Aristotle claimed that excellence is not an act, but a habit. I used to think that meant discipline. Now I think it means alignment. When the form of your day supports the function of your mind, when what you do with your time supports the kind of thoughts you hope to have.
The stories that affirm our shared humanity are born of self-knowledge, and I rarely gain a deeper understanding of my inner landscape just by scrolling through an endless feed of posts. We are allowed, perhaps even obligated, to prioritize what enriches us—so why don’t we?
The next time you use something that works so well you barely notice it, remember that somewhere, a designer solved a problem so thoroughly that both the problem and its solution became invisible. That designer might not be famous, might not have thousands of followers, might not be invited to speak at conferences — but they’ve achieved something remarkable: greatness through invisibility.
The strongest heart is the one that’s still beating. Even at your lowest point, the job of the heart is to make sure all your organs are getting blood so your body survives. You don’t have to be amazing all the time. Sometimes there are low points, and even if you’re just surviving, that’s a big deal.
When nations grow old,
the Arts grow cold,
And Commerce settles on every tree:
And the poor and the old
Can live upon gold,
For all are born poor.
Aged sixty-three.
The things that I have made over the years of my life have taught me so much, and in so many different ways. They have different lessons depending on the period of my life that I’m engaging with them and they change over time to me. There are many pieces in this building that have also changed over time so, to me, that is a bit of a kind of a life. There is a bit of something alive in that intersection.
Browsing one day in a library, I opened a book in the stacks and found a passage on 1830s France by Charles Fourier, the utopian French philosopher, in which he talks about the dishonesty of business transactions, the tedium and deceit of family life, the hardship of small farmers, the miseries of the poor and near-destitute in great cities, the evils of naked greed, the neglect of genius, the sufferings of children and old people, the stupidity of war, the coercive mechanisms of society disguised as law, morality and the benefits of civilization. Can you believe this? I thought to myself. Everything this man said one-hundred-and-eighty years ago is true about us today. I had no choice but to write it down, so I could prove to my friends that nothing ever changes.
Finally, consider how lucky you are to have someone who still occasionally lets you perform a nearly useless act of love that you always try really hard to do well.
Speaking as both a (largely wildly ‘unsuccessful’) musician and a corporate strategic consultant type, the conclusion I’ve come to of late is that the music industry can only ethically exist if it de-emphasises product/content/output as a …
We contain multitudes, all of us, even the worst of us.
From those multitudes, we make things.
Sometimes the things we make come from the light in us. Sometimes they come from the shadows. Usually, making something requires a bit of both.
We need to break the notion of “discovery” away from the myth that some system will find interesting stuff and hand it to us without us having to do any work.
As the Internet continues to increasingly mirror how things work in the real world, we have to abandon the idea that good things will come to us on an endless conveyer belt. Unlike spam calls, junk mail, and advertisements the things that we actually care about require us to find them and are not produced at a constant rate.
We are not uplifted by competing to achieve superior speed and efficiency. The sales pitch of GenAI is that the technology provides a shortcut to writing a song, making a movie, understanding a book, but these promises are illusions.
A simulacra of human virtuosity is not what we need. We need each other. We need signs of life about us. We need to know that we are not alone. And this is something we must consider not just in relation to the singular artifact, but also in relation to our environment. In a time of acute loneliness, the proliferation of AI-generated content seems not unlike an act of pollution, compromising the integrity of the social ecosystem.
I think, probably, the amount of delight we experience is directly related to the amount of control we’re willing to not have.
I feel like this is particularly fantastic advice for being delighted by music, movies, tv, games, books, and other creative media. Delight can only surprise you when you’re chasing what interests you and not following the reviews of algorithms and strangers.
But we didn’t take any photos of that bullock. You rarely do, when something comes of nowhere and flabbergasts you with its simplistic beauty. Everything moves on, a different picture moves in to occupy the frame, as the rules of the universe dictate, and it’s often in those moments, directly after the flabbergasting, beautiful thing has been witnessed, when the bittersweet fact of that seems most apparent.
It is quite obvious that the human race has made a queer mess of life on this planet. But as a people we probably harbor seeds of goodness that have lain for a long time waiting to sprout when the conditions are right. Man’s curiosity, his relentlessness, his inventiveness, his ingenuity have led him into deep trouble. We can only hope that these same traits will enable him to claw his way out.
Putting small things into words can create connection - The Reader recognizes a feeling or a moment that seemed too insignificant to dwell in til they discovered the writer was dwelling in it too. In my experience, little can be translated from the life’s monumental joys and tragedies. An extraordinary love rendered ordinary when you name it. Or else the dull, incurable ache that a life could have gone differently, but didn’t.
Major inventions don’t have some inherent nature that tends towards improving life or enriching humanity. More often than not, they worsen life and deepen inequality because elites hoard their benefits and tightly dictate the terms of technological deployment. So when technological breakthroughs do yield positive outcomes, it’s because those with power are forced into an agreement that distributes resources more equally.