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How many of us actually identify the public good with our own good? For most of us, the outside world exists for our income and our enjoyment. We have
What once inspired passion and unity is now subordinated to calculation.
Whatever rhetoric we might preach about mental health and social justice, we know that if we don't make enough money to be self-sufficient, we're next
My high-level advice—which supersedes everything below—is that you should decide what you want from your writing, and then completely ignore any advic
mostly of the internet kind
I ultimately think that the people who are histrionic about safety in San Francisco—they just hate cities! They hate the fact that they have to intera
Here’s some extremely obvious advice for anyone living in San Francisco (or any city, really) that feels lonely: go outside, strike up conversations w
What gives multinational corporations the right to pollute the air we breathe, drain our groundwater and exhaust our planet’s dwindling resources – an
A lot has been written about how the internet radicalizes people. But the same dynamics that turn a slightly lonely young man into a seething misogyni
[b]eing trapped in protocols dictated by a functional-yet-suboptimal system feels eerily calm, yet unsatisfying. Everything works, sort of, but partic
Sex is weird and disgusting and ridiculous and quite often abused and weaponized and traumatic. But I like it. I like what it can be and sometimes wha
Literature allows us to name the world by giving us new phrases, new characters, new words. Poets like Chaucer and Shakespeare coined hundreds of new
What these fears come down to is a deep false belief that we have to give ourselves up to be loved and to be seen as a caring person. Giving yourself
We aspire by doing things, and the things we do change us so that we are able to do the same things, or things of that kind, better and better. In the
Doing something badly, she insists, isn’t a sign of unworthiness. Nor is the fear that you are doing it in a way that seems fake, insincere. If you ca
For the aspirant, there’s nothing more comforting than realizing you are not alone in trying. You’re not alone in trying to find a subject, trying to
You’re a beginner. You haven’t become who you want to be—yet. You want to wake up in the mornings to write, but you often don’t manage it. What we lea
can I predict what their reaction will be to what I say? why would a reasonable person disagree with my position? if I am so smart, and they are so du
People were my new puzzle. Every time someone said something that I thought was crazy/irrational, I got excited: it was a new clue about a world view
I started to realize that there was ALWAYS a reason why people were acting in ways that were confusing to me. When they did something “confusing”, it
...[A]spirants must grow comfortable with a certain quantity of awkward pretense. If someone were to ask you why you enrolled, you would be overreac
The happiest and wisest couples I know are able to balance the brutal truth of being creatures with the flowery theatrics of being humans. They have a
You don’t have to be best friends, you don’t have to do everything together, but what you do have to do is take care of each other. Take complete and
You ought to go through life expecting the absurd, and finding joy in the fact that humans display the same behaviors over and over and over. Like ani
Everyone is always posting about how third spaces are dead, and that we’re living in an era of unprecedented social isolation and anomie. Well, in SF
The idea that psychopathology involves entrenchment is not by itself that innovative, but once we conceptualize that entrenchment as canalization, we
Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
“Man’s search for meaning,” Frankl writes, “is the primary motivation in his life and not a 'secondary rationalization' of instinctual drives.”
Instead of using therapy to untangle our desires and fears so that we may effectively act on them, therapy becomes the goal in itself—to create mental
[Trump] cobbled together a coalition of the wacky and weird. But being weird in America is kind of normal. It’s a very weird place. A lot of Americans
I think the best default answer to leftist ideology is to point out the arbitrary, sweeping assertions using proprietary abstractions, without evidenc
when you start meditating, you have the idea that you’re gonna, like, clear your mind and concentrate, and all of the stupid mental junk will go away.
Philosophy is bad because you think thoughts that you think are your own thoughts, and you think you’re in charge of those thoughts, and you’re figuri
Rather than offering direct lessons about the modern world, literature is an indirect guide to life. There is no simple way in which we can interpret
There’s a difference, of course, between caring deeply about quality and being excessively critical! But this instinct to critique my own work, to und
I never allowed [my system of thought] to fall to pieces, but was incessantly occupied in weaving it anew. I never, in the course of my transition, wa
Rather than offering direct lessons about the modern world, literature is an indirect guide to life. There is no simple way in which we can interpret
Applied literature helps not to decide, but to think, to see, to name, to know, to understand. If we want to know the world we must see it for what it
Because these vectors are built from the way humans use words, they end up reflecting many of the biases that are present in human language. For examp
When a word has two unrelated meanings, as with bank, linguists call them homonyms. When a word has two closely related meanings, as with magazine, li
Spirituality promises a total explanation of everything. Tantra rejects that. Things often happen for no particular reason. There is no ultimate “why.
For humanistic psychology ... religious experience is a direct feeling, rather than the discovery of objective truths. The essential feeling is a onen
Compassion is about having good intentions. Tantra is not interested in that. Good intentions pave the road to mediocrity, self-righteousness, and irr
Spaciousness is an attitude: the willingness to suspend the process of meaning-making. Spaciousness is the willingness to allow unknowing, uncertainty
All things related to an interconnected, systemic view of the world
8. How can principles learned from living systems inform our approach to solving contemporary societal crises, such as climate change, biodiversity lo
As Fritjof Capra says: a machine can be controlled, a living system can only be disturbed. At best, we will find ways of carefully nudging a living sy
“[y]ou never change something by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.”
A program is a building of thought. It is costless to build, it is weightless, and it grows easily under our typing hands. But as a program grows, so
