Selfhood
“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
“In my old life, I believed, I had ascended to the top of a mountain and there was a throne there where I used to sit, and now here I was ten years older, in the valley of beginnings, in a ditch on the floor, just me and my butt and the ground beneath us.“
Leandra Medine Cohen, Founder of Man Repeller
I can move through pain, but I have an intolerance for a life that doesn’t sparkle.
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
“The great miracle is that we understand each other at all.”
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.
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Why it’s so hard to align our work with our values, and how we justify not trying.
Julia Galef refers to ‘high-entropy thinkers’. When you ask a high-entropy thinker for their views on some political or social issue it’s hard to predict what they’re going to say because they approach every question afresh through the lens of a very individual sensibility. Most us aren’t like that. We offer up predictable opinions which come... See more