Observations on the Human Experience

I asked him a question about the local culture, and he said, “It depends if you’re talking about the people from the desert, versus the coast, versus the mountains.”

I said, “Where is your family from?”

He said, “From the desert, but then two uncles got in a fight, splitting the family, and half went to Iraq for a while. They reunited in Abu Dhabi,... See more

These are the run clubs and swim clubs with very robustly branded websites for some reason, websites that greet you with full-width videos of delighted people being very sweaty together. New ventures for “group conversation” or exclusive social spaces or curated clubs with sign-up flows and membership levels that evoke the rigor of a bank account... See more

"When I was a philosophy student, I used a photocopier to enlarge pages of books onto A3 paper. It helped me understand difficult texts by slowing me down, and it left room for my notes. My classmates thought it was ridiculous, but it helped."

There's so much this world, it's people and it's rules tell you to do, tell you to be.

It's hard to escape... See more

Many people still feel ambivalence about moving to Thailand. Not everyone has mustered the courage to tell their Chinese parents where they really are. Mom and dad are under the impression that they’re studying abroad in Europe or something. That sometimes leads to elaborate games to maintain the subterfuge, like drawing curtains to darken the room... See more

Making work easier. This is the problem. So obsessed with getting to the answer, completing the project, producing a result which are all valid things, but not where the richness of the human experience lies.