Reminders for myself

“You have to just work,” said 24-year-old Mackay Grant. “You have to be hardcore.” He skipped his college graduation from Suffolk University in Boston last year to move to San Francisco—the kind of city where “brilliant misfits have a place,” he said—and founded an AI finance startup.

"Man has achieved his present position by being the most aggressive and enterprising creature on earth. And now he has created a comfortable civilization, he faces an unexpected problem... The comfortable life lowers man's resistance, so that he sinks into an unheroic sloth... The comfortable life causes spiritual decay."

~ Colin Wilson

These experiences tap into what Stiegler calls our "pre-individual” drives—our basic impulses and reactive desires that don’t require reflection or effort. The more we engage with short circuits, the less space there is for longer-term, meaningful engagement.