Thought provoking

Things that make me, think.

“When a system is far from equilibrium small islands of coherence in a sea of chaos have the capacity to lift the entire system to a higher order.”

- Chemist and Nobel Laureate, Illya Prigogine

The male burnout gets empathy; the female burnout gets accused of poor boundaries.

Tamara • The Cult of Busyness

The reason we’re so increasingly intolerant of long articles and why we skim them, why we skip forward even in a short video that reduces a 300-page book into a three-minute animation — even in that we skip forward — is that we’ve been infected with this kind of pathological impatience that makes us want to have the knowledge but not do the work of... See more

Maria Popova • Maria Popova — Cartographer of Meaning in a Digital Age

Feminism told us to choose ourselves, but capitalism quickly monetised that too. “Self-love” became another product category. You can now buy your autonomy in skincare form. It’s genius, really, turning emancipation into retail therapy. The rhetoric of empowerment was rebranded into the same old consumer loop: You are enough... once you purchase... See more

Tamara • Addicted to Being Chosen

Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy.

Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. In other words, it requires autonomy (which was what I

Henrik Karlsson • On Agency

I like writing that is unsummarizable, a kernel that cannot be condensed, that must be uttered exactly as it is.

Sarah Manguso • 300 Arguments

The second step is to acknowledge the zero-sum game that is life. Here are the rules of dating: You either get married or you eventually break up. Here are the rules of a career: You either start chasing it, or you don’t. Here are the rules of anything you do: You either do it, or you don’t.

Those are the rules: you didn’t make them, you can’t... See more

When we are faced with something that genuinely challenges our worldview, we choose ignorance.

Caring only about the things which immediately affect us. Consuming only that which our senses can easily perceive.

We fall back on what we know, we revert to our biases. We make our known ignorance a source of truth.

And at its heart, this ignorance is... See more