flâneur

Ashna Nirula

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on the atlas — 62

highlights — 178

  • the identity built around being untouchable.
    learning to trust love when you have it - by harls
  • the truth is, many of us learned love as a transaction. we learned that affection followed usefulness. that attention followed effort. that being wanted was something you had to work for, not something that arrived freely. so when love shows up without a checklist, it challenges everything we thought we understood about worth. “i’ll do this if you do that”. i’ll be softer, quieter, funnier, easier, prettier, more useful, if it means you stay. love becomes a system of exchanges rather than something natural. instinctive. mutual. but real love isn’t a scoreboard. it isn’t calculated. it isn’t tw…
    learning to trust love when you have it - by harls
  • i want to believe that i deserve love even on the days i’m not useful. even when i’m tired, messy, unproductive and quiet. even when i’m just a person standing in stillness, with nothing but my own existence. i don’t mean to be the way i am, i just don’t know how to let myself be held. because what if i become a burden? what if they stop seeing me as the strong one? what if, when i finally let someone take care of me, they decide i’m too much?
    i don't know how to be loved without earning it - by harls
  • it is a profoundly human need, this wish to be recognised in our fullness- to have someone glance beyond the curated mask and meet the soul beneath. when this happens, healing begins. connection deepens. and we start to accept ourselves not despite our flaws, but because of them.
    the paradox of craving to be seen but fearing being known
  • And I, who will never know my wife as a daughter, will always know her as a mom. There is the third reason to become a parent: It gives the people you love another way to know you.
    On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson
  • The presence of a parent remakes a child, transforms them back into a child.
    On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson
  • But, much more to the point, parenting is nothing like Paris. Imagine that every day you wake up in your left-bank apartment, and the city has meaningfully morphed into some magically strange variant of Paris. On Tuesday, the streets and boulevards no longer meet at their old familiar intersections. On Wednesday, the Louvre moves to another arrondissement. The Arc de Triumphe turns upside-down on Thursday and floats in the sky on Friday. Now we’re talking. Now that is more like parenting. To be a parent is to be a permanent tourist in a constantly evolving foreign city, which also happens to b…
    On Being a Dad - Derek Thompson
  • I truly think that women don’t want to be thin nearly as much as they want to be free from wanting to be thin. They don’t want to be beautiful nearly as much as they want to be free from having to think about whether they are beautiful.
    What If We're Not Actually Worried About Ariana Grande
  • the friendships meant for you will not require you to abandon yourself to keep them.
    no one talks about grieving friendships - by harls
  • “i know you’re different now, but i still want to know who you are becoming.”
    no one talks about grieving friendships - by harls
  • when you grow, you don’t just become a different person. you become someone who requires different things: you might develop stronger boundaries; become more protective of your energy; start noticing things you used to overlook; choosing yourself in ways you never did before; understanding what respect, communication, and connection actually mean to you.
    no one talks about grieving friendships - by harls
  • The worst version is entitlement disguised as boldness. “I admire your company, can we chat?” sent to fifty people with the same dead-eyed phrasing, a vague request for mentorship from someone busy, or a cold email that is just asking the recipient to do the work of figuring out who you are, what you want, and why they should care. The better version is usually much more attentive. You notice a person or company with specificity, study what they are doing and form a view on the problem they might be solving. You ask yourself where you could add value, then make the smallest useful proof that c…
    how to enter side doors - by maja - velvet noise
  • Rather than saying “I am passionate about wellness and would love to contribute”, I was trying to say: I see what you are building, I understand this corner of the internet, here are ideas, here is evidence I can do something, here is why I care. Specificity is one of the highest forms of respect. It shows you have actually looked and that you are not spraying need into the world and hoping someone converts it into opportunity. It shows you have taken the time to understand the person, the company, the problem, the context. In a market full of generic AI applications, specificity itself become…
    how to enter side doors - by maja - velvet noise
  • Who is doing work I care about? What are they trying to make happen? Where are they stuck? What do I know how to do, or what could I learn to do, that would help? Who would be delighted, relieved, or intrigued if I showed up with something useful?
    how to enter side doors - by maja - velvet noise
  • A more precise way of seeing the economy is as billions of people trying to solve problems, with “getting a job” meaning finding someone with a problem and convincing them you can solve it.
    how to enter side doors - by maja - velvet noise
  • A job is a bundle of problems someone wants solved badly enough to pay another person to solve them.
    how to enter side doors - by maja - velvet noise
  • Why would anyone hire a 22-year-old with Claude Code when they could just use Claude Code?
    The Old World Is Dying - by Jasmine Sun
  • . The people who will win are those who can remake themselves again and again: to summit one peak, descend it, and then hike up the next. Know your fallback plans. If I wasn’t a writer, I’d go back to product, and if I couldn’t do that, I’d work in policy or comms. I also like to teach, host events, and lead group travel. I’d be a slow line cook, but could do that too. You must imagine yourself happy in any number of worlds. There is nothing “higher status” than excelling joyfully at what you do.
    The Old World Is Dying - by Jasmine Sun
  • If people can't think clearly about anything that has become part of their identity, then all other things being equal, the best plan is to let as few things into your identity as possible.
    Keep Your Identity Small
  • I think what religion and politics have in common is that they become part of people's identity, and people can never have a fruitful argument about something that's part of their identity. By definition they're partisan.
    Keep Your Identity Small
  • What is your comparative advantage as a human? What traits will be scarce? How can you stay a complement to machine intelligence?
    The Old World Is Dying - by Jasmine Sun
  • What is your comparative advantage as a human? What traits will be scarce? How can you stay a complement to machine intelligence?
    The Old World Is Dying - by Jasmine Sun
  • What is your comparative advantage as a human? What traits will be scarce? How can you stay a complement to machine intelligence?
    The Old World Is Dying - by Jasmine Sun
  • To aspire is to want to want something before you actually want it. For example, the first time I tried to read Tolstoy, as a teenager, I didn’t get it—I didn’t want to read it. But I wanted to be the kind of person who wanted to read Tolstoy. I vaguely sensed there was something that would happen if I became that sort of person, something good. So I sort of faked my enthusiasm and tried to read War and Peace every few years, and, though I always failed to finish it, I learned a little more about Russian literature and Tolstoy each time, until, in my mid-twenties, I opened the book, suddenly g…
    Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
  • we made our relationship into a cocoon, a place where we felt safe enough to… well, what is it that caterpillars do in cocoons really? Dissolve themselves into a nutritious soup and assemble a new self. Yeah. It was like that.
    Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
  • Imagine that every day you wake up in your left-bank apartment and the city has meaningfully morphed into some magically strange variant of Paris. On Tuesday, the streets and boulevards no longer meet at their old familiar intersections. On Wednesday, the Louvre moves to another arrondissement. The Arc de Triumphe [sic] turns upside down on Thursday and floats in the sky on Friday. Now we’re talking. Now that is more like parenting. To be a parent is to be a permanent tourist in a constantly evolving foreign city, which also happens to be your home.
    Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
  • To be a parent is to be a permanent tourist in a constantly evolving foreign city, which also happens to be your home.
    Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
  • we made our relationship into a cocoon, a place where we felt safe enough to… well, what is it that caterpillars do in cocoons really? Dissolve themselves into a nutritious soup and assemble a new self. Yeah. It was like that.
    Love is to be invested in someone’s continual expansion
  • the discipline of understanding that every life is dense with its own motives, constraints, illusions and hopes.
    the weight of ordinary lives - Chandhana's Marginalia
  • the world is sustained by countless acts of care.
    the weight of ordinary lives - Chandhana's Marginalia
  • Achievement can feel cleaner than intimacy. More legible. More controllable. Relationships, by contrast, force a confrontation with the parts of yourself that do not respond to optimization nearly as easily. But that is exactly why they matter.
    Love and ambition | Kahlil Lalji
  • many of the things people call “bad luck” in relationships are, at least in part, patterns. Patterns of reactivity. Patterns of avoidance. Patterns of misattunement. Patterns of choosing people who confirm old emotional conclusions. Patterns of not saying what you mean until resentment says it for you.
    Love and ambition | Kahlil Lalji
  • Relationships are filled with contradictions. They contain optimization functions that often feel like they are running in opposite directions. They ask you to be both softer and stronger. Clearer and more flexible. More rooted in yourself and less consumed by yourself.
    Love and ambition | Kahlil Lalji
  • But ambition in the deeper sense: the desire to become more whole, more honest, more capable of building something meaningful with your life.
    Love and ambition | Kahlil Lalji
  • Love is not a reward for success.
    Love and ambition | Kahlil Lalji
  • Others, more quietly, delay partnership until they feel their future success will make them more desirable. Until they are more established. More impressive. More in line with the status they imagine they’re on track to earn.
    Love and ambition | Kahlil Lalji
  • But trying to hold on to the good distracts us from being present in the moment just as trying to flee from the bad does. Grasping at that feeling of elation is not realistic, not possible, and only leads to disappointment. All such ups and downs are transient. Keeping an evenness of temperament allows for clarity of mind and intention.
    Into the Magic Shop: The Alphabet of the Heart — The Innerwork Center
  • Our values can easily disintegrate, and the disintegration can at first be imperceptible. If we compromise our integrity once, it becomes that much easier to do it again.
    Into the Magic Shop: The Alphabet of the Heart — The Innerwork Center
  • it is love that holds our humanity.
    Into the Magic Shop: The Alphabet of the Heart — The Innerwork Center
  • love’s power as an act of invention, the way certain people draw out a version of you that didn’t exist before they arrived. They witness you, and thus, rearrange you. In their presence, words you didn’t know you knew tumble out. Your thoughts sharpen, colours seem richer, you inhabit yourself more fully.
    some parts of you only emerge for certain people - by maja
  • “I always thought, I kept taking the wrong turns and then they magically add up to the right place? Isn’t that too good to be true? How could that be? And now I realize that it’s because the turns were only partly wrong. They all revealed something.”
    searching for your life's work is a multi-turn endeavor
  • Like tuning an instrument string by string, I’d notice one note was off and I’d play it again. Turn the peg. Listen again. Turn the peg. It strikes me searching for your life’s work is just that. Eventually, the music rings clear and sweet.
    searching for your life's work is a multi-turn endeavor
  • Techne (tékhnē) is an ancient Greek term for art, craft, skill, or applied technique, representing a "state involving true reason concerned with production"
    techne - Google Search
  • In the absence of courage, nothing worthwhile can be accomplished.
    Quick Summary: The Eternal Pursuit of Unhappiness
  • They do not view “time taken” as a cost; they view it as an ingredient. Like the Minogame growing its tail, a sign of experience and traveling across the sea collecting seaweed, the Shokunin believes that quality is a layer-by-layer accumulation like that, which just cannot be rushed. So what is in there for you?
    Why Japan Is Seen to Build Tech That Is "Build To Last", And What Is So Cool About It ?
  • In traditional Japanese aesthetics, things that last longer are considered more beautiful than things that are new and flashy.
    Why Japan Is Seen to Build Tech That Is "Build To Last", And What Is So Cool About It ?
  • It’s a concept called `Monozukuri` (ものづくり), and it’s not just “manufacturing.” It’s the “art of making things.”
    Why Japan Is Seen to Build Tech That Is "Build To Last", And What Is So Cool About It ?
  • The exact mechanics differ, I presume, but the basic pattern is that when we linger on something, our bodily systems synchronize and feed each other stimuli in an escalatory loop that restructures our attentional field.
    Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom
  • Attention is something we “have to protect.” We have to “pay”1 attention—like a tribute. But we shouldn’t forget how interesting and overpoweringly pleasurable sustained attention can be. Slowing down makes reality vivid, strange, and hot.
    Almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom
  • And I knew that as long as I kept walking towards the mountain I would be all right. And when I truly was not sure what to do, I could stop, and think about whether it was taking me towards or away from the mountain.
    "Make Good Art" by Neil Gaiman speech transcript