juliana ong

Both partners taking accountability for having an outside support network (no attempt to make each other everything)

I can’t do better than Kurt Vonnegut on this subject:

Why are so many people getting divorced today? It’s because most of us don’t have extended families anymore. It used to be that when a man and a woman got married, the bride got a

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Functional foods have been around for decades, but are taking off anew. Consumers have become more health-conscious, weight-loss drugs are changing people’s eating habits and strained household budgets make non-essentials harder to justify

We’ve been told that the meaning of life is self-actualisation, to achieve some perfect state of mental health and productivity. Don’t commit until you have perfect control. But I think that way of thinking will backfire. Because the end point of trying to control everything is you become like a machine: emotionally detached, hyper-productive,... See more

In the absence of strong convictions about what you want from life, you will always default to wanting more money. It’s the lowest common denominator of desire in a society with any semblance of upward mobility. The key to escaping this cycle is first establishing your priorities (family dynamics, geography, lifestyle, whatever) , and then figuring... See more

Not long ago, young people were told: “Learn to code.” That’s not working so well now. The first wave of AI is destroying the workaday tech jobs—perhaps there’s some karma in that.

But it also makes sense. When Dr. Frankenstein makes the monster, he’s usually the first victim.

So forget coding, and develop the real skills that we need now—and they... See more

When we insist that we could only ever effectively love someone who’s been perfectly “healed” — who will not struggle, accidentally hurt us, trigger us, say the wrong thing, do the wrong thing, or participate in any other uncomfortable display of humanity — we are reinforcing, and perhaps projecting, our own beliefs that we have to be perfect in... See more

We tend to assign different meanings and values to certain relationships, which then flattens the connections we might have. But the truth is that the heart of every connection is its very own thing.