You are allowed to care about people who don’t care about you, and even people who dislike you. The way you feel about someone else can be totally decoupled from how they feel about you. In fact, uncovering your capacity to love people who will never fully reciprocate it is the definition of grace.

You should pay special attention to the thoughts that gnaw at you despite them being against your self-interest to think.

You basically don’t need to worry about being too kind or too chill. If you’re the kind of person who worries that being a little more relaxed or emotionally open will destroy your whole life, you could probably stand to relax and be more emotionally open.

You should pay special attention to the thoughts that gnaw at you despite them being against your self-interest to think.

Revealed preference is a stupid concept, because it treats the self as unified. “If I did it, I must have wanted it” — maybe, or maybe you’re a conflicted parliament of sub-agents with diverging priorities.

The most important thing to hire for is deeply giving a fuck, and no amount of money will get someone who doesn’t care to care. This means you should pay people enough that it’s easy for them to say yes, but not enough that it’s hard for them to say no.

You can go through a lot of relationships and experience a lot of flavors of admiration and obsession and limerence — in other words, lots of things that kind of feel like love — without experiencing real love. (This is either terrifying or reassuring, depending on your perspective.)

“Every strange thing you’ve ever been into, every failed hobby or forgotten instrument, everything you have ever learned will come back to you, will serve you when you need it. No love, however brief, is wasted.”

Loneliness is not necessarily a feeling that requires a response.