flâneur

Robert Kang

8 followers · 9 following · 424 views

on the atlas — 55

highlights — 19

  • We are watching people who have more freedom than the Medicis use that freedom to pretend they have less freedom than the line worker in Shenzhen, and we applaud it.
    On Grindslop - by Will Manidis - Minutes
  • In other words, instead of sharing our lives, we are merely summarising them; instead of living alongside one another, we now intersect only long enough to recap the weeks (sometimes months) that have passed since the last catch-up.
    catch-up culture is killing friendship - by laura
  • A Substack post that’s 100% AI gets, on average, about as many reactions as a post that’s 0% AI. This fundamentally should make us reevaluate the “AI slop is bad” thesis.
    In Defense of AI Slop - by Evan Armstrong - The Leverage
  • Not that many people will care about what you write, at least for the first few years, so make the writing useful to you. Write in a way that lets you refine your thoughts about the things that matter.
    Advice for a friend who wants to start a blog
  • Burnout comes from moral injury. It comes from a job that hurts your soul, or a boss that's an asshole, or a company that too obviously doesn't give a shit about you. You endure too much moral injury, and you get burnt out — it's not because you're averse to hard work. Hard work in service of a good purpose, or alongside people you care about, is a joyful thing!
    Spencer Yen on X: "Burnout at the chicken rice shop" / X
  • Perspective. You’ve always wanted it, now you’ve got it! Compared to knowing my daughter is safe and happy, I don’t care anymore how prestigious people think my job is, if my book does well or not, if anyone thinks I’m smart or funny or talented. I’ll still try at those things, because life still needs living. But really, I only have one purpose that matters now, which is helping another small human flourish. It’s a big job, but at least it’s only one.
    On whether having a baby ruins your life or not
  • All souls are naked and receptive, the cashier who is treated as a machine all day carries that weight, it affects their essence, the coldness is imbibed each and every time.
    Simone Weil's most beautiful idea / Why I am obsessed with her
  • Somewhere along the way, without realizing it, I rewired my brain. I trained it to only feel satisfied when something gets produced, and consumption started to feel like waste.
    Why Can’t I Enjoy Anything Anymore - by John Kim
  • Michael Knowles launches into a frustrated rant about how libs will castrate babies and sacrifice them to Moloch. “You just spiked your cortisol,” Clavicular calmly responds. “That’s a catabolic hormone…
    The Beautiful One - by Denzel Rust - Static Blue
  • And so young people find themselves at festivals, surrounded by music and possibility, standing still. Not because they don't want to dance, but because they're busy wanting to be the kind of person who dances - forgetting that such people become that way simply by dancing.
    There's a reasonable chance that you're seriously running out of time
  • Someone who feels deeply connected to themself and the world around them. Who has enough peace and equanimity in their daily life to seek truth and express that truth. A person who has the courage to take action to help create a better future for all. And one who chooses love over fear as often as they can.
    How to prepare for the next decade - by Scott Barker
  • To what extent are my problems caused by awkwardly contorting to hold a hazy magnifying glass back onto myself, and pretending to understand what I see?
    Self discovery is not the point - Emma Chen
  • “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.”
    see the good in everything, and the good will look for you too
  • “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.”
    see the good in everything, and the good will look for you too
  • There is ripe fruit left untouched on every tree I’ve grown.
    the hunger to be everything. - by amber. - odetoapoet
  • A tree does not exist in order to produce lumber. You can make lumber from it, and good lumber is nothing to sneer at. But if you look at a tree and see only lumber, you have missed what is standing in front of you. Something is growing there under its own power, toward its own form, and the growing is not a means to some further end.
    You Are Not a Function - by Brendan McCord
  • There’s something you get at about why we pay attention to certain things and collect them…that is different than a cynical and algorithmic view of taste…Our desire and attention falls to certain things because of the way that we feel about the person, place or thing that introduces them to us. In that way, taste is a lot more similar to love than it is to education.
    no one told me about proust - by Celine Nguyen
  • By making social approval measurable, turning conflicts into public displays, and creating a permanent record of social strife, the internet has recreated village life on a planetary scale. This was what the media theorist Marshall McLuhan meant when he declared that “an electronic world re-tribalizes men.”
    How Technology Re-Tribalized Us | Compact
  • As Jorge Luis Borges said, “I am not sure that I exist, actually. I am all the writers that I have read, all the people that I have met, all the women that I have loved; all the cities I have visited.”
    Es Devlin — Letters to a Young Creator