You will meet some people in your life who are your soulmate in an alternate universe. Don’t cause an incursion. Appreciate how they are doing in the other reality.

A top indicator of relationship success will be if you can successfully share a bathroom together.

The quarter life crisis is overrated. If you’re worried about your life at 25…stop. Whatever you experience between age 25 to 32 probably does not matter at all.

“If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up people to collect wood and don’t assign them tasks and work, but rather teach them to long for the endless immensity of the sea."— Antoine de Saint Exupéry

People get too caught up in finding a perfect person, and don't understand that their partner is fluid and ever-changing. Love is a choice. If someone asks you why you're with your current partner, the answer should always be "because I chose to be." If that choice is dependent on your partner remaining fixed in place, or dependent on a fantasy version of them you have in your head, then you have fantasy love. Love is not desire or admiration, it's acceptance. It's saying "I love the person you are, whoever that may be today."

People are not Pokemon to be worn down slowly over time until you eventually get a chance to capture them. If you want to ask someone out, just do it.

Each person I've been with wants a different set of things from the relationship smorgasbord, but most sort of assume that everyone else wants the exact same slice. So get specific. Ask for what you want and be clear about what they want. If that changes, talk about it.

Sometimes when you're around someone, you may morph into some version of yourself that you don't like. I used to believe this was a problem with me and the other person: unfixable, requiring a split. But this is something you can cultivate too, if you're aware of it. You fix it by noticing which habits cause you to be that way. If you express it, your partner is your teammate in getting you back to the person you want to be.

People aren't really themselves when they're going through strong emotions and really just need support. Love is saying "yes, I choose you, even now."

Non-okayness is the opposite. I’ve described it elsewhere as being “mildly disgruntled all the time.” You’re frustrated with life and with yourself. You feel like there is something wrong with you, although it’s a different problem in each moment: you’re too soft, you’re too rough, you’re too social, you’re too alone. You constantly feel like you’re in the wrong place and you “should have” done something else to avoid this situation.

I distinctly remember one of my first days back in New York after my retreat. I was on PTO so I had the day to myself, and I didn’t have much of an agenda. Usually this is enough to put me on edge: I like maximizing productive use of my time, so I make detailed schedules and todo lists. If I spend an entire day off doing “nothing”, I’ll feel really bad and frustrated with myself at the end of it.

This day, post-retreat, was not like any day I had experienced before. It felt like literally anything could happen and things would be perfectly fine. I do some work? Great. I don’t do any work? Great. I felt like I could just sit there and stare at the brick walls of my apartment all day. I felt such unbridled affection for my roommates and friends. I started reading Stephen Batchelor’s Buddhism Without Beliefs, and felt moved by every paragraph. I could read for a whole hour without the slightest urge to use my phone. And even when bad things happened—one night I was hurt by something my friend did, another night someone at a bar yelled at me—I would feel upset, and then I’d move on, and it wouldn’t spiral into an endless internal echo of “I should’ve done this, I should be that, I should do that.”

One of the things about okayness is that it entails a lot of presence, and the more your sense of presence deteriorates, the less aware you are of the fact that it’s deteriorating.

entering stable okayness is a non-voluntary inner movement. There are many outer, voluntary moves you can do to make it more likely that the inner, non-voluntary move occurs, but none of them will reliably trigger the inner move. Being in a state of non-okayness is like having an internal knot in your mind, and the harder you try to untie the knot—the more you clench and tug on it—the tighter the knot becomes.

The things that tend to nudge me towards okayness are: retreats, quiet time to myself, long walks, reading, and looking at beautiful things. The things that nudge me away from okayness are: consuming a lot of social media, socializing a ton, having a lot of deadlines. This doesn’t mean that those things are strictly bad and to be avoided at all costs. It’s just about working through your own relationship to these things — trying to figure out what it is about these things that uproots yourself sense of okayness, and address that.

One of the trickiest aspects of the inner knot is this: each time it gets tied again, it’s in an ever-so-slightly different shape, requiring a different move to untie it.

The shift that has been working for me most recently is to recognize that okayness just isn’t something I can reliably produce. And repeatedly asking myself, what is the truth of this moment, rather than trying to figure out how I can get to some other state, or some past memory or object of blame, that has nothing to do with what is going on right now.All these things are little nudges to help make it more likely that you get to okayness.

Okayness is when you feel fundamentally at ease with reality and with yourself. You feel like you are enough: there is nothing fundamentally deficient about you. You move through life with grace and fluidity. When bad things happen, negative emotions arise, and you just feel them, and then they pass, and none of that detracts from the fundamental beauty of your experience. Life feels inherently meaningful, you’re perfectly content with how things are, while also naturally gliding towards the things you want

Siri also had a cumbersome design that made it time-consuming to add new features, said Mr. Burkey, who was given the job of improving Siri in 2014. Siri’s database contains a gigantic list of words, including the names of musical artists and locations like restaurants, in nearly two dozen languages.That made it “one big snowball,” he said. If someone wanted to add a word to Siri’s database, he added, “it goes in one big pile.”So seemingly simple updates, like adding some new phrases to the data set, would require rebuilding the entire database, which could take up to six weeks, Mr. Burkey said. Adding more complex features like new search tools could take nearly a year. That meant there was no path for Siri to become a creative assistant like ChatGPT, he said.

There’s a flipside to the wonder of childhood, though: things can be as terrifying as they are mesmerizing. In fact, when I think about childhood the feeling that usually comes up is not wonder, but terror. I was afraid of everything as a kid: of my parents dying, of burglars breaking into our apartment, of the dark and dirty hallways of my elementary school. Even the shows I loved would scare me: there was a character in dragonball z, his name was broly, and even to this day thinking about the image of his face sends the faintest shiver down my spine.1 This is why I always say I’m happy to have grown up: life is less scary now that I’m older, now that the world is more predictable.

These two things seem to come as a package deal: life as a child is both mesmerizing and terrifying. I think there is something fundamental here. It’s the same reason why when people take LSD, they will either describe it as the most blissful experience of their life, or the most harrowing—and often both. Someone asked recently whether babies are tripping all the time. I’m sure they are.

a child’s experience is an endless explosion of vividness. Slowly we start to make sense of the world, we start to notice repeating patterns, we start to establish boundaries between “me” and “you” and “this” and “that”, and we get better at predicting what will happen next. Life becomes a little more manageable, but a little more dull. Our ideas about experience harden into rigid stories we can’t shake.

There are two ways to make the world more mesmerizing: to seek out new and increasingly intense experiences, or to loosen the filters that make ordinary experience “ordinary”. You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving.

even more important, many advocates argue, is how the two reforms together can change how candidates and elected officials of all stripes approach their jobs, by adjusting the incentive structure they operate under. Increasingly, many states and districts are solidly red or blue, meaning the general election is uncompetitive, and the key race takes place in the primary. That’s a problem, because the primary electorate is by and large smaller, more partisan and more extreme than the general electorate. Right now, with politicians worrying more about the primary than the general, they’re more focused on playing to their base than on reaching beyond it and solving problems, critics argue.

By allowing multiple candidates to advance, Final Four/Five shifts the crucial election from the primary to the general. And RCV means the votes of Democrats in red districts and Republicans in blue ones still matter, even if their top choice remains unlikely to win. Together, it means candidates are rewarded for paying attention to the entire general electorate, not just a small slice of staunch supporters. As a result, it encourages candidates — and elected officials, once in office — toward moderation and problem-solving, and away from extremism.

There is nothing wrong with wanting a big fanbase or making money with your talent. In fact, I’d argue that we all have this desire (as a writer, I definitely do). The problem arises when these things become goals in and of themselves. Artistry is the soul of creation, and over-engineering it for the sake of a certain outcome kills that soul.

There are writers and there are grifters. There are artists and there are content creators.

This isn’t about highbrow versus lowbrow art, but rather algorithmic versus authentic creation.

creative works cannot be deeply transformational for your audience if they are not meaningful to you first.