Agalia Tan

Starter pack memes reverse engineer the demographic profile: people are composites of products they and similar people have purchased, identified through credit card data and internet browsing behavior tracked across the web.

You’re a person, you’re not something that can be moulded into this aesthetic box. It’s really important to know those who came before you and why you like what you like, instead of just being fed information very quickly and saying ‘This is my personality now’. Your personality shouldn’t be built upon trends. You are the person and you can add to... See more

We can give ourselves permission to make things without those things being perfect. And the fact is, once you get started, you don’t stop. The more you make things, the more you can make things and the more you want to make things.

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

• What’s one word on your mind right now?

• What’s an idea that jumped out at you from what you just heard?

• What did this remind you of?

• Share one way you might make this better. 

• On a scale of 1 to 5, how confident/excited/clear are you on what you just heard?

• Raise your hand if you felt ____ about this. Raise your hand if you felt _____ about this. (Bonus

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AND, we humans love to unwrap things. It’s both the tantalizing feeling of anticipation and the manifestation of care and time invested by the gift giver — that someone bothered to make this thing itself an experience. It contains a before and an after, a transformation and a threshold.

This doesn’t mean there aren’t beautiful digital treats. But... See more

the more we have the confidence and ability to make things from what we already have, the less we feed the capitalist system that doesn’t care about us or the people making our stuff or the planet that our rampant consumerism is actively making uninhabitable.

Psychologists have a name for this: the upper limits problem . Each of us carries an invisible ceiling for how much joy we’re willing to let in. Cross it, and the alarms start to sound, so we pick fights, invent crises, fall suddenly ill, anything to tug life back down to the safer, lukewarm bath of “fine.”