Keely Adler

Navigating mystery humbles us, reminds us with every step that we don’t know everything, are not, in fact, the masters of all.

Maybe human intelligence is more illusory than we think, a kind of egotistical fantasy. Are human authors really very different from those Balnibarbian pupils spinning the cranks of their writing machine? Human authors learn to write by reading other books in their chosen genre (“training”), and maybe what’s happening in their brains is just a

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to navigate the intersections between scale and regeneration, between growth and the commons. A principle of ‘many universals’ could provide the framework for balancing the tension between, on one hand, enabling community-led and governed projects to flourish, and, on the other, the need to then challenge massive and well-resourced centers of... See more

our imaginations shape the experiences we design, and the experiences we design shape our imaginations.

And language is a fundamental tool in architecting both. The details and specificity and intention of it constructs our beliefs about how the world is, and can unlock all of the new ways we might hope it to become.

It’s also something that I encourage people to investigate with their own practices. There’s so much that you can do beyond just making your thing. You can also work on the whole system of getting that thing and others like it out into the world. There’s a lot of room for expansion and creativity there. I think the coolest projects look at the

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Hannah Arendt’s discussion of common sense and a common world. “Only the experience of sharing a common human world with others who look at it from different perspectives,” she wrote in The Human Condition, “can enable us to see reality in the round and to develop a shared common sense.”

The perceived need to learn something new is inversely proportional to the rank of a manager. Those at the top feel obliged to pretend to omniscience, and therefore refuse to learn anything new even if the cost of doing so is success.

What if we reframed “living with uncertainty” to “navigating mystery”? There’s more energy in that phrase. The hum of imaginative voltage.