you don’t need a massive dose of a drug to see results, you need the smallest dose that produces the effect you’re looking for. Personal choices work the same way. Micro-doses of self-betrayal scale into entire identities.

You think you’re discovering yourself, excavating some essential core that was always there waiting to be found, but you’re actually constructing yourself

Benjamin Franklin kept a ledger where he tracked his progress on thirteen virtues he wanted to cultivate. Temperance, silence, order, resolution, frugality, industry, sincerity, justice, moderation, cleanliness, tranquility, chastity, and humility. He treated character as a project, something you chose and refined and measured against your own... See more

You can prefer anything. You can spend an entire afternoon organizing your taste into a more palatable format and feel like you’ve done something meaningful when really you’ve just rearranged the surface of your life without touching anything underneath.

We’ve confused consumption with identity in a way that would have been incomprehensible to previous generations. Your Spotify Wrapped feels like it’s revealing something profound about your soul, your Amazon cart seems to document your values, your aesthetic era, your carefully curated feed, the books stacked on your nightstand that you may or may... See more

identity doesn’t work like archaeology at all, rather it works like architecture.

We were raised on algorithms deciding for us, institutions claiming to know better, self-esteem culture telling us we’re already perfect exactly as we are, political movements insisting identity is predetermined by categories we were born into, and therapy language that frames every flaw as trauma rather than choice.