flâneur

Mylene Tu

12 followers · 10 following · 1262 views

on the atlas — 67

highlights — 162

  • By looking for familiarity, you’re not looking for all the beautiful new experiences that are out there for you. You say nothing is coming close to what you had before, and one day you’ll see that as a good thing, because what’s coming is going to be so much better than what has been.
    Home | Substack
  • fitting is not the same as belonging. eventually, it starts to feel like being loved for the absence of your needs
    who are you when you’re not pleasing anyone? - by lina
  • the more fluent you become in other people’s needs, the harder it becomes to locate your own. you lose sight of where you end and they begin. you start performing yourself in ways that earn connection but cost authenticity
    who are you when you’re not pleasing anyone? - by lina
  • Local art becomes valuable via experience and presence, not global scale. Human art becomes an artisanal good with unique value. Not all 8 billion of us will make our living from traditional art, but creation will be central to our lives — making something meaningful and being valued for it is how humans find purpose.
    Five Jobs - by Anu Atluru - Working Theorys
  • The fool is a curious player, not a strategic planner or thinker. The Fool indulges his imagination and curiosity and gifts. The Fool follows intrigue, wanders into places he “doesn’t belong” and exists there openly
    stay foolish - Isabel Unraveled
  • when I depolarize, I (nearly) always discover that my resistance to the system has some insight. By reconceptualizing my beliefs and goals in light of this insight, I deepen my system, making it more authentic, resonant, flourishing, and alive.
    Reason is an underrated way to be authentic
  • A much more useful thing to do when my system starts to feel like a dead dogma is to go, “. . . oh? huh? Something feels a little off here?” and then sit with that feeling for five, ten minutes, or however long it needs to unfold.
    Reason is an underrated way to be authentic
  • Our personal meaning starts to become incoherent when it becomes fixed. The incoherence increases when past meaning is imposed on present situations. As this continues, yesterday’s meaning becomes today’s dogma, often losing much of its original meaningfulness in the process.
    Reason is an underrated way to be authentic
  • You want to return to your notes so you can enter into a dialogue with them, refine your thoughts, and integrate past insights with what you’ve learned in the meantime. In this way, the notes act as a self-organizing system that accumulates, integrates, and generalizes intuitions and insights.
    Reason is an underrated way to be authentic
  • You write down your thoughts, feelings, and intuitions about decisions you are making—like a lot of people already do when thinking through hard problems. Then (this is the main difference) instead of letting the note rot on your phone, you set up some system that makes sure that you revisit your reflections when you think about the same topic again.
    Reason is an underrated way to be authentic
  • Intuitions are, partly, compressed representations of our experiences and can, if we are experienced, hold more than we can put into words. Emotions are pointers to what we need to flourish as humans, and so form the basis of our ethics.
    Reason is an underrated way to be authentic
  • our emotions and intuitions are littered with contradictions.
    Reason is an underrated way to be authentic
  • Our emotions and intuitions, first of all, do not come from within most of the time; they are implanted and controlled by forces outside of us.
    Reason is an underrated way to be authentic
  • you have to develop your perceptiveness so you can see opportunities that you can leverage to find a fit
    Reason is an underrated way to be authentic
  • Make sure that the things you're pursuing are weird things that you want to pursue, not whatever the standard path is. Heuristic: do your friends at school think your path is a bit strange? If not, maybe it's too normal.
    Advice · Patrick Collison
  • nobody is going to teach you to think for yourself. A large fraction of what people around you believe is mistaken. Internalize this and practice coming up with your own worldview.
    Advice · Patrick Collison
  • Make things. Operating in a space with a lot of uncertainty is a very different experience to learning something.
    Advice · Patrick Collison
  • Make friends over the internet with people who are great at things you're interested in. The internet is one of the biggest advantages you have over prior generations. Leverage it.
    Advice · Patrick Collison
  • Don't stress out too much about how valuable the things you're going deep on are... but don't ignore it either. It should be a factor you weigh but not by itself dispositive.
    Advice · Patrick Collison
  • You will have lost track of all the experiments and insights that led you to a fit. But the good news is that you don’t have to remember. The form does.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • It will be easier if you can overcome your social fear of looking stupid or incomprehensible. Wanting to be understood by others, or not wanting to contradict ourselves and our established identity—these are major blockers to unfolding.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • By unbundling things, by seeing through the abstractions, you get more information.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • Instead of trying to force a vision, here is how you can lean into unfolding. You observe the context (when applying to university, trying to figure out what my career should be, this would have meant, among other things, observing what kind of tasks I liked doing again and again and again; what kind of people I want to surround myself with; how the job market looks; and what I am interested in). You form a mental model of the context (a guess about what kind of work I should do). Then you use that guess to decide how to take your next small step in the context (“Maybe I should email someone w…
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy: if you could just make it into another context your problems will go away.2
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • By gradually adjusting the thing you are designing and observing how well it fits the context, you create a feedback loop that embeds the context’s knowledge into your design.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • When you design something, a useful definition of success is precisely that—the form fits the contex
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • It has been what Christopher Alexander called an unfolding.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • You need to keep a certain rate of improvement for things not to break. If you are too slow in adapting to each other, you grow apart.
    Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Iteration speed is key when you deal with feedback loops of this kind, when you want to figure out how to best understand and interact with an emergent reality. The best scientists aren’t those who are the most intelligent; they are the ones who tweak their theories further than others, in close contact with experimental reality.
    Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Talking for hours every day, new insights would continually arise, and we could rapidly turn those ideas into reality. We were relentless. Everything we did was fast,
    Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
  • Two truths approach each other. One comes from inside, the other from outside, and where they meet we have a chance to catch sight of ourselves. —Tomas Tranströmer
    Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
  • What I’m saying is this: You are born with this weird interiority that no one else can see. You can’t see it either at first. But if you run enough experiments you get a sense of how that inner space behaves. In particular, you can figure out which types of people can fuse with your interiority and expand it. You will not be able to explain how this fusion works. So don’t do it. But when the interiorities do fuse: notice how things are set in motion.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • Tolstoy repeatedly describes love as something that happens in the group first and only then spreads to the individuals who are to act out the love.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • if you take [jelly fish] out of the water their entire form disappears, like when an unspeakable truth is lifted up out of the silence and expressed as lifeless gel, yes, they’re untranslatable, they must stay in their own element. — Tomas Tranströmer, Baltics
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • it is not something I knew I was looking for; I’m not even the same person after having been there. It does not look anything like I imagined a relationship would or should look.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • Or you can prompt them by yourself going into uncharted territory, perhaps thinking aloud about something that confuses you. And you make sure to do so in a way that leaves room for them to use their experience to reason about what you are saying.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • If you want to prompt someone to be authentic and playful and generative, you usually just need to ask them something where they have a rich experience to pull from but have never pulled an answer from that experience before. If you ask two or three increasingly detailed questions about something they tell you, you get there.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • The type of person I’m assuming we’re looking for here is 1) someone that you will find fascinating to talk to after you’ve talked for 20,000 hours, 2) you feel comfortable with them talking through the hardest and most painful decisions you will face in your life, and 3) the conversation is wildly generative for both of you, in that it brings you out, helps you become.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • That is perhaps the most solid dating advice I have, by the way—show the inside of your head in public, so people can see if they would like to live in there.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • And the thing is, there aren’t that many people you can have an amazing life with. Maybe 10,000, spread fairly evenly across the globe? A bit more if you’re less weird than me, perhaps. Anyway, the number is small enough that you can’t afford to be casual about it. You have to never let someone like that pass you by.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • thinking in categories would interfere with my ability to freely pattern-match for the particular type of individual I resonate with.
    Looking for Alice - by Henrik Karlsson - Escaping Flatland
  • It’s true that life is a series of abandonments. Also true is the Saul Bellow line that life is a series of “unexpected intrusions of beauty.”
    bookbear express | Ava | Substack
  • the love we experience basically lives inside us until we die. It’s not fungible, it’s not like I can be best friends with Edward and then Edward stops talking to me and then I become best friends with Annie and everything is fine. Annie might fill the same functional role in my life Edward does, but since my love for Edward is uniquely linked to his personhood, his absence will also be linked with a longing for this one particular person I loved.
    bookbear express | Ava | Substack
  • We store ourselves in others; they make us whole.
    friends shape your identity - by Ava - bookbear express
  • friendships are not fungible—no two people are the same, obviously, but also you can’t replicate the experience of someone knowing you through a particular era of your life. You can never go back to that period of your life; you can never replace the people who witnessed you and supported you
    friends shape your identity - by Ava - bookbear express
  • the most instructive force they can follow is what they think should exist in the world but doesn’t yet.
    letting myself be seen - by Isabel - Mind Mine
  • I wish I knew that if you can’t do it for yourself, do it for others. That you learn more from teaching others that by reading alone.
    I'm at a Fred again concert but he only performed once wtf man
  • There is no shortage of smart people in the world, but there is a shortage of courage, and by having courage yourself you’ll make your friends more courageous as well.
    I'm at a Fred again concert but he only performed once wtf man
  • Your playing small does not serve the world. There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won't feel insecure around you. We are all meant to shine, as children do. We were born to make manifest the glory of God that is within us. It's not just in some of us; it's in everyone. And as we let our own light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.” — Marianne Williamson, Timo Cruz from Coach Carter
    I'm at a Fred again concert but he only performed once wtf man