Brian Sholis

- "Squashed evaluations: When an entire rich form of activity gets evaluated through one tiny window, then the importance of whatever’s in-frame gets over-exaggerated — and whatever’s outside of that frame gets swamped."

* "The self-honesty required here isn’t a one-time thing, it’s an ongoing process.* You may find that doing the things you once did is no longer congruent with your inner climate. This gives you, roughly, two choices—either you flow with who you’ve actually become, or you slowly descend into a hollow parody of what you once were."

A thoughtful essay about how our online identities—even when our default mode is misdirection or obfuscation—are visible to the platforms we use, and by extension to capitalism and its prerogatives.

* "[Writing] should feel like work rather than labor."

* “The 10 Club is a group of 10 people you want to work with later in life, and every member should be kind, ambitious, and generous.”

* “The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life: a diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural... See more

- “… a clock is anything that undergoes irreversible changes: changes in which energy spreads out among more particles or into a broader area.”