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PEOPLE IN SYSTEMS DO NOT DO WHAT THE SYSTEM SAYS THEY ARE DOING. University professors chase grants, not student enlightenment. VCs nurture personal b

What the humans like is responsiveness - by Sasha Chapin What the humans like is responsiveness

Surviving…whatever all this is… doesn’t have to mean being left a shell of a human. In culture today, there’s an attempt to make something out of it.

The latest season touches on a similar note — in which Robinson’s neighbor sneaks a pig in a Richard Nixon mask into his home. It ends with an all-too

Extra-Existentialism

The problem (or at least one of the problems) is that the twin edicts to simultaneously optimize your team and life and to be flexible in light of an

But you can’t optimize systems in a context that’s changing, especially if it’s changing in unpredictable ways. Removing inefficiencies when circumsta

Against Optimization

freedom is less about options, and more about self-discipline. True freedom means cultivating a self-governance that frees you from your inclination t

Pennies and deutsche marks disappear, languages cease to be spoken, and once-popular technologies are abandoned. Over time, many hieroglyphs, wax cyli

To anyone in love with the precious, fleeting things of this world, resistance to disappearance seems natural and proper.

“Gnosis should be an experience of your own life, a plant grown on your own tree. Foreign gods are a sweet poison, but vegetable gods you have raised

Market forces incentivise us to get on the property ladder, and then to set fire to the rungs beneath us so that nobody else can climb up. Moloch need

“True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyful

The Science Finally Catches Up: New Research Confirms ADHD as an Evolutionary Advantage, Not a Disease

Among the troubadours, there was a different class of people, called knowms. Thecouncil was told that the knowms had some special skills that may help

information becomes knowledge only through processes of verification and critical analysis.

This is what knowledge decay looks like. Not burning libraries, but a slow, structural dissolution of the connections between claims and their sources

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A good life doesn’t ask you to be good at everything. It asks you to find the small circle where you have unusual leverage, and to be peacefully avera

My father was a Sarkari Babu (government officer with basic salary) his entire life, he was at one job throughout his life. He drove a Bajaj scooter

Oliver Burkeman – Time Management for Mortals

The Nothingness of Money - More to That

How Much is Enough?

when someone tells me to keep writing, it feels like a command to keep living.

Everyone wants to be picked, but no one wants to organize the collective ‘we’. It’s the ‘we’ that creates a school of thought, a movement, a network,

When startups start taking off, the founders usually can't tell what's changed. It's some combination of all the random things they did to make it ta

That is, be systematically ascetic or heroic in little unnecessary points, do every day or two something for no other reason than that you would rathe

Traumatisation is most usually presented as anunassailable, concrete fact, and this is where I need to be respectful. If someone brings a firmconvicti

when the trauma label has been appliedby outside mores – when an event like an explosion, an assault or a sexual event has taken place andour culture

The Nothingness of Money - More to That

Many of us, in pursuit of the spiritual, become woefully neglectful of the physical.

According to him, the word “natural” has become a “sort of a secular stand-in for a generalized understanding of goodness, which in religion you’d cal

Meditation Tips for a Lifetime of Practice

A few lines from my eclipse diary entry, if anyone wants to say them out loud with me: I lovingly and peacefully call all of my energy back to me now

A lot of people are just trying to get to tomorrow and don't have the luxury of getting to think about how good they can be. And so if you are in a pl

yep, we've been doing it at the end of our morning routine so we're usually already sitting down, outside & after meditation, then we just turn to fac

what i had to do was a combination of exposure therapy (spending a bit more than felt comfortable) + emotional work: i’d notice my tendency to choose

Tractors and Computers