Agalia Tan

We cannot keep buying the fallacy that everything meaningful should feel effortless, including the relationships that make life worth living.

The work doesn't vanish when you find your passion.

The work, hopefully, becomes workable.

We've made "work" synonymous with suffering, when it should be synonymous with building. Tending a garden requires effo... See more

To sabotage the mindless saboteurs who are following the CIA’s manual, here are some new instructions:

01. ELI5 (Explain Like I’m Five) : Play dumb. Require over-simplification in the recommendation. Request or provide a super basic answer to help strip jargon and complexity. If it doesn’t make sense to a five year old, it won’t ever make sense. Ma... See more

Once upon a time, when checking and scrolling were not an option, there existed so much interstitial space. The gap between one activity and another was an open field, a transitional territory.

Many concepts can be explained concisely, in simple language, and we should all strive for clarity. But the aphorism is a mistake, for a number of thoughts approximate the carpenter’s craft, and to meaningfully reveal them requires time and attention. Sometimes these cannot simply be told to another at all, they must be grown. For a topical example... See more

I think there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest.

When you see work untether from reward in foundational systems like labor, finance, and media, you have to reorient your understanding of the market and the consumer. The future of business and culture is not merely about the value these systems unlock—it’s about the behaviors and beliefs they lock in.

We're locking into a very different system that... See more

"It's remarkable how often the real problem is not what happened, but how it was communicated."