Importance of Being Earnest

This is an idea that Nietzsche would have found sympathetic - he said that we are artists of our own lives, and that art requires illusion. The illusion here is preemptive belief: the ability to act from a place of imagined inevitability, to say, “I will meet this standard,” and to let that belief shape your behavior as if it were already true.... See more

On role models: “I remember there was this quote Ocean Vuong said in an interview where he likened the rules of life to a guardrail where if you’re driving down a road and you’re following the guardrail, you’re just going to end up somewhere that’s already discovered on a map. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, but sometimes you sit down and... See more

Earnestness is radioactive. People sense it through the screen. If you’re saying something because you believe it, people may not agree, but they will listen longer. If you’re saying something because you think it will work, they may like it, but they won’t love it. There is a difference between engagement and emotional investment. One gets clicks.... See more

privacy is the womb.

it’s where we gestate who we are before the world gets to shape us.

take it away, & you don’t get more honesty. you get collapse. conformity. psychic suffocation.

if you love freedom, you have to love privacy.

if you care about the human spirit, you have to defend its room to breathe.

& if you still want to become something... See more

The contest isn't between humans and machines but between two models of human-machine interaction. One treats cognition as a commodity to be optimized for frictionless consumption. The other preserves what made that blank box special: the good struggle of human curiosity meeting its limits and pushing through.

There will still be some people who can write. Some of us like it. But the middle ground between those who are good at writing and those who can't write at all will disappear. Instead of good writers, ok writers, and people who can't write, there will just be good writers and people who can't write.

Is that so bad? Isn't it common for skills to... See more