flâneur

Neel K

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on the atlas — 28

highlights — 80

  • 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
  • The term “third place” has been popular to refer to physical community places. I think it’s time to retire this term. Just saying that these are non-work, non-home places gives no information about the kinds of places they are. This is why Starbucks was able to grift on “third space” so successfully. A Starbucks is not a community space, does not center healing, and has no vision of the good life—traits which clearly matter to the organizations popping up all around the nation. This movement doesn’t need a brand or special terminology to organize around. That’s why I think ⦿ Center is an appro…
    Prototyping Social Forms of Care
  • Geriatric and extractive institutions, however, are not the only areas of stagnation. Social forms themselves can themselves fall into disuse. Fraternal organizations and small-scale civic organizations in the US are two social forms indicative of this neglect: they played an important role in Tocqueville's America, but have little vitality today. In a report on civic associations, Lewis et. al describe how social media platforms have out-competed neighborhood associations, to be the “most representative layer of the governance stack.” In this media environment, additional financing isn’t suff…
    Prototyping Social Forms of Care
  • Not only that: it is impossible to create good craft without studying previous great works of art. I strongly believe that you cannot write well without reading good books, just like how actors who truly value and study film are usually better at their jobs. You cannot create something out of vacuum, and in order for your brain not to be a complete empty space, you need to fill it with substantial and important information that can serve as a foundation and inspiration to create something new, something as good. As someone who writes, one of my main goals when trying to maintain and expand my …
    how to get smart again: building a media syllabus
  • To tap into the flow state, your skill level and the challenge of the task you’re working on should be in perfect balance.
    You need to build mastery in order to find your flow | Aeon Essays
  • They've learned that each attempt is data, not judgment. They've developed what psychologists call "task orientation" rather than "ego orientation;
    being too ambitious is a clever form of self-sabotage
  • Talking or writing about the things you're interested in is a good way to generate new ideas. When you try to put ideas into words, a missing idea creates a sort of vacuum that draws it out of you. Indeed, there's a kind of thinking that can only be done by writing.
    How to Do Great Work
  • If you actually want to discover new things, it's better to take the risk of telling people your ideas.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Aspects of the built as well as the social environment can cause us to turn outward toward the environment and others, or to turn inward toward our own (often painful) simulations. A freeway is useful for getting from place to place, but it’s not a place to merely exist in the moment. So it is allowed to be ugly. More and more utilitarian, interstitial places are excused from beauty – parking lots, shopping areas, waiting rooms, hallways, and eventually even the rooms we live in. A utilitarian “housing unit” is a box for storing people; it doesn’t have to be beautiful, just cheap. And ugliness…
    The Essence of Peopling
  • Aspects of the built as well as the social environment can cause us to turn outward toward the environment and others, or to turn inward toward our own (often painful) simulations. A freeway is useful for getting from place to place, but it’s not a place to merely exist in the moment. So it is allowed to be ugly. More and more utilitarian, interstitial places are excused from beauty – parking lots, shopping areas, waiting rooms, hallways, and eventually even the rooms we live in. A utilitarian “housing unit” is a box for storing people; it doesn’t have to be beautiful, just cheap. And ugliness…
    The Essence of Peopling
  • Aspects of the built as well as the social environment can cause us to turn outward toward the environment and others, or to turn inward toward our own (often painful) simulations. A freeway is useful for getting from place to place, but it’s not a place to merely exist in the moment. So it is allowed to be ugly. More and more utilitarian, interstitial places are excused from beauty – parking lots, shopping areas, waiting rooms, hallways, and eventually even the rooms we live in. A utilitarian “housing unit” is a box for storing people; it doesn’t have to be beautiful, just cheap. And ugliness…
    The Essence of Peopling
  • What I’m feeling now is that this was all so cute. How adorable it is that I got wrapped up in this so deeply. What an amazingly intricate inconvenience. I have a lot of fondness for the person who believed this insanity. And I am now aware that self-love means less. It means lightness. It means knowing that I’m not that complicated. It is the knowledge that I’m a simple thing, both bigger and smaller than I dared to believe. It doesn’t mean proving that I’m great; it’s a permanent vacation from proof. It’s the understanding that I don’t require a solution, that there is no actual problem, and…
    Stranded on the Space Mountains of Self-Loathing
  • And, really, I thought I did love myself, or at least like myself. That’s what I thought it was when I puffed myself up by rapidly reviewing all of my credentials, pretty sentences I’d produced, muscle tissue I’d accumulated, impressive people who liked me, attractive people I’d seduced. I thought nothing of the desperate character of this process, which less resembled a luxurious spa treatment, and more resembled a hummingbird flitting between food sources but finding none nourishing.
    Stranded on the Space Mountains of Self-Loathing
  • And the person I was talking to said, “you’re so wise,” and, suddenly, I experienced a soul-level cringe when I realized that I was being lavishly praised for reciting obvious truths, none of which belonged to me. I was just a conduit for trivia I’d encountered by chance.
    Cosmic impostor syndrome - by Sasha Chapin
  • In the default mind, self-esteem is the hard-won product of an inner battle. There is a constant fight going on between positive and negative thoughts. Your boss gave you stellar marks during your annual review. But perhaps Becky did not find you inspiring as a lover. This is okay, in light of your last Tweet going viral. But look at the intruding paunch you see in the mirror! Many human beings spend most of their lives locked in this unresolvable conflict, hoping to remain on the winning side most of the time.
    Cosmic impostor syndrome - by Sasha Chapin
  • So, having a better vocabulary for a given medium doesn’t just make you sound smart, it increases the resolution of your enthusiasm.
    How to like everything more - by Sasha Chapin
  • But any energy that goes into how you seem comes out of being good.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Don't try to work in a distinctive style. Just try to do the best job you can; you won't be able to help doing it in a distinctive way. Style is doing things in a distinctive way without trying to. Trying to is affectation. Affectation is in effect to pretend that someone other than you is doing the work. You adopt an impressive but fake persona, and while you're pleased with the impressiveness, the fakeness is what shows in the work. [12] The temptation to be someone else is greatest for the young. They often feel like nobodies. But you never need to worry about that problem, because it's sel…
    How to Do Great Work
  • And that is what you're aiming for, because if you don't try to be the best, you won't even be good. This observation has been made by so many people in so many different fields that it might be worth thinking about why it's true. It could be because ambition is a phenomenon where almost all the error is in one direction — where almost all the shells that miss the target miss by falling short. Or it could be because ambition to be the best is a qualitatively different thing from ambition to be good. Or maybe being good is simply too vague a standard. Probably all three are true.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Consciously cultivate your taste in the work done in your field. Until you know which is the best and what makes it so, you don't know what you're aiming for.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Great work happens by focusing consistently on something you're genuinely interested in. When you pause to take stock, you're surprised how far you've come. The reason we're surprised is that we underestimate the cumulative effect of work. Writing a page a day doesn't sound like much, but if you do it every day you'll write a book a year. That's the key: consistency. People who do great things don't get a lot done every day. They get something done, rather than nothing.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Ideally those hours will be contiguous. To the extent you can, try to arrange your life so you have big blocks of time to work in. You'll shy away from hard tasks if you know you might be interrupted.
    How to Do Great Work
  • For example, while you must work hard, it's possible to work too hard, and if you do that you'll find you get diminishing returns: fatigue will make you stupid, and eventually even damage your health. The point at which work yields diminishing returns depends on the type. Some of the hardest types you might only be able to do for four or five hours a day.
    How to Do Great Work
  • If you're interested, you're not astray.
    How to Do Great Work
  • Obviously the most exciting story to write will be the one you want to read. The reason I mention this case explicitly is that so many people get it wrong. Instead of making what they want, they try to make what some imaginary, more sophisticated audience wants. And once you go down that route, you're lost.
    How to Do Great Work
  • When everything is subjective, when all is debunked, when all is a social construct, how can you pass it down? If nothing is real or solid, how can you hold onto it? Their hands are empty. Never before in history have so many adults been wedded to nothing, vowed to nobody, belonged to nowhere, had nothing to live or die for. They have political positions, sure, but not principles. Sides in the culture war but not convictions. We live in a world of adults with little faith in anything, least of all themselves.
    The Need For Adults - by Freya India - GIRLS
  • Reading is the main way to expand your mind as an adult. Media consumption simply does not cut it. If you want to separate yourself intellectually from your peers, develop serious interests and passions, feel calmer and more collected, have deeper, more interesting conversations, and rarely feel bored—you have to read. (Books, by the way. Not Instagram captions, not lists, not product recommendations from The Cut. Books.)
    How to Make the Most of Your 20s - Catherine Shannon
  • Our society is addicted to the tales of the 22-year-old pop star, the 19-year-old actress, the 24-year-old novelist. There are like six of these people, and a good deal of them are industry plants with powerful connections. Most people with a shred of creative integrity do not succeed right out of the gate. They persist, they work their asses off for decades, until one day it all finally pays off. In your 20s, don’t worry about being known for it, worry about being good at it.
    How to Make the Most of Your 20s - Catherine Shannon
  • This is the crux of human experience: To want and to not get. We are horrified by the naive, the stupid, and the young, who openly express what we all feel but have learnt to repress, like the village fool who becomes hysterical when she realises what we’ve all long understood.
    On the desperation of female neediness
  • But that sounds like a cope. These losers don’t want to date us because our paychecks are fatter!!! Hur hur !! It feels more realistic that men are as terrified of female emotionality as women are of male hornyness. The expectation that a woman’s needs will swallow you whole if you go on a date and sleep with her. Your phone will be buzzing with a stream of consciousness texts while your social circle is shaming you for being a fuckboy for lacking the emotional bandwidth to feel the need to text a girl good morning and goodnight and all the meals and snacks in between. The female equivalent is…
    On the desperation of female neediness
  • Most women don’t want easier sex; they want romance.
    On the desperation of female neediness
  • It is perhaps impossible to desire what we already have, what is easy, or what is implicitly promised to us. Desire is fueled, to a certain degree, by the possibility of not getting what you want. It depends on a certain distance and difficulty that must be overcome through one’s own effort. Technology makes us lazy. We think our phones will do the work for us, but they don’t. Thoroughly exhausting ourselves intellectually and physically through productive work brings fulfillment, and with fulfillment comes peace.
    Your phone is why you don't feel sexy
  • Criticize the world all you want, but do the hard work of building something better to take its place.
    Everyone is numbing out - Catherine Shannon
  • Death and loneliness abound. Everyone is constantly joking about killing themselves while Canada rolls out a “humane” service to do just that (MAID). People are struggling: most people simply cannot cope without substances like marijuana, alcohol, drugs, and SSRIs. People are lonely: they have fewer friends and live far from their families. Dating seems impossible. Men and women in the prime of their lives are struggling to meet even one potential partner who shares their values and vision for a relationship. Oh, and our phones—Gen Z averages an unfathomable 9 hours of screen time per day—have…
    Everyone is numbing out - Catherine Shannon
  • Thanks to the internet and our insatiably consumerist culture, it is finally possible to distract yourself for every waking minute of your life and barely even notice you’re doing it. When you mix all colors of paint together, you get black. Everything quickly becomes nothing.
    Everyone is numbing out - Catherine Shannon
  • Everyone longs for love and compassion. Everyone secretly admires it, even when they’re distancing themselves from it.
    Rejection Isn’t Personal - by Heather Havrilesky
  • And here’s what’s really sad: Many, many people in this world are terrified of real connection that unfolds in real time. This means that anything that makes you seem real will set them on edge. They would prefer a painted backdrop, where they can mouth the same lines and get the same predictable responses from everyone they meet. They don’t even realize that they prefer this. They simply feel WEIRD or AWKWARD or UNCOMFORTABLE around a real human. And they back away.
    Rejection Isn’t Personal - by Heather Havrilesky
  • It is this kind of attitude that makes someone succeed at their level, as far as I can tell. They are always pushing themselves to the edge, which makes them grow, and they are so selfless and pleasant to work with that you just want to do more stuff with them all the time. And you need that attitude to do anything ambitious: you need support, and funding, and goodwill, and you don’t get that by being disorganized or self-centered.
    6 lessons I learned working at an art gallery
  • My friends all believe that meaningful work was crucial to a good life. That was surprising to me when I first moved here. I wasn’t ambitious about work in the sense that I expected to be fulfilled; what mattered to me was survival, reassurance. Those were my parents’ values, and the values of the community I was raised in. Though I’m sure most of them were also hugely motivated by ego, validation, and financial success, I could also tell that they genuinely cared about liking what they did. Several of my friends told me over the years that I should write more—B in particular was insistent abo…
    the friendship theory of everything
  • They are doing what they want to do, and they have discovered that it is hard.
    the friendship theory of everything
  • But I sit down anyway. I don’t write because I’m inspired; I write because I care. Being inspired is fun, and I savor the moments when I am. But more often than not, inspiration refuses to show up until I assure it that I can be trusted to stick to my writing schedule. So I make sure that I sit down at my desk every day — by focusing on the thing I can control, I craft a space for inspiration. And if it fails to come, I work anyway.
    Dostoevsky as lover - by Henrik Karlsson
  • the form fits the context
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • I kept iterating—paying attention to the context, removing things that frustrated me, and expanding things that made me feel alive.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • I paid attention to things I liked to do, and found ways to do more of that. I made it easy for interesting people to find me, and then I hung out with them. We did projects together.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • Eventually, I looked up and noticed that my life was nothing like I imagined it would be. But it fit me.
    Everything that turned out well in my life followed the same design process
  • At each stage do whatever seems most interesting and gives you the best options for the future. I call this approach "staying upwind."
    How to Do Great Work
  • For most of us, settling is an inevitability, not because of insufficient exposure to these bland admonishments but because, unlike Jobs, we do not know what great work really is —we lack confidence in any system of values or ideals; we cannot give ourselves wholly over to anything without doubt; we cannot have faith, and utter dedication seems faintly ludicrous— or we cannot decide how much of ourselves or others we are willing to sacrifice. We want love and labor, freedom and meaning, flexibility and commitment. One has the strong sense that Jobs had no issue whatever with the idea of total,…
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • The value or articulation of the ideas, it is appropriate to mention, is less important than we might think; in the case of Jobs, it is not crucial that he had a system of philosophy that charted the place of design in problem-solving, problem-solving in human advancement, human-advancement in a moral context. Indeed, we might leave that to others entirely, others who write about such things rather than living each moment driving themselves and others to achieve them.
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • “Leaders,” who live in accordance with their own values, or values of some community that is worldly in its intentions, such that they do not drop from society but seek to instantiate their values in it.
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • the third path most of us take: muddling through and bargaining in internal monologues about what we ought to be while compromising constantly:
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders