Agalia Tan

In his own fine post on baseball and optimization a couple of years back, Rob Horning cited Melissa Gregg who observed that “personal productivity is an epistemology without an ontology, a framework for knowing what to do in the absence of a guiding principle for doing it.”

craft circles

Recently I learned about Lacan’s concept of jouissance, which I’ve come to understand as pleasure that becomes so intense it’s hard to distinguish from pain. I’m fairly certain this describes the high of answering anxiety’s biggest questions: binging on information, hoarding social validation, buying stuff, so much stuff, crafting five-year plans.... See more

Studios, he said, are not “interested any longer in supporting individual voices that express their personal feelings or their personal thoughts and personal ideas and feelings on a big budget. And what’s happened now is that they’ve pigeonholed it to what they call indies.”

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

Surround yourself with people who think big. And if you can’t find them, listen to their podcasts. You’ll live a lot differently.

Here was an existence, brand new to our species, that was defined by tightly controlled routines, bounded by regular shifts and rewarded with regular pay. Individual workers became easily replaceable parts in a massive machine.

Today, when we’re still so young we’ve barely had the chance to register we’re alive, we’re pushed into an education system... See more