Insights

Books, articles, podcasts.

Intellectual property doesn’t make sense. What makes sense is to stop trying to limit ideas about ideas. What makes sense is for all intangible creations of the human intellect to be free.

Laniakea Books: Public domain books for everyone — nutcroft

“Feel compliments as deeply as you feel insults.”

James Clear • Highlights From jamesclear.com

To be a gardener is to give a fuck. To be a gardener is to be invested in a place—to know it, to protect it, to be present to it. How can we protect and heal ourselves and our planet if we’re not willing to step into, and value, the role of the gardener?

Wonderground • Audacious Gardening: On Daring to Care

Like human happiness, teenage happiness does not flourish when everyone has the freedom to live just as they please. Where there is neither order nor necessity in life—no constraints, no inhibitions, no discomfort—life becomes both relaxing and boring, as American philosopher Allan Bloom notes. A soft imprisonment.

Ruby LaRocca • A Constitution for Teenage Happiness

“Give up trying to create something sophisticated,” I told myself. “Why not forget all those prescriptive ideas about ‘the novel’ and ‘literature’ and set down your feelings and thoughts as they come to you, freely, in a way that you like?”

‘I want to open a window in their souls’: Haruki Murakami on the power of writing simply

Do nothing for prestige or status or money or approval alone. As Paul Graham observed, “prestige is like a powerful magnet that warps even your beliefs about what you enjoy. It causes you to work not on what you like, but what you’d like to like.”

Matter

If you can understand this my dear friends, the understanding will melt the addiction. And you will be free and you will understand the loveliness of what prayer is. Then you will discover what reality is, what god is, because you will have dropped one of our biggest illusions: the illusion that we need to be appreciated, to be popular, to succeed,