Sarah Wong
@sarahwong
Sarah Wong
These questions are inverted. I don’t play in order to hit the goals; I set goals so I can play.
remind me that I’ll never build a habit that I only squeeze into my “leftover time.”
Writers, after all, are drawn to enclosure. Physical boundaries create social experiments, forced encounters, snow-globe microcosms of humanity’s virtues and ills.
Creative writing involves a deliberate rejection of practicality: To get into the right mood for writing requires short-circuiting our usual calculations of profit and loss, since there is nothing as gratuitous as a poem or story.
— Adam Kirsch in The New Republic
— Adam Kirsch in The New Republic
Writers serve the public as historians of vibe. What does it feel like to be here, now?
Still, when someone asks me about my ambition, the word gets stuck in my throat because the definition of ambition has, for so long, been limited to work.
If we continue to measure our lives by standards of self-determination, self-actualization, self-reliance, self-betterment, self-caregiving just to get wiser, happier, and healthier seems like a strange path.
But if we change our orientation to one of interdependence, seeing humans as a web of twisted roots, a vision of interdependence allows for us
... See moreFeeding this crisis is the fact that we are spending more time alone than ever before, and as a result, care, whether giving or receiving, has become a less organic part of our lives. For much of history, it was difficult for humans to go it alone. Goods and services were more expensive in relative terms, and running a household was extremely labor
... See moreWhen someone's daily struggle with instability is met with lectures about macroeconomic indicators, it doesn't change their reality, it only deepens their alienation from institutional expertise.
The rhetorician Kenneth Burke liked to remind his readers every way of seeing is also a way of not seeing, that our frameworks and analytical lenses can obscure certain details even as they highlight others