Agalia Tan

value practice over perfection.

If someone likes you best when you are vague, it means they fell in love with what they painted over you, not the actual contours of your selfhood. So when you begin to articulate your values, preferences, boundaries, they may pull away, because they never met you in the first place. The work of becoming specific, then, is also an act of... See more

our national sickness: an unyielding belief in technology’s ability to allay our suffering.

Build, don't babble

Acknowledging this bias or incompleteness is perhaps the most important part of the work.

Answers are mere theory.

Productivity software is a gigantic industry (lots to unpack there). And within the category, there seem to be two schools of thought: breadth of function of range of integration. i.e. "software that can do everything you need” or “software that can connect to all your other software” —— These two approaches are fueled by the same thing: “how can... See more

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.”