then, a study appears saying no amount of alcohol is safe:
But there’s pushback to the hyper-optimization health movement. We need to live, also. I’m not saying everyone should drink3. I am saying I’ll continue to drink.
What is the real goal of overly stringent health routines? it’s not immortality. It’s the act of chasing purity.
Yes, make mostly good choices. But also, live a little. We don’t last forever, no matter how rigorous a routine Bryan Johnson designs.
The Middle
If you are of a certain vintage, you remember the Internet start page. My Yahoo! was ubiquitous, but far from the only choice. MSN. AOL, of course. And you could build a Voyager Start Page, if you were a customer at the Michigan-based ISP I worked at, Voyager.net:
Man, that’s a nostalgia hit.4
Today, survivors still serve up start pages. Protopage delivers an old-school feel with an easy setup:
Yahoo!’s Scout works similarly.
The appeal of the start page in 2026? It’s a page you shape. That you prune. In contrast, on a social media site, an algorithm shapes the experience for you.
But I got to thinking: what could AI bring to a modern start page? Well, if you use ChatGPT or Claude regularly, it knows you a little bit. And it could render a page for you not just based on your preferred news and information sources, but on your intent. What you might want to see on a morning start page could be different than an evening edition.
In my case, I want news about Apple, AI, Michigan, and local sports and weather. But also: ways to synthesize topics into potential projects or newsletter essays. The AI-powered start page shouldn’t just scrape headlines. It should make useful connections between them and the things I want to get done.
Feels like a fun, straightforward project to tinker with. Kind of like we did at Voyager in 2000, but with a modern twist.
Took a school field trip there in 1985. Drank enough Mountain Dew to make me sick.
Occasionally, painfully, longer …
Obviously. There are many good reasons peopled abstain.
Also, 51 degrees on a February Leap Year day in Michigan? Miraculous.