Agalia Tan

if you’re very rich, the city becomes a service. someone else handles the friction. time stretches. the noise dulls. you pay to avoid eye contact. the city feels smaller, more obedient. you experience new york as a series of well lit interiors.

youre doing drugs because youre working a series of part time jobs or because youre a wall street demon.... See more

26. Escapism is an art.

In a polyreality world, escapism is no longer about fleeing reality—it’s about moving fluidly from one reality to the next. Romantasy, fantasy, alternate worlds, retreats, gaming, virtual reality, social media, AI: today’s physical and digital technologies increasingly aim to become indistinguishable from magic. But this is... See more

Love is the drug, friendship the cure.

A growing number of younger people are abstaining—not only from alcohol, but also from sex. Romantic relationships, too, seem to be losing their cultural primacy. Single-person households are rising, and the notion of heterofatalism is becoming increasingly mainstream, especially among women. In this shifting... See more

Certainty is an act. Uncertainty is an art.

We are obsessed with the need to control, to minimize or erase uncertainty. But “uncertainty isn’t a void,” Isabella Martin writes, “it’s the wellspring of evolution and regeneration. Resilience doesn’t live in checklists or abstract models. It requires more from us than our ability to calculate. It is a... See more

So practice the lost art of losing.

Which three things would you save if your house were on fire? It is important to grasp what is essential to us. And to recognize that losing is our natural predicament. We are always losing. Rock bottom can be a tabula rasa from which to create something beautiful (that might not last).

5. Optimization diminishes our humanity.

Our myopic obsession with efficiency and the optimize-everything (including our self) mindset forces us into consistent, productive, linear beings when in fact we are human because we are not. We need businesses to design for non-linear, non-binary, inconsistent, incoherent selves.

4. Conversation allows us to think together.

Philosophy and literature encourage us to question everything and ask, in particular, the big “untimely questions.” If we enter them not with the aim to convert the other but to possibly be converted ourselves, conversations can unlock our best collective thinking and serve as the source code for... See more

1. Original thinking begins at the origin.

As we imagine the future, it’s worth returning to the past—honoring the masters and elders, drawing from ancient philosophy and Indigenous wisdom, practicing age-old rituals, and seeing artificial intelligence as ancestral intelligence.