Sixian

It’s revealing to think of mimetic desire along a continuum. Certain people and organizational cultures are more prone to mimesis than others. And one thing is clear, on a societal level: any society in which people are no longer struggling with scarcity but coping with abundance will undergo an explosion of mimetic desire. In this universe of... See more

But I’ve never truly loved anything that didn’t move me to my core. I can’t help but wonder if all this effort we’re putting into keeping work at arm’s length is actually holding us back from being our best selves.

“The infoverse may be infinite, but our allotment of days is not.” We ought to be conscious of how far and how quickly we move through the internet. But without a physical way to observe our time spent online, we risk scrolling, skimming, and hyperlinking ourselves to oblivion.

In societies, unlike in goose or vehicle formations, there’s no natural or designed rotation in the higher-energy-cost leader position. Instead, you have dissipative generational wealth-transfer mechanisms, and slow social churn and vertical mobility “rotating” the formation.

Becoming 'multi-temporal', rather than multi-cultural: it used to be a very big problem for historians that they supposedly could not divide themselves from the outlooks and interests of their own age. I think we are approaching a situation where the outlooks and interests of our own age make very little sense. They just don't bind us to anything... See more

One of my heuristics for growth is to seek out the magicians, and find the magic. Often without noticing, your progress in aspects of life or all of it unconsciously becomes linear. You made a certain amount of money last year, so you aim to make some ‘reasonable’ proportion more this year. But you are largely using the same tools to get 2x as you... See more

Blogging has a father and a mother. It inherits features from both the hero’s journey and the carrier bag.

What we are facing over a decade is a decade of emergency rescue, of resiliency, of attempts at sustainability, rather than some kind of clear march toward advanced heights of civilization. We are into an era of decay and repurposing of broken structures, of new social inventions within networks, a world of 'Gothic High-Tech' and 'Favela Chic' (as... See more