Jen

and the irony is that most of us weren’t like this as kids. we didn’t optimize playtime; we didn’t schedule curiosity. we just wandered until something felt interesting. maybe that’s what adulthood quietly kills — the ability to do something without folding it into a bigger plan. optimization feeds the illusion of progress, but often it just strips... See more

you are the insistence of a heartbeat

that has carried you this far.

It’s not that every “smart” person you admire is innately smarter than you. What they’ve preserved is the willingness to keep asking questions—the obvious ones, the inconvenient ones, the ones that risk making them look naïve. The difference isn’t raw intelligence, but the permission they give themselves to stay in constant motion.

Curiosity is like... See more

the irony is that most of our heroes went through this exact liminal space. joan didion, in her early thirties, took a leave from her magazine job to figure out what she really believed. toni morrison didn’t publish her first novel until age 39. greta gerwig started writing and directing after a long stretch of feeling “off-purpose” in her acting... See more

we tend to go through a type of exhaustion that doesn’t come from overwork, but from working without wonder. it’s the fatigue that sets in when you’re chasing achievement for its own sake — when everything you do is measured against how it looks, what it yields, or how quickly it moves you forward

the other day, i caught myself scrolling through old photos — not the big ones like vacations or birthdays, but the blurry in-between ones i used to skip over. and i realized those are the photos that move me now. the ones where nothing was happening. someone mid-laugh, an empty coffee cup, the view from a car window on a random tuesday. i think... See more

But what explains this “Lethe effect”? Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, and scary. And yet we seldom remember such content. The reason for this discrepancy is simple: when every post is alarming, your brain quickly becomes... See more

Sometimes an experience can seem brief in the moment but long in memory, and vice versa. A classic example is the “holiday paradox”: while on vacation, time speeds by because you’re so overwhelmed by new experiences that you don’t keep track of time. But when you return from your vacation, it suddenly feels longer in retrospect, because you made... See more

The system might not see this kind of time-taking as productive. But I believe it’s where the deepest truths of the world live. To make art is to sit with a thought, a shape, a question, a whisper—for months, or years, or a lifetime—is a kind of intimacy with yourself and the planet. It’s the philosophical surprise in which human history has been... See more