Agalia Tan

But that’s online dating, I’ve always thought: random and chaotic and terrible and weird and then — with time or patience — transformative.

under capitalism, we all do live on a spectrum of captivity, with access to social and physical and intellectual stimuli unequally distributed. And thus we live on a spectrum of forced introspection, in which we ruminate on our own lives excessively because we do not have adequate access to external stimuli.

In our society, the spaces for adults to play are mostly constrained, for example, to sports, or going to the pub. And opportunities to live a life of imagination are reserved for exceptionally privileged people, like designers, actors, artists and film directors. This lack of imagination in our lives is an existential risk for society and humanity... See more

What I write is all mine, it’s a living thing, it’s an extension of me that wanders out into the world. It is desire turned inwards instead of outwards, focused instead of displaced. It’s a way to access self-knowledge and self-respect.

rather than observing and following online trends, brands are fully capable of creating their own, treating social media culture as its peer and equal, rather than a source of culture-mining. What it achieves is a kind of dignity that is hard to come by in the current climate of incessant algorithm-stroking. It reads as effortless, not desperate. (... See more

These are the run clubs and swim clubs with very robustly branded websites for some reason, websites that greet you with full-width videos of delighted people being very sweaty together. New ventures for “group conversation” or exclusive social spaces or curated clubs with sign-up flows and membership levels that evoke the rigor of a bank account r... See more

We've convinced an entire generation that if work feels hard, they must be doing it wrong.