Lani Assaf

You can just do things. What’s the future you want to see? Making reclaims agency amidst lost meaning. So, don’t escape this reality — design the one you want. We desperately need your alternatives.

Chaos is where great strategies are born.

I’ve found that writing is a great way to process higher-level concepts — the sorts of big-picture ideas that there isn’t really an appetite for at my day job, but which inevitably still inform and improve my day-to-day thinking.

Silicon Valley, firmly planted in the Third Estate (the bourgeoisie), has attempted to take on the First Estate (the church), the Second Estate (the establishment), and the Fourth Estate (the press) simultaneously. It’s a credit to their business models and products that this is even possible.

But it’s unclear that it’s consensual.

Over the past few years, it’s become obvious that trends are trending. At this point, I think we can all agree that the frenzy around “identifying” and “explaining” various TikTok “micro-trends” is exhausting and redundant. In reality, something “trending” on social media does not make it a culturally relevant trend. TikTok “cores” are often just... See more

A total eureka moment; the files are in the computer. I felt like a beautiful Benjamin Franklin with a key and a kite. Was this boundaries? Manifesting? Math? Whatever it was, it was simple. What if I could apply this logic to the rest of my life? Ex: I always have an amazing boyfriend because I don’t date losers. I always love my job because I... See more

I used to believe rigor and love were mutually exclusive, or that they somehow worked against each other, that love was supposed to feel like something flooding you, something you surrendered to, rather than something you showed up for daily, tinkered with, sculpted, rediscovered. I guess another way of putting it, I imagined love as the bucket’s... See more

You talk about breakups as useful, if not altogether happy, opportunities to celebrate what was gathered over the course of a relationship. Most of my breakups have been dominated by the sense that I’d never be loved so well again, that I had fucked up with the one person who’d ever be capable of loving me. And I think that sense springs from a... See more

But of course the idea that I would know what I or anyone deserves is just another manifestation of my own outsize ego, right? That I should be the arbiter of such things. Thank the stars I’m not. Do you deal with this at all?