Values

Why didn’t I see that it would be easy to fund essay writing in this way? It was, as I’ve said, partly a lack of imagination, partly a fear of looking stupid. But it was also that my thinking was bundled. I had conflated “being a writer” with “having a publisher” and “getting a salary from my writing.” These are not the same thing.

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 ... See more

Why We Want Robots at Work but Humans in Art

We hate other people when latency becomes intolerable. As soon as a task is about speed, other humans feel like an irritating inconvenience. The Uber driver’s small talk annoys us. We wish we were in a Waymo. The cashier’s tip screen feels like a micro-ransom when all we want is a bottle of water. Elevato... See more

There are times to give. There are times to receive.

There are times to be seen. There are times to recede.

There are times to be with others. There are times to be alone.

Systems wish to freeze us into predictable models of monetizable output, but our circumstances are always changing and we are too. Systems want us to do the same thing every day and... See more

[Willed introversion] cannot be described, quite, as an answer to any specific call. Rather, it is a deliberate, terrific refusal to respond to anything but the deepest, highest, richest answer to the as yet unknown demand of some waiting void within : a kind of total strike, or rejection of the offered terms of life, as a result of which some powe... See more

I’m still promoting an album that came out a year ago. I put too much time and energy into this finished project just to put it on Instagram and forget about it. No. Promote. Let people know. Be proud of what you made.