Lan Chi Nguyen

A man who knows what he’s building uses systems as leverage. A man who doesn’t know what he’s building uses systems as a substitute for figuring it out.

The missing variable isn’t discipline. It’s texture. Depth. The accumulated weight of a life that has actually gone somewhere, risked something, chosen something.

With it, a growing desire to take control of our future is building, and there is an underlying feeling that it will require an attitude filled with a rebellious spirit.

once an activity becomes obligatory or purely goal-oriented, the brain processes it differently.

From a psychological and neuroscience perspective, play is a voluntary, intrinsically motivated activity where the process takes priority over the outcome, and it is one of the most critical mechanisms through which the developing brain wires itself for social competence, emotional regulation, creativity, and cognitive flexibility.

Neo-Leisure and Its Discontents

Although many activities today would have been considered leisure by previous generations - skincare rituals, vinyl listening bars, elaborate dining experiences - the question remains: is it still leisure if an algorithm told you to do it?

Do we go to these places to enjoy them, or to photograph them? To prove we were... See more

We’ve traded the self for data about the self, turning ancient practices - ayahuasca, mindfulness, matcha - into quantifiable wellness products. Never have we spent so much money trying to connect with ourselves whilst feeling more disconnected than ever.

And yet there’s a fundamental difference between this problem and the atomic bomb: one infohazard is an irrefutable fact of nature, and the other is entirely dependent on the current structure of social media platforms. Parasitic memes are only possible online because everything is optimized around attention metrics. Beyond easily circumventable... See more

Substack is making everyone into writers the same way Instagram made everyone into photographers, but there’s one big difference: