juliana ong

I realized that being in the driver’s seat of my own life was exhausting, and became aware of the pipeline between submission and surrender—how fucking good it feels to be relieved of the need to decide, both in the bedroom and outside of it. That’s part of why I’m fascinated by tradwives—women whose lives to me lack liberation and ambition, but to... See more

A charming person is not one that glimmers but holds a mirror to your glow — a conversation with them makes you fall for them by making you fall for yourself.

Perhaps the most important insight is this: when we criticize our technology, we’re really criticizing ourselves. And when we try to imagine better systems, we’re really trying to imagine better ways of being human.

The task of living is figuring out a way to build enough resilience to honor, respect and nurture your nature (to essentially cultivate values) so as not to abandon it when the culture endorses something different.

Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield titled one of his books, “After the Ecstasy, the Laundry.” Achieving enlightenment, he argues, does not preclude one from the daily, mundane tasks of life.

in order to will any meaningful new project into existence, I actually must be untethered from reality. I need to view the world as bendable and controllable, not as this unchangeable force for me to analyze and carefully dodge around. So for me, “becoming more agentic” has really been a project in carefully maintaining a state of delusion.

In Pascal’s Pensées, he writes “And how shall [man] be happy? By finding something to occupy him, that shall divert him, and prevent him from seeing himself what he is. For if he saw himself as he is, he would be miserable indeed.”