Stuti Pandey

Feminism told us to choose ourselves, but capitalism quickly monetised that too. “Self-love” became another product category. You can now buy your autonomy in skincare form. It’s genius, really, turning emancipation into retail therapy. The rhetoric of empowerment was rebranded into the same old consumer loop: You are enough... once you purchase... See more

Here’s the part anyone would hesitate to admit: when you aren’t busy, you feel afraid. Afraid that you’ll vanish, that your worth will evaporate, that you’ll become irrelevant, forgotten. I suspect that’s what drives most of us, not ambition, not greed, but fear of invisibility. Busyness is the camouflage we wear to convince ourselves we matter.

It’... See more

There is no finish line. There is no winning, no losing.

Everything is a Practice.

A practice is the disciplined repetition of what you know with enough experimentation in that repetition to unlock those things you don’t yet know. It is ever-accumulating, and never-ending. It is sometimes painful, but that is the way.

Individual projects may come to... See more

Pain has always had a kind of intellectual credibility. We call it gravitas. We trust it more. We assume that someone who suffers has seen something. That their insights have been pressure-tested in agony. Joy, on the other hand, is often mistaken for complacency. Worse... denial. To be visibly happy is to risk being read as unthinking, emotionally... See more

When I want to be transformed, I chase my reading, to use Robin Hanson’s phrase. “Hunting has two main modes: searching and chasing,” Hanson writes. “With searching you look for something to chase. With chasing, in contrast, you have a focus of attention that drives your actions.” Searching is when I’m reading without a clear aim and continue to... See more