flâneur

Smoke & mirrors - by Ashley Zhang

ashleydzhang.substack.com · 492 words · saved by 1 readers

Treading the tightrope between imagination and reality

Dear friend, Recently, a longtime friend asked me what drew me to the San Francisco startup scene. “You studied philosophy and love literature, so I always clocked you as a humanities person,” she said. “It doesn’t make sense on paper — yet, somehow, it fits.” My answer, in less carefully crafted terms, was this: I have always lived with one foot in make-believe, and am drawn to people who are the same. The things that fascinate me most — startups, ideologies, literature, love — are acts of shared imagination. We conjure up new worlds and ask others to inhabit them with us; we build a…

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