Stuti Pandey

Often, agency is almost gentle—an attunement to the world and the self, a feeling out the details of reality, and a finding of the path of least resistance. There is sometimes considerable force involved, hard work, but it is like the force of a river being pulled toward the sea.

Agency, as I see it, is an amalgamation of two skills, or mental dispositions: autonomy and efficacy.

1. Agency requires the capacity to formulate autonomous goals in life—the capacity to dig inside and figure out what wants to happen through you, no matter how strange or wrong it seems to others. In other words, it requires autonomy (which was what I

... See more

I wish I had a book that I could put in her hands, and it helps her learn what many never learn, or learn too late, namely, that the possibilities are much bigger than you think, that you can live more deeply, and truly, and that you can solve almost any problem if you put your mind to it. A book about how to handle being sentenced to freedom, and... See more

A person can’t be contained in your ideas about them. This was a core idea for us. To whatever extent I assumed I knew who Johanna was, I treated her as something that I could fit in my head — as something smaller than me. But she couldn’t fit in my head, nor I in hers: that was the exciting thing about it. You can only ever know another individual... See more

The real voyage of discovery consists not in seeking new landscapes, but in having new eyes.

—Marcel Proust

The third and deepest kinds of friendship, according to Aristotle, are friendships of virtue . That is, you like a person because of their character. They might be fun, they might be useful, but even if they aren’t, you like them anyway. It is what the marriage vows are getting at with the line: “To have and to hold, from this day forward, for... See more

The third and deepest kinds of friendship, according to Aristotle, are friendships of virtue . That is, you like a person because of their character. They might be fun, they might be useful, but even if they aren’t, you like them anyway. It is what the marriage vows are getting at with the line: “To have and to hold, from this day forward, for... See more

There are three types of friendship, Aristotle says. The first one is based on pleasure—the way our relationship in high school was all about laughing, or the way you can date someone because they are hot and make you feel good. The second is based on utility—you’re friends because it is useful, because your friend plays drums and you need a... See more

Realising that your past self was sincere, and that sincerity still wasn’t enough is uniquely destabilising. It dismantles the comforting narrative that failure only happens when we don’t try. Sometimes you try. Sometimes you try intelligently. Sometimes you even try bravely. And still, the year ends before you are ready.