Agalia Tan

The thing beneath the thing is the process.

The process of humans coming together.

Sharing ideas outside of the cookie-cutter norm.

And making something beautiful.

Because that’s what humans do.

The process is the point.

Because it is only through the process

that a squishy little grey blob

can become

something sublime.

The prescription economy necessarily creates imbalances between those who have a prescription to offer and those who believe they need it. Power and value flow from one to the other. Economies of description—say the moms' group you're part of or the running club you joined—are predicated on the inherent value of everyone's experience, perspective,... See more

Then came the existentialists—Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir—who picked up where Nietzsche left off. They said, “We’re free now. We get to create ourselves.” But wow—what an obligation that is. It’s not just a gift, it’s a burden. Suddenly, it’s up to us to define who we are, how we live, what we stand for.

That’s where Sartre’s quote comes in—possibly... See more

AD: One thing I clocked early on about all this AI stuff is the language around it. When we talk about Google, we say, “I Googled something.” I’m the one doing the Googling. But with ChatGPT, we say, “ChatGPT did it.” We gave it agency pretty quickly. I think that’s really hard to claw back. Most people don’t even realize they’re giving it soul.

“The mere consciousness of an engagement will sometimes worry a whole day.” That’s Charles Dickens. In other words, if you try and break up your day into lots of little chunks of time, your productivity is massively destroyed even though the time available is pretty much notionally the same.

We cannot become more disembodied in an age of technological expansion. In fact, we must become more embodied. Here, we leverage all the modalities of movement that allow us to connect with the core of our being. We also harness our social and emotional wellbeing by becoming more astute at processing how we feel and how others feel.