flâneur

Jessica Wang

3 followers · 2 following · 297 views

on the atlas — 21

highlights — 24

  • In the search for moreness, we can miss the suchness.
    Talking Enneagram 7 blues - by Sasha Chapin
  • Re-defining play gives us power in the form of shared fiction which we can build towards and manifest into reality.
    Play to Win: A Post-Work Society
  • Games, as Suits defines it, are “goal-directed activities in which inefficient means are intentionally chosen.” In games, one purposefully ignores the more efficient method. To play a game is to do the crossword puzzle without looking up the answers, even though looking it up would be the most efficient way of finishing the crossword. The added rules and restrictions are what make possible the act of playing outside of the endless pursuit of efficiency.
    Play to Win: A Post-Work Society
  • It's the most visibly impressive, it makes the showreel, everyone applauds. But it's when artists struggle with stuff that's not working that I find really impressive– almost precisely because nobody is impressed. It looks like failure! The magic is gone and you’re left with all the wrong words. To me, that is the crucible in which real artists are forged.
    when the vision isn’t manifesting - by visakan veerasamy
  • the problem with everyone constantly chasing the hype is that it essentially turns us all into leeches — if 100% of people are focused on “finding where the best party is”, none of the parties will actually be fun. Communities die when everyone seeks to gain more than they hope to give.
    World-building IRL - by Joss - box.
  • Deci and Ryan (1985) describe the use of rewards as “control through seduction.” Control, whether by threats or bribes, amounts to doing things to children rather than working with them. This ultimately frays relationships, both among students (leading to reduced interest in working with peers) and between students and adults (insofar as asking for help may reduce the probability of receiving a reward).
    The Risks of Rewards - Alfie Kohn
  • The actual reward state is not one where you're lazing around doing nothing. It's one where you're keeping busy, where you're doing things that stimulate you, and where you're resting only a fraction of the time. The preferred ground state is not one where you have no activity to partake in, it's one where you're managing the streams of activity precisely, and moving through them at the right pace: not too fast, but also not too slow. For that would be boring.
    Rest in motion
  • “We have become a self-care nation,” Raphael writes. “Though arguably one that still lacks the fundamentals of wellbeing.”
    ‘We’re sedating women with self-care’: how we became obsessed with wellness | Well actually | The Guardian
  • When you see people clearly, you see the transcript of their conversation with reality up until that moment of your meeting, and you glimpse the horizon that stretches out ahead of them. And then sometimes you can help them overhear themselves and overhear what the world wants from them, whether or not that includes working in the role that you had initially imagined for them.
    Head of people operations for the entire friend group
  • Instead of asking if the candidate is right for the role, he asks: what role would be ideal for them? Given their character, their strengths and weaknesses, where should they work? With what, and with whom?
    Head of people operations for the entire friend group
  • Notice that the search starts in the area to the right, which does not contain the highest peak. If it had been a focused search early on it would have gotten stuck at a local optimum. (This is one of the reasons why education is a nightmare for many, by the way. Schooling forces you to decide what you will pursue long before you get to try it. It makes your future, more knowledgeable self, the servant of the younger, ignorant self.)
    Think more about what to focus on - by Henrik Karlsson
  • When I was younger, I was never this lucky. It is partly because I was less skilled. But it is also partly because I would interrupt the nonconscious processing back then. Unintentionally, I would tell my brain to focus on something else—a conflict in a TV series I was watching, for instance. I would watch an episode before bed, and the cliffhanger would open a loop in my head. That loop would be churning in my head as I slept; I woke to a blank page. I don’t have time for that anymore. I make sure to always have an open loop concerning my writing. And I close every other loop—by wrapping it u…
    Think more about what to focus on - by Henrik Karlsson
  • In the prologue to Parallel Lives, you say that gossip is the beginning of moral inquiry. Do you stand by that? Yes, I think that’s true. It’s the reason that women in general have finer sensibilities than men. They’re used to talking about other people’s behaviour. Men don’t do that, and they’re a little morally dull.
    Phyllis Rose: ‘Power still resides in marriage’ | Biography books | The Guardian
  • Friendships are, by their very nature, made of friction. To know what is going on in someone’s day-to-day life, to make plans with them, and then reschedule those plans when someone inevitably gets sick, and then bring over Calpol or soup or an extra laptop charger. To water their plants while they’re away, to ask them to take your kids when you’re feeling sad, or for help getting rid of mice in your house. To show up for the walk you planned even when you’re a vulnerable anxious mess — this is all friction.
    The friendship problem - by Rosie Spinks
  • The poet David Whyte said that "the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self. The ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone, and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them, and to have believed in them, and sometimes, just to have accompanied them, for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone".
    attending to the other - by Jasmine Wang 🌱
  • Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life: “One of the few things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book, or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water.”
    Spend it all every time - Austin Kleon
  • There are so many things I used to do out of obligation. Shoulds were the building blocks of my world. Well but I should be nice to him. I should reach out. I should go to this meeting even though I don’t feel like it. I should stay up later. I should work out today. And the thing I’ve realized is that sense of obligation was often how I ducked out of recognizing where I actually was, what I actually felt.
    to be loved is to be changed - by Ava - bookbear express
  • Don’t get me wrong; money is great. It makes life much easier, but it’s surprisingly difficult to convert into lasting happiness. Maybe I could have fooled myself into believing that the next order of magnitude of success would do it, but I knew the guy at the next order of magnitude, and the one after that. To quote Justin Kan ‘Yeah I sold a company for a billion dollars, but I was looking at the AirBnB founders. The Airbnb founders were looking at Steve Jobs, and Steve Jobs is fucking dead.’
    How a Glimpse of 'Absolute Perfection' Changed the Course of My Life
  • Having diverging goals was the sort of thing that had, in previous relationships of mine, been a source of conflict. But with Johanna, there was rarely such friction. It was more like our conflicting needs were two equations, and our task was to figure out where they intersected; the hardness of the problem wasn’t personal.
    Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
  • When you write classical poetry, as I liked to do, you impose strict rules on yourself to deliberately make it harder to say what you want—and this is what makes poetry come alive. W.H. Auden, the British poet, praised metrical rules because they “forbid automatic responses, force us to have second thoughts, free from the fetters of Self.” The same thing is true for relationships, I reasoned: I could chart a path through life that made no compromises for others, and it would go where I wanted it to; or I could impose the much stricter rigor that comes from aligning my trajectory with Johanna’s…
    Relationships are coevolutionary loops - by Henrik Karlsson
  • My output on social media tends to go up, rather than down, when I am getting done what needs to be done. There appears to be some universal variable behind my productivity, which is something like “comfort with smoothly transferring my energy into the world,” that results in more Tweets, more posts, more chores getting done, and more money being made.
    What maximum productivity looks like for me
  • One of the most conspicuous patterns I've noticed in my life is how well it has worked, for me at least, to work on things that weren't prestigious. Still life has always been the least prestigious form of painting. Viaweb and Y Combinator both seemed lame when we started them. I still get the glassy eye from strangers when they ask what I'm writing, and I explain that it's an essay I'm going to publish on my web site. Even Lisp, though prestigious intellectually in something like the way Latin is, also seems about as hip. It's not that unprestigious types of work are good per se. But when you…
    What I Worked On
  • Or, to put it another way, it should feel like work rather than labor. This criterion was proposed by art critic Dave Hickey, who, after writing about and working among many of the great visual artists of our time, said in an interview, of creative work, “I think that if you don’t like it and it’s not easy, you shouldn’t be doing it … I mean it’s work, but it’s not labor.” Intuitively, we understand this distinction well. Labor is breaking rocks with a pick-ax while someone holds a gun to your head. Labor is your tenth hour in the warehouse when your vertebrae are starting to feel crunchy. Wor…
    If You Have Writer's Block, Maybe You Should Stop Lying
  • So the point is to take the work seriously but you don’t take yourself too seriously. There’s a riff about this in Stephen Pressfield’s War of Art, where he talks about how amateurs are too precious with their work: “The professional has learned, however, that too much love can be a bad thing. Too much love can make him choke. The seeming detachment of the professional, the cold-blooded character to his demeanor, is a compensating device to keep him from loving the game so much that he freezes in action.”
    Are you serious? - by visakan veerasamy