Brandon Dang

I could experience the vibrancy of my local coffee shop as just an aesthetic, or I could experience it as a hive of fellow humans buzzing with energy, conversations, and dreams. Even if I have my noise cancelling headphones on, I could choose to tune into this energy as something I am part of and be deeply grateful for that.

There is no other way work of artistic worth can be done. And the occasional success, to the striver, is worth everything. The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.

Of this there can be no question — creative work requires a loyalty as complete as the loyalty of water to the force of gravity. A person trudging through the wilderness of creation who does not know this — who does not swallow this — is lost. He who does not crave that roofless place eternity should stay at home. Such a person is perfectly worthy,... See more

In practice, this felt like releasing tension. A healthy inner space was created between me and the dirty kid in my mind. That person wasn’t identical to me, I was not my history. Simultaneously, though, I didn’t need to reject that person, either. This act of acceptance triggered a whole-body relaxation. It was like opening up a lens: unclenching ... See more

A psychotechnology is anything that can alter your relationship with self, from mainstream talk therapy, to all kinds of meditation, to newfangled forms of therapy like IFS, etcetera. Different psychotechnologies will be more or less appropriate to a given individual. Some will be powerful in combination. There is no one “path,” although some tradi... See more

Deep Okayness is not the feeling that I am awesome all the time. Instead, it is the total banishment of self-loathing. It is the deactivation of the part of my mind that used to attack itself. It’s the closure of the self as an attack surface. It’s the intuitive understanding that I am merely one of the apertures through which the universe expresse... See more

It’s disorienting that I don’t really have the experience of “choosing” anymore. It’s also hard to even really imagine the old way of being, which involved mentally simulating some future existence I might want to have, and then mentally flailing against the present moment in a futile effort to drag myself towards that imagined future.

If you’re an expert navigating a novel problem, an LLM won’t imagine a new solution for you. But they become a gift for generalists, who can use them to get up to speed in new domains much more quickly, and resurface and apply knowledge from other fields easily. Generalists can use their adaptability and imagination to work through any “wickedness”... See more