Agalia Tan

When survival and gain become the only legible orientations, the common world - as Arendt calls it - goes untended.

Philosopher Martin Buber speaks of two types of relationships with the world around us. There is ‘I and Thou’, where we encounter other beings as connected, interwoven and relational to our own lives. Then there’s ‘I and It’, where beings are othered as objects, detached from ourselves and something to be used for our own ends. The voyeuristic... See more

The act without intimacy is the wager. We watch world events unfold from behind the glass, financially invested in outcomes whose only legible meaning comes from whether we win or lose. When context, people and feelings get removed from the equation, what gets surrendered is not only money but the very capacity to be implicated in the world you’re... See more

Not by optimizing for optionality—that cult of keeping doors open that has dominated career discourse for far too long—but by doing the opposite. By closing doors. By choosing the one thing that makes you come alive, and going so deep into it that joy and intensity become indistinguishable. Liu won because she stopped optimizing and started wanting... See more

Here is the virtuous cycle that most people have not yet noticed:

1. The more things you do for yourself—for pleasure, for curiosity, for the sheer joy of it—the more you discover what you actually like.


2. The more you discover what you like, the more you develop taste.


3. The more taste you develop, the better you become at identifying and doing good,

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Whoever wants to achieve something great must not seek to satisfy or please anyone but himself in his work: as soon as he fishes for the approval of others, it will not be anything great.

Part of why people are unsure of where to walk is that AI is severing the deepest identity loop in the Western world: who you are equals what you do for money.

The Protestant work ethic was a load-bearing wall for the Western psyche. We are dismantling it without a blueprint for what comes next.

For centuries, the equation was simple. You work. You... See more

The belief that doing takes more resources than deciding what to do has been the default operating mode for basically all of human life. The how has always been so expensive that the what barely matters. You didn’t need to be good at wishing because you were never going to get most of what you wished for anyway. That’s why ‘default to action’ (vs

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I quote him at length because his thinking deserves the room.