Rishita Chaudhary

“a protection against real intimacy, real friendship and real engagement with our work,” a way not to feel “the full vulnerability of being visible and touchable in a difficult world.” In anxiety, we disallow ourselves “the ability to stop and rest and the spacious silence needed for... a new understanding” — and all true intimacy opens into a new... See more

I have been thinking about growth and decay, the interplay between the two, the way all growth requires regeneration, which in turn requires a shedding, a composting, a reconstituting of old material. We don’t always know what needs to be shed, or what the optimal direction of growth is. This is where the “blind optimism” of a tree is helpful —... See more

Subconsciously, we cling to the belief that the game is pre-defined. We have no control over who we’re born to, where we’re brought up, our quality of education, and how often we’re at the right place at the right time. But that’s where we trip up: we begin to conflate our lack of control over starting conditions with a lack of control over... See more

There was Arturo Béjar’s testimony in 2023. The former Facebook engineer told senators, “Meta continues to publicly misrepresent the level and frequency of harm that users, especially children, experience on the platform.”

And there was Frances Haugen’s bombshell testimony in 2021: “I recognized a frightening truth: almost no one outside of Facebook... See more

The older I grow, the more convinced I become that commitment generates a kind of experiential wealth that can't be brute-forced into existence. There's this fascinating fractal effect that occurs, where constraint transmutes into focus, revealing layers of complexity a dabbler would miss entirely. It's not a limitation, because even that word... See more