humanity
All she had done was record a story—or, as she had put it, things she had actually witnessed—that she possessed inside her, and it just so happened that she had used words to do it. She might just as well have used something other than words, but she had not come across a more appropiate medium. (...) And yet, the sentences and paragraphs that
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To find a deeper sort of freedom in surrendering to temporal constraints, instead of always dictating how things unfold.
—Oliver Burkeman
Four Thousand Weeks, 185
I have this framework in my mind that as we go forward on this automation / AI curve, every human skill will either become extinct, art, or sport. Extinct when machines absorb it. Art when humans still do it because we care about the person, story, or meaning. Sport when we watch humans test their limits — often for its own sake. We like to see
... See moreHuman beings aren’t meant to be optimized. We are meant to be in relationship. In conflict. In care. In community. And community, here, doesn’t mean constant harmony. Because, ew, that’s not real life, nor should it be. Community comes with burden, it comes with inconvenience, it comes with conflict. But somehow, we’ve deluded ourselves into... See more
Gloria Alamrew • Healing is Making Us Mean
In ten years, much of life will look the same. We’ll still be ourselves, just with more leverage in our hands, and hopefully with health as the area of deepest progress. I’m not convinced progress keeps moving in an exponential or even straight line. More likely, it flattens and then jumps.
- Anu Atluru
I’ve experimented with AI in every facet of my writing to understand it. I’ve found it’s most helpful in the upstream and downstream phases. Upstream, when I have an idea, I can use a tool like ChatGPT to offload some of the cognitive burden. Instead of just typing notes, I can have a back-and-forth conversation, pulling out the essence of a
... See moreVery quickly, “healing” became less about connection and more about control. Less about understanding ourselves, and more about explaining ourselves; justifying every boundary, every reaction, every ~vibe shift~ with a diagnosis. We’ve developed this not-so-subtle kind of smugness — often cruel and alienating — where if someone doesn’t speak our... See more
Gloria Alamrew • Healing is Making Us Mean
My specialty is cultural anthropology" the Professor said. "I gave up being a scholar some time ago, but I'm still permeated with the spirit of the discipline. One aim of my field is to relativize the images possessed by individuals, discover in these images the factors universal to all human beings, and feed these universal truths back to those
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French philosopher Henri Bergson tunneled to the heart of Kafka’s problem in his book Time and Free Will. We invariably prefer indecision over-committing ourselves to a single path, Bergson wrote, because “the future, which we dispose of to our liking, appears to us at the same time under a multitude of forms, equally attractive and equally
... See moreFour Thousand Weeks, 83