Johnathon

Introducing Synnoia: a place to read books with other people, where the conversation stays anchored to the page instead of scattered across group chats and apps. Read together, discuss in the margin.

@jhendersonYT I'll be celebrating!

Today is my birthday. To celebrate, please read a good book.

@wickedguro Appreciate this. Thanks for the inspiration!

> Age 21, released from the army, got a job building WordPress websites at $2,025 per month. > Age 23, moved to another job with a higher salary, working with PHP and Laravel at $3,037. > Age 25, moved to another job working as a dev team leader with JS, routing-controllers, NestJS, $5,738. > Age 27, became a digital nomad, same job, part-time $2,869. Building Thai Tours, a B2C tour-booking app, failed miserably. > Age 29, Covid happens, kills the app (luckily), trying stuff, created Linvo, sold tons of LTD, and crashed the company by not getting a subscription with a huge debt in the bank. > Age 30, Going back to my country, signing unemployment, working on Linvo v2, 24/7 in a coworking. And met cool founders. that tried to recruit me, I declined. > Age 31, was in too much debt, started working for them as head of growth (marketing) - full time, at $11,476, and learning about open-source and open-source marketing. Doing no entrepreneurship, just learning. Brought them to 31k stars. (best decision of my life, learned so much stuff) > Age 33, Quit. Building an open-source consultancy, high ticket, with 4 clients, each $4k per month. Get so much stress, my veins pop out. And running Gitroom. > Age 34, Building Postiz while doing consultancy for one client, pushing everything I have learned with open-source, getting to $3k per month + $4k for consultancy. > Age 35, Bringing Postiz to $132,527 MRR. Your life can flip in a second with everything you have learned over the years. never give up. keep learning. try stuff. burn. burn out. Give up life. Find new strength. build something awesome.

This thought is getting at something I think is deeply true. On the one hand, tradition isn't merely a set of facts or rules passed down through time. It's also not just an aesthetic or emotional preference for how things should be done that has calcified in groups of people by happenstance. Ultimately, I think tradition is a living vision and relationship with the world that informs every aspect of life and thought, and it is transmitted through time in the rearing of children, the bonds of friendship, and the navigation of life's difficulties by people in concrete communities.

“Tradition, of course, is a sequence of experiences and associations. We might derive laws from textual arguments by analogy but we instill significance from emotional comparisons.” @MendelHorowitz

@kisstheblade_ Not only are they great, but they're also books.

My position on the great books is that they're pretty great.

@resistancemoney Students should read the greatest books so that they're prepared to discern the wheat from the chaff in the great books.

Thesis: students should read great books Antithesis: but students need historical context to understand great books Synthesis: students should read even more great books, to provide historical context for other great books they read

@reed_barnes Sounds like Claude is about to level with you.

how you know claude's about to give you some absolute bullshit

Definitely think this is true. One of the confounding factors in the present world is the hyper-specialization of knowledge. The average person can function well as a broadly learned generalist, but because formal fields of study are now so distributed and deep, there has arisen a perceived need for dependency upon specialists when this is often unnecessary in most practical circumstances.

Immanuel Kant explained this exact reality, noting that most people choose to remain in a state of mental immaturity simply because it is convenient to let others take on the difficult burden of thinking. He explicitly stated, "It is so comfortable to be a minor. If I have a book that thinks for me... I have no need to think." By letting figures like doctors or teachers command their choices, people inadvertently outsource their own intelligence. This constant reliance reinforces a deep dependency, conditioning the mind to fear the apparent dangers of independent thought. The result is a lifelong, self-inflicted childhood. They become completely incapable of functioning without a master, permanently relying on external guidance and paralyzed by the fear of making their own decisions.

As a father and someone who also likes to create things, the transferable skills in both directions are surprising.

@mralexthomas Protein for the soul.

Sun + caffeine + stogie = protein

@hthieblot Sounds like something AI would suggest putting on your resume.

I just reviewed 3,000+ LinkedIn profiles for our summer program and learned that apparently every student on Earth is an AI researcher now.

@bestbooksb90892 Books have a strange way of finding us at the right time.

fact: the right book at the right time can change everything

@the_culturist_ Absolutely. Reading and developing a deeper vision of the world, especially within a community, is one of the most fulfilling and beneficial paths for the meaning-starved person.

Only 7% of adults are part of a book club. I firmly believe that joining a reading group is the best thing you can do in 2026 to resist the rot of our age. This account deserves a follow.

@EntryLevelRebel This is a promising development, and is also what has motivated me to try to create a tool to facilitate it!

Book clubs aren’t just for wine-loving moms anymore. Young people are inventing cool new ways to build communities around books buff.ly/wNeoNrH

@OrthodoxLurker My barber, attempting to make safe small talk: “So, you following the World Cup?” Me: No, who’s playing? My barber:

Idk what’s going on with the world soccer thing

@AugustusDelano “Blessed are the pure in heart: for they shall see God.” One of the many instances where Christ says something that appears simple on the surface but contains unfathomable depth.

Christ says the eye is the lamp of the body. The saints understood this not merely as physical sight, but as the direction of the soul What you continually look upon gradually shapes who you become. The greedy man sees self-gain everywhere. The fearful man sees threats. The lustful eye sees objects. The envious see what they lack. While the pure of heart learn to see God in everything, in everyone, everywhere. Pay attention to what occupies your gaze. Your attention reveals your treasure, and what you treasure reveals your heart.

@pensandpoison @athenaeumbc A concise and apt definition!

The Western canon is not a collection of old books. It's a 2,500-year debate about what it means to be human.

@athenaeumbc And you realize that it’s probably a good idea to understand what people thought and argued about in the past so that your engagement with current human thought isn’t an ignorant, half-baked recreation of a wheel that doesn’t spin properly!

If you read enough great literature, you eventually realize that most of life's important questions have already been asked.

@nikitabier This principle sort of just applies to life in general.

The Timeline you’re reading now would be shocking to the person you were 5 years ago. And 5 years from now, the Timeline you’re reading today will seem quaint.

@Electrarythm I’ve done something similar to this with poetry before. It’s reliable for memorization, and it’s also a brilliant way to understand a text deeply!

Instead of starting at an wall to fix your attention span, this exercise daily. It was developed in the early 1900s by William Walker Atkinson in his book The Power of Concentration. The exercise is called the Sentence Drill. Read one short sentence from any book, then close it and try to write the sentence down word for word from memory. Once you can do that reliably, move up to two sentences. Then three. Then a small paragraph. The first time you try it you'll realize how loose your reading actually is. You'll get the gist, but you'll miss exact words, change "and" to "the," skip a comma, swap an order. This exercise forces you to actually see the words, not just glide over them. Your mind has to hold the exact shape of a sentence long enough to reproduce it. Do this once or twice a day. Within two weeks you'll feel a significant difference, as it strengthens your attention span, strengthens your memory, and makes you pay more attention to detail, a very rare skill nowadays.

@AugustusDelano What a brilliant series of books to read.

Last month, i finished Dostoevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and read Shakespeare's Macbeth, Tolstoy's Death of Ivan Ilvanich, and Camus's The Stranger I'm now focusing on St Augustine's Confessions, which i started slowly reading in December, and no novel compares to how efficacious this has been for my internal prayers He writes with such grace, objectivity, and humility that presents a mirror for your soul to see itself more clearly And the way he intimately speaks of God working within his life, has opened my eyes to new ways in which God is intently working in mine, and for that i could not recommend this book enough