juliana ong
@julianaong
juliana ong
There’s a real tension in love — at the beginning of love, particularly — between the desire to be honest about who one is and the desire to win the affection of another person. Of course, ideally, we can both be honest and loved for being honest. That’s the dream.
Brené Brown • Aloneness, Belonging, and the Paradox of Vulnerability, in Love and Creative Work – The Marginalian
Romantic love has taken on excessive significance in modern times because it is supposed to fill the void left by other social bonds. Family, religion, community—all of these have lost their footing. So we charge love with meaning.
It is supposed to offer intimacy, belonging, identity, and even moral fulfillment. In a world where work and... See more
It is supposed to offer intimacy, belonging, identity, and even moral fulfillment. In a world where work and... See more
Romantic Love and Relationship Anarchism
“Chefs, grandmas. Potato, potah-to. Many chefs say they were first inspired by their moms and grandmothers, so these rotating nonnas, grannies, and nanas in Staten Island eatery Enoteca Maria are definitely chefs in their own right.
In just one month they had nonnas — Italian for grandmother — from Azerbaijan, Uzbekistan, Peru, and Japan, with Egypt, Hong Kong, Sri Lanka, and Argentina on the calendar. And what’s better than a meal cooked from the heart?”
When you look back at the most fruitful moments of your life years from now, you’ll be surprised to discover how many of them unfolded amid a big loss or a crisis or in the face of a giant unknown.
Heather Havrilesky • Tolerating Unknowns Will Make You Stronger
We are very fluent in blunt, materialistic, capitalist questions: What? How soon? How much? What I hope that we can learn to do is add questions of moral imagination to that mix: questions like “Why?” and “To what human effect?” and “How much is enough?”
The On Being Project • Living the Questions
My advice for travel is the same as it is for most things in life: question accepted wisdom and authority. Be open to disaster and strangers. Occasionally let your aloneness devour you. Shred the itinerary. You have to do interesting things to have interesting thoughts. Stop being so fucking safe.
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.
Put another way, a major reason everyone is so exhausted is because we have been taught to always strive for better, even if we have only the vaguest notion of what that “better” would look like, and even if it means viewing everything in our world as raw material that could potentially be utilized toward that end. But obedience to something... See more
Kelsey Osgood • Why Your "Digital Shabbat" Will Fail
There is a palpable component of financial nihilism here – the idea that cost of living is strangling most Americans; that upward mobility opportunity is out of reach for increasingly more people; that median home prices divided by median income is at a completely untenable level. All of that is true, so you need to really swing for the fences. Why... See more