Selfhood
Often we fail to improve our lives simply because things don't get bad enough. If your new job is hell, you’ll leave it, but if it’s just unsatisfying, you’ll likely grind it out. Thus, small problems often threaten our quality of life more than big ones.
Gurwinder • 25 Useful Ideas for 2025
Even now, when I’m lucky enough to be able to write exactly what I want to write with very few external constraints, writing often feels difficult for me in the same way it did when I was pumping out listicles — slow, sticky, clunky, painful, humiliating. I wonder if this, too, is part of the appeal of AI: it is so often humiliating to push up... See more
“When you’re losing a game you don’t even want to play, or forcing a fit into a form you don’t want to be in, the best thing to do is to stop playing and go find your shape.” — A Soft Manifesto by Cortney Cassidy
People often, for example, oppose the actions and belief systems of billionaires, but take jobs at companies that increase the power and influence of those same billionaires. It’s not because these job-seekers are bad people, but because we are all operating in a system that makes aligning our values and our everyday lives seem impossible.
This... See more
This... See more
Why it’s so hard to align our work with our values, and how we justify not trying.
“A different view into this, a more optimistic one which i choose to adopt, has to do with what being online helps people do. The original piece in The New Consumer talks about how "younger consumers are also more likely to say they feel “more valued for their talents” online than offline, feel “more appreciated” online, and feel “more creative” online." Which suggests to me the problem isn't necessarily how addictive being online is, it's how unappreciated people feel in the offline world. The internet helps us find our people.
I recently heard a great quote about what is the opposite of depression. It's not happiness. It's expression. And so when you have people say they effectively feel more expressive online, and can bond with others more attuned to their needs and points of view, then this gives me hope that there is a net positive effect of all this time we spend online.
Looking at it this way, i see great news in the idea that people have places where they can feel more like themselves, even if it may not fit into our current worldviews of what personal and collective flourishing looks like. When i grew up, playing video games was going to be the ruin of us all, and yet statistically speaking the vast majority of our generation turned out well enough (if anything, the lack of an economic and social safety net fucked us up later).
So it's entirely possible that a whole generation who feel better online than offline will turn out somehow ok as well. Better or worse than us? Impossible to tell. Different? Most likely.”
Three-fourths of philosophy and literature is the talk of people trying to convince themselves that they really like the cage they were tricked into entering.
Gary Snyder — poet, anthropologist and ecological steward
cruel optimism: Lauren Berlant’s seminal coinage for “when something you desire is actually an obstacle to your flourishing.” In Berlant’s usage, optimism is “the force that moves you out of yourself and into the world” in search of something—some sense of self or state of being—that you can’t generate on your own. This optimistic relation can feel... See more
— Rayne Fisher Quann
Late 20s/Early 30s: Complex machinations around friendship as many people move from group living arrangements to couple living arrangements and designations of “close friendship” are solidified or challenged by wedding / wedding party invites (who amongst us has not been surprised by being invited/not being invited to be part of a wedding or attend... See more
Anne Helen Petersen, The Friendship Dip