Everybody goes to the theater in the U.K. because it’s accessible. Tickets are affordable. So many theaters are government subsidized, and there are all kinds of schemes where you get £5, £10, and £15 tickets. So there’s a kind of democracy to the whole thing. In New York, theaters are dependent on their subscribers, and everything is based around not losing them. Because without them, these buildings will shut down. The rent on a Broadway space is 10 times the rent of a West End space. The cheapest ticket you can get, even for Off Broadway, is $80. That means you go out for dinner, and you’re out close to $200 in a night. Nobody can afford it, and this makes it very exclusive. If you limit the audience to wealthy, older white people, it changes the type of play you can put on. Don’t get me wrong, the theater community in New York is beautiful—I absolutely love and adore it—but the commerce of it is just a different beast.

I think there’s a lot of pressure in the United States to become a famous person in a way that people in the U.K. don’t really give a shit about. You can work there and be a successful theater actor without having to have a big name. In the U.S., I felt like if I didn’t get some kind of TV visibility, those theater parts might dry up. Because they need to sell tickets, and famous people sell tickets.

Bill and Alec did such a nuanced job of writing a complicated female character who’s as nasty as the male characters on the Barry. But Sally’s not a bad person. She just learned the wrong survival skills. And her ideas of how to get ahead are bit misguided. We’re all so ready to forget that Barry literally kills people for a living and still root for him, and yet we’re challenged by an ambitious woman who has some irritating personality traits.

For years, I had been building what technologists and lifehackers call a “second brain.” The premise: capture everything, forget nothing. Store your thinking in a networked archive so vast and recursive it can answer questions before you know to ask them. It promises clarity. Control. Mental leverage. But over time, my second brain became a mausoleum. A dusty collection of old selves, old interests, old compulsions, piled on top of each other like geological strata. Instead of accelerating my thinking, it began to replace it. Instead of aiding memory, it froze my curiosity into static categories.

The modern PKM (Personal Knowledge Management) movement traces its roots through para-academic obsessions with systems theory, Luhmann’s Zettelkasten, and the Silicon Valley mythology of productivity as life. Roam Research turned bidirectional links into a cult. Obsidian let the cult go off-grid. The lore deepened. You weren’t taking notes. You were building a lattice of meaning. A library Borges might envy.

n “The Library of Babel,” he imagines an infinite library containing every possible book. Among its volumes are both perfect truth and perfect gibberish. The inhabitants of the library, cursed to wander it forever, descend into despair, madness, and nihilism. The map swallows the territory.

The more I wrote into my vault, the less I felt. A quote would spark an insight, I’d clip it, tag it, link it - and move on. But the insight was never lived. It was stored. Like food vacuum-sealed and never eaten, while any nutritional value slips away.

Worse, the architecture began to shape my attention. I started reading to extract. Listening to summarize. Thinking in formats I could file. Every experience became fodder.

Human memory is not an archive. It is associative, embodied, contextual, emotional. We do not think in folders.

Merlin Donald, in his theory of cognitive evolution, argues that human intelligence emerged not from static memory storage but from external symbolic representation: tools like language, gesture, and writing that allowed us to rehearse, share, and restructure thought. Culture became a collective memory system - not to archive knowledge, but to keep it alive, replayed, and reworked. In trying to remember everything, I outsourced the act of reflection. I didn’t revisit ideas. I didn’t interrogate them. I filed them away and trusted the structure.

The vision I’ve set out for myself is – can you trust yourself to take care of your problems as needed, and also to reach out for help to the extent that it’s needed too? I’ve found that by virtue of this increased security I also find it easier to reach out when I actually feel like I need help. In the past I would often just “struggle in silence” and secretly hope for my friends to check in on me, and then develop resentment when they didn’t. I was continually reinforcing this self-story of “I have so much difficulty with basic things and no one understands.”

When you treat friendship—or anything else, really—as a crutch for an underlying insecurity you are doomed to be unsatisfied. No number of crutches will get you back to walking again.

opening notion or obsidian feels less like launching software and more like putting on your favorite jacket. it says something about you. aligns you with a tribe, becomes part of your identity. software isn’t just functional anymore. it’s quietly turned into a lifestyle brand, a digital prosthetic we use to signal who we are, or who we wish we were.

somewhere along the way, software stopped being invisible. it started meaning things. your browser, your calendar, your to-do list, these are not just tools anymore. they are taste. alignment. self-expression.

suddenly your app stack said something about you. not in a loud, obvious way but like the kind of shoes you wear when you don’t want people to notice, but still want them to know. margiela replica. new balance 992. arcteryx. stuff that whispers instead of shouts, it’s all about signaling to the right people.

notion might be one of the most unopinionated tools out there. you can build practically anything with it. databases, journals, dashboards, even websites. but for a tool so open-ended, it’s surprisingly curated. only three fonts, ten colors.

if notion is a sleek apartment in seoul, obsidian is a cluttered home lab. markdown files. local folders. keyboard shortcuts. graph views. it doesn’t care how it looks, it cares that it works. it’s functional first, aesthetic maybe never. there’s no onboarding flow, no emoji illustrations, no soft gradients telling you everything’s going to be okay. just an empty vault and the quiet suggestion: you figure it out. obsidian is built for tinkerers. not in the modern, drag and drop sense but in the old way. the “i wanna see how this thing works under the hood way”. it’s a tool that rewards curiosity and exploration. everything in obsidian feels like it was made by someone who didn’t just want to take notes, they wanted to build the system that takes notes. it’s messy, it’s endless, and that’s the point. it’s a playground for people who believe that the best tools are the ones you shape yourself.

notion is for people who want a beautiful space to live in, obsidian is for people who want to wire the whole building from scratch. both offer freedom, but one is curated and the other is raw. obsidian and notion don’t just attract different users. they attract different lifestyles.

the whole obsidian ecosystem runs on a kind of quiet technical fluency.

the fact that people think obsidian is open source matters more than whether it actually is. because open source, in this context, isn’t just a licence, it’s a vibe. it signals independence. self-reliance. a kind of technical purity. using obsidian says: i care about local files. i care about control. i care enough to make things harder on myself. and that is a lifestyle.

now, there’s a “premium” version of everything. superhuman for email. cron (i don’t wanna call it notion calendar) for calendars. arc for browsing. raycast for spotlight. even perplexity, somehow, for search.

these apps aren’t solving new problems. they’re solving old ones with better fonts. tighter animations, cleaner onboarding. they’re selling taste.

chrome gets the job done, but arc gets you. the onboarding feels like a guided meditation. it’s not about speed or performance. it’s about posture.

arc makes you learn new gestures. it hides familiar things. it’s not trying to be invisible, it wants to be felt. same with linear. same with superhuman. these apps add friction on purpose. like doc martens or raw denim that needs breaking in.

linear even has a “work with linear” page, a curated list of companies that use their tool. it’s a perfect example of companies not just acknowledging their lifestyle brand status, but actively leaning into it as a recruiting and signaling mechanism.

This doesn’t mean that everything that has happened to you is a result of your actions. It means that you develop an ability to respond to whatever happens to you, even if you don’t control the consequences of your actions. It means exerting maximal agency towards the things you can directly change (your behavior), and maximum acceptance towards things you can influence but not control (external circumstances, other people’s behavior).

Our responses typically come from patterns and scripts handed down from our parents and our pasts. We are not hostage to those patterns, we can update them. A pattern that's run through your family for generations can stop with you. Vision is bigger than baggage.

A pattern like anxiety may have been helpful in a previous unsafe environment but is maladaptive for our current safe environment.

Cognitive behavior therapy or Byron Katie’s work helps us get new training data by asking questions like: “are you absolutely sure that’s true? How do you react when you believe that thought? Who would you be without that thought?“ This is great for updating limiting beliefs, of which we have many that are often mostly incorrect and holding us back.

loving people and wanting other people to flourish on their own terms, independent of what’s in it for you—even when it’s at your expense.

Write down a list of what you want in your relationships and the types of people you want personal and professional relationships with and then make sure you are bringing those attributes to the table too. e.g. If you want loyal friends, *be* a loyal friend. Focus on “being” rather than “having”, because you can only control the former, and by doing so you can influence the latter.

We want to get that job because we want respect, autonomy, recognition, connection. But there are thousands of ways to meet that need. Acknowledging this makes you more flexible to what life throws at you, and makes it more likely you’ll get what you actually want deep down. A lot of stress in my life came from being set on certain strategies when if I appreciated what need I was trying to meet, I could have been more flexible in switching strategies.

“I’ll be happy once I hit X goal” may be motivating, but it won’t be true—you’ll just move the goalposts. If this is how you’re motivated now, it’s unlikely to last because at some point you’ll figure out that your pattern is unfulfilling and you’ll stop following it. Then you’ll need to find a new way to motivate yourself. A more durable motivation comes from genuinely enjoying the process and the contributions and the relationships that stem from it.

You can’t be in your body and be stuck in your brain at the same time. The way out of the brain loop is through the body. If you feel feel the feelings it might take a few minutes or hours to pass them, whereas if you repress it it might take months or years.

Keep in touch with old friends more broadly. Call them randomly, even if it’s been years. Keep track of what they care about.

Be able to acknowledge when you are not in a secure place, and be able to reset by working out, taking a walk, listening to music, talking with a friend, etc. Wait until the anger or trigger passes before acting. And never fight over text. And if you ever find yourself in a fight, realize you’re in one and calm down and ask yourself why you’re fighting.

Deposits into your own bank account look like being proud of yourself — contributing to others, gaining competence at something that matters, doing the right thing, keeping promises to yourself and others, and taking good care of yourself.

Track what people and activities and habits make you feel better and which drain you. Track when you get triggered or or when you trigger others and see if you can identify patterns.

Do a weekly audit where you can look backwards and reflect on what brings you closer to yourself or and vice versa and readjust how you spend time accordingly.

Although rewiring is worth doing, it's easier to change your environment than to change your insides. Change your environment & then let the new cues do the work.

If you’re going to offend someone, do it on something you care about. Not on an off hand remark or action that didn’t mean anting to you. If you’re unsure, wait a couple days to see if you still mean it. Usually you don’t.

Grudges are ankle weights on your soul.

If you have extended anger with someone, even if they’re in the wrong, you’re both losing.

Empathize with what needs they were trying to meet through their actions and then either reconcile with them or move on with the levity of being grudge-free.

Try other tactics to get curious about other people instead of righteous. If you look at their childhood photos it’s hard to be mad at them. If you have your hands on your heart it’s hard to be angry at them. If you’re hugging your partner it’s harder to fight with them.

One self-connection exercise when triggered is: How do you feel? (vent) How does that feel on the inside? (connect with deeper feeling) What do you want? (suggest strategy, get action oriented) What would that give you? (connect with deeper need)

Use language that emphasizes the fact that people can change: Use verbs over adjectives and observations instead of judgments. For example, instead of saying, “X is always late”, say “X has been late the last three times.”

Don’t bring work mode to relationships and vice versa. For work, you want to be efficient, outcome oriented, and prioritize winning above all. With people, you want to be effective, process oriented, and prioritize connection above all. For work you want to be right (accurate), for relationships you want to be happy (connected).

Don’t keep score, your patience will run out. And equality doesn’t matter. On your death bed you won’t wish things were more fair, but you’ll regret that your insistence on fairness prevented you from connecting with an open heart.

everyone has a micro impact on their families, friends, and local communities and we don’t pay enough attention to making it great.

Use things like politics, sports, social media etc as ways to meet or get closer to other people, but don’t use it as something to make you angry or further from others.

Cultivate what makes you unique. The more distinct your path is, the less competition you’ll have, and the less you’ll compare yourself to others because you’re running your own race.

Envision the highest version of your own success and strive to get as close to it as possible while also being happy with wherever you land.

Your past was what you needed to get here (no regrets), and fretting about what will happen in the future bond what you need to prep for it won’t help either

Most ambitious people on their death beds wish they were less hard on themselves. The happiest people are best at focusing on what they can control and not letting past drama or future worries get in their way.

Asymmetric upside opportunities could lead to new relationships or forms of growth. Asymmetric downside opportunities could lead to sacrificing your health or your relationship or your reputation.

Taste has historically been reserved for conversation about things like fashion and art. Now, we look for it in our social media feeds, the technology we use, the company we keep, and the people we hire.

When I ask people what they mean by “taste,” they’ll stumble around for a bit and eventually land on something like “you know it when you see it,” or “it’s in the eye of the beholder.” I understand. Words like taste are hard to pin down, perhaps because they describe a sensibility more than any particular quality, a particular thing. We’re inclined to leave them unencumbered by a definition, to preserve their ability to shift shapes.

’ve found a taste-filled life to be a richer one. To pursue it is to appreciate ourselves, each other, and the stuff we’re surrounded by a whole lot more.

I can’t think of a piece of writing that does this more effectively than Susan Sontag’s “Notes on ‘Camp.’” In her words, “a sensibility is one of the hardest things to talk about... To snare a sensibility in words, especially one that is alive and powerful, one must be tentative and nimble.

Things don’t feel tasteful, they demonstrate taste. Someone’s home can be decorated tastefully. Someone can dress tastefully. The vibe cannot be tasteful. The experience cannot be tasteful.

Someone could have impeccable taste in art, without producing any themselves. Those who create tasteful things are almost always deep appreciators, though.

we typically talk about it in binaries. One can have taste or not. Great taste means almost the same thing as taste.

They’re the people you always go to for restaurant or movie or gear recommendations. Maybe it’s the person you ask to be an extra set of eyes on an email or a project brief before you send it out.

It requires intention, focus, and care. Taste is a commitment to a state of attention.

As John Saltivier says in an essay about building a set of stairs, “surprising detail is a near universal property of getting up close and personal with reality.”

To quote Susan Sontag again, “There is taste in people, visual taste, taste in emotion — and there is taste in acts, taste in morality. Intelligence, as well, is really a kind of taste: taste in ideas. One of the facts to be reckoned with is that taste tends to develop very unevenly. It's rare that the same person has good visual taste and good taste in people and taste in ideas.” The sought-after interior designer may not mind gas station coffee. The prolific composer may not give a damn about how they dress.

Taste in too many things would be tortuous. The things we have taste in often start as a pea under the mattress.

it is often formed through the integration of diverse, and wide-ranging inputs. Steve Jobs has said, “I think part of what made the Macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientists in the world.”

taste gets you to the thing that’s more than just correct. Taste hits different. It intrigues. It compels. It moves. It enchants. It fascinates. It seduces.

Taste honors someone’s standards of quality, but also the distinctive way the world bounces off a person. It reflects what they know about how the world works, and also what they’re working with in their inner worlds. When we recognize  true taste, we are recognizing that alchemic combination of skill and soul. This is why it is so alluring.

many snobs (coffee snobs, gear snobs, wine snobs, etc.) often have great taste. But I would say that taste is the sensibility, and snobbery is one way to express the sensibility. It’s not the only way.

If rich people often have good taste it’s because they grew up around nice things, and many of them acquired an intolerance for not nice things as a result. That’s a good recipe for taste, but it’s not sufficient and it’s definitely not a guarantee. I know people that are exceedingly picky about the food they eat and never pay more than $20 for a meal.

creating forces taste upon its maker. Creators must master self-expression and craft if they’re going to make something truly compelling.

artists are more sensitive. They’re more observant, feel things more deeply, more obsessive about details, more focused on how they measure up to greatness.

Picasso remarking that “when art critics get together they talk about Form and Structure and Meaning. When artists get together they talk about where you can buy cheap turpentine.” Taste rests on turpentine.

the process of metabolizing the world is a slow one. Wield your P/N meter well, take your time learning what you find compelling, and why. There are no shortcuts to taste. Taste cannot sublimate. It can only bloom. To quote Susan Sontag one last time, “taste has no system and no proofs. But there is something like a logic of taste: the consistent sensibility which underlies and gives rise to a certain taste.

I realized that the more “luxury” a company is that you’re working for, whether it’s consumer or editorial, the worse the attitudes are. It’s like, “Well, you’re lucky to be an ambassador of this brand.”

There’s training around how you give feedback and how you receive it, how you tackle problems, and how you behave. Seeing all these systems in place, when I first arrived, I was just like, “Wow. I didn’t know work could be like this.

Women spend twice as much time as men, on average, on childcare and household work. All groups experience a free-time gender gap, with women having 13% less free time than men, on average. Mothers spend 2.3X as much time as fathers on the essential and unpaid work of taking care of home and family Young women (18-24) experience one of the largest free-time gender gaps, having 20% less free time than men their age Working women spend 2X as many hours per week as working men on childcare and household work combined Mothers who work part-time spend 3.8X as much time on childcare and household work as fathers who work part-time Married women without children spend 2.3X as much time as their male counterparts on household work Among Latinos, mothers spend more than 3.6X as much time as fathers taking care of children and doing household work

The unequal division of unpaid work in the home, such as cooking, cleaning, and shopping for food and clothing, is a powerful testament to the tenacity of old gender norms. Women do significantly more of this work than men do, even when there are no children living in the home. This holds true for women regardless of their marital status, their employment status, or their level of education.

Among all adults without children, women do twice as much household work as men, dedicating 12.3 hours per week to these tasks, on average, compared to 6 hours for men. Similarly, among all single people without children, women do nearly twice as much household work as men, spending 10.6 hours per week on household tasks compared to 5.7 hours for men.

getting married seems to exacerbate the burden of household work on women. Married women do substantially more household work than their single women peers, while married men spend just a few minutes a day more than their single peers. Married women without children do 2.3 times as much household work as their male counterparts (14.3 hours per week versus 6.2 hours).

Working women spend significantly more time than working men on unpaid work in the home. This is the case whether they work full-time or part-time. It is the case whether they have children or not. Take household work like cooking, laundry, and the like. Women who work full-time do 1.8 times as much as men who work full-time; they spend 9.7 hours per week on it compared to 5.4 hours for men. Women who work part-time do 2.5 times as much household work as men who work part-time.

Across every group studied, men spend more time than women socializing, watching sports or playing video games, or doing similar activities to relax or have fun. Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to one-quarter less free time than men.

Women overall have 13% less free time than men, on average. The gap balloons among some groups, with women having up to nearly one-quarter less free time than men.

there is a wide gulf between our ideals and our realities, as we have seen in this report on how Americans divide the work of taking care of home and family. One reason for the persistence of these gender disparities is that the U.S. has failed to modernize its public policies to fit 21st century economic realities. Even though 78% of American women are in the labor force, the nation’s social infrastructure is still largely premised on the assumption that mothers will be at home with children.

Every high-income nation in the world provides for paid leave for new parents—except the United States. Most provide ample financial and institutional support for childcare and preschool. Our peers devote a substantial share of public spending to family benefits, but the U.S. invests only minimally in supporting families. For instance, family benefits account for 2.4% of GDP in Germany compared to 0.6% in the United States.

Even when young children enter school, typical American school hours are grossly misaligned with the workday, forcing families to either spend money on after school care or reduce their work hours.

Public policy alone will not entirely eliminate these deeply rooted gender disparities. Cultural change is needed too. But smart policy can nudge along positive behavioral change that ultimately advances equity and equality. For example, several countries include mechanisms in their family policy to encourage fathers to take paid parent leave. Many Nordic nations have a ‘use it or lose it’ provision for fathers. Other countries, like Canada, provide extra paid weeks of leave to families if both parents use the time.

The unequal division of care work, particularly, affects women’s opportunity and well-being in ways that cannot be measured solely in dollars and cents.

One way Americans deal with the housing affordability crisis is to move to distant suburbs and exurbs, where housing is cheaper than it is in central cities and job hubs. The tradeoff, however, is typically a long commute to and from work. But for women who are caring for children or elderly relatives, long commutes are often not feasible. Children and elderly parents get sick and need to get to doctors in the middle of a workday. School hours begin too late and end too early to accommodate a commute to a 9-to-5 job.

when schools close due to climate-driven events, mothers might have to take unpaid time off of work or pay for childcare. As Americans experience more dangerous heat waves, wildfires, and floods driven by climate change, the caregiving demands on women can increase, as they are more likely to be the ones responsible for helping children and elderly adults stay out of harm’s way.

People pay you for doing what they want, not what you want. But there's an obvious exception: when you both want the same thing. For example, if you love football, and you're good enough at it, you can get paid a lot to play it.

it's clear that Bill Gates truly loved running a software company. He didn't just love programming, which a lot of people do. He loved writing software for customers. That is a very strange taste indeed, but if you have it, you can make a lot by indulging it.

If you want to make a really huge amount of money — hundreds of millions or even billions of dollars — it turns out to be very useful to work on what interests you the most. The reason is not the extra motivation you get from doing this, but that the way to make a really large amount of money is to start a startup, and working on what interests you is an excellent way to discover startup ideas.

Many if not most of the biggest startups began as projects the founders were doing for fun. Apple, Google, and Facebook all began that way. Why is this pattern so common? Because the best ideas tend to be such outliers that you'd overlook them if you were consciously looking for ways to make money.

there's something like a midwit peak for making money. If you don't need to make much, you can work on whatever you're most interested in; if you want to become moderately rich, you can't usually afford to; but if you want to become super rich, and you're young and good at technology, working on what you're most interested in becomes a good idea again.

When you have trouble choosing between following your interests and making money, it's never because you have complete knowledge of yourself and of the types of work you're choosing between, and the options are perfectly balanced. When you can't decide which path to take, it's almost always due to ignorance. In fact you're usually suffering from three kinds of ignorance simultaneously: you don't know what makes you happy, what the various kinds of work are really like, or how well you could do them

Don't wait till the end of college to figure out what to work on. Don't even wait for internships during college. You don't necessarily need a job doing x in order to work on x; often you can just start doing it in some form yourself. And since figuring out what to work on is a problem that could take years to solve, the sooner you start, the better.

You'll become like whoever you work with. Do you want to become like these people?

If you choose a kind of work mainly for how well it pays, you'll be surrounded by other people who chose it for the same reason, and that will make it even more soul-sucking than it seems from the outside. Whereas if you choose work you're genuinely interested in, you'll be surrounded mostly by other people who are genuinely interested in it, and that will make it extra inspiring

The less sure you are about what to do, the more important it is to choose options that give you more options in the future. I call this "staying upwind." If you're unsure whether to major in math or economics, for example, choose math; math is upwind of economics in the sense that it will be easier to switch later from math to economics than from economics to math

The root of great work is a sort of ambitious curiosity, and you can't manufacture that.

It’s Kali Uchis describing falling in love like melting like ice cream. It’s St. Teresa’s ecstasy. It’s why 18th-century German poet Ludwig Uhland said that waking up buried in his lover’s arms is like dying from love’s bliss because he “saw Heaven in her eyes.” Heaven is commonly used to describe this feeling because falling in love is like dying: Both death and falling in love are about losing a grip on reality, leaving this world and entering the ethereal. Like death, we describe a soul in love as being escorted away by angels to a better place. It’s why Cupid has wings—so he can take us from over here to over there.

Yet, when you try to articulate the deepest of your desires, you can’t find a name for it. It’s like that marvellous ache you feel when you see the Milky Way spilled across the sky—it draws you in and makes you long for more of it. This longing has the shape of the infinite. I know a love song is good when I don’t know if they’re singing about a lover or God.

Love, in its purest form, feels like mysticism, like being absorbed into something that wants you to be part of it as much as you want to join it. Some might call it a longing for happiness, but it is so much deeper. Here’s what I mean by mysticism: it’s something that grows your wonder instead of trying to solve it. “Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced.”

It’s like watching fire—something that constantly moves without going anywhere. It’s “alive” in its own way. Like how God speaks through a bush that burns but is not consumed, something ineffable about music—the way it decorates time like art decorates space—speaks to us.

Marx’s definition captures that taste isn't just having an eye, ear, or sense for quality, it’s about having an accurate filter for the choices that are uniquely you. As he explains, “There are occasional sui generis taste geniuses, but most people with good taste…are very curious and studious people who have learned it over time.”

A better barometer of whether someone has authentically cultivated their own taste—or merely adopted what the algorithm feeds them—is their enthusiasm for sharing what they’re into and why. For instance, I have little personal interest in exploring TV or movies, which admittedly might be off-putting to some. However, the last guy I dated had what I consider to be great taste in this area. Unfamiliar picks from the 1970s through the ‘90s, international and domestic alike – I loved that he could open me up to this world. His world.

if shared tastes are sometimes important and sometimes not, how should we incorporate taste into our dating decisions? According to Dr. Akua Boateng, a licensed psychotherapist with an emphasis in individual and couples therapy, how you and your significant other blend your interests is the real indicator of compatibility. “It really goes back to people’s psychology or politics of difference,” Boateng says. If differences are the kindling for conflict rather than connection, compromise, and acceptance, it’s doomed from the start. “If you're coming from two different worlds, and the things that make you tick and find joy are diametrically opposed, you're going to have conflict in how you spend your time,” she says.

“From 2009 through 2014, it felt like people were bringing real life, morals, values and judgements to the internet, whereas now it feels like we’re bringing internet values and judgements to real life and trying to force them into how we move and interact…” says Mark Sabino, a product designer and cultural critic. The ease with which algorithms relentlessly serve up “content” has brought a societal shift toward liking or disliking things that are relatable rather than personal.

As we grow together within relationships, we’re continuously collecting new markers of taste to bring home to our person. It’s an exchange in perpetuity – memes, restaurants, recipes – whatever moves you to feel something, you’re likely sharing with your partner. As Portrait of a Lady director Céline Sciamma told The Independent, “A relationship is about inventing your own language. You’ve got the jokes, you’ve got the songs, you have this anecdote that’s going to make you laugh three years later. It’s this language that you build.”

As much as taste can be a connector and a litmus test, it’s unreliable as a fixed lens for selecting partners. Instead of evaluating every prospect based on how they match up “on paper” to your taste do’s and don’ts, both Marx and Boateng point out that taste is one of multiple characteristics that can influence the quality of relationships. But if you just can’t get over someone’s allegiance to Taylor Swift or Burning Man, Boateng says, “It could be a sign that how this person operates in the world is just not intriguing to [you]. It's not problematic or bad. It's just not uniquely intriguing to you.” And here, you should definitely trust your taste.

We can finally define what it means for someone to be differently free from you. They are people who are playing just a slightly different game than you are. That difference makes them a reliable sources of non sequiturs in your life. Waiting for nature to present you with a parrot or a piece of corn to awaken you out of a finite game is a tricky, chancy business.

Differently free people change the equation in an interesting way. When you include a person in your life, it is because they have a definite worth (possibly negative) in whatever finite game you’re asleep in at the time. This means there is at least some overlap between their game and yours; some similarity between how you keep score and how they do. Some meaningful relationship (possibly adversarial)  between how you define winning and how they do.

This means you have a model of the person in your head. One that predicts how they will value things.

it is the parts that don’t overlap that matter. There are things that have a defined worth in their lives that are non sequiturs in yours, and vice versa. When you see through the eyes of a differently free person, you expect to see a landscape of presumptively valued things. A landscape based on your predictions of how they value things. When the other person appears to value something that doesn’t even register with you, for a moment, that thing turns into a non sequitur, a candidate parrot. It lingers just a little bit longer in your own mind than it would if you yourself saw it. Long enough that you do a double take and notice it consciously.

My alternative to the heuristic, which many of you have heard in off-blog conversations, is that I am only interested in people as long as they are unpredictable to me. If I can predict what you’ll do or say, I’ll lose interest in you rapidly. If you can keep regularly surprising me in some way, forcing me to actually think in unscripted ways in order to respond, I’ll stay interested. It’s reciprocal. I suspect the people with whom I develop long-term relationships are the ones I surprise regularly. The ones who find me predictable don’t stick around. We’re not talking any old kind of surprise, but non sequiturs. Surprises that you can’t really relate to anything else, and don’t know what to do with. Mind-expanding surprises rather than gap-closing surprises.

The useful thing about defining good design as a form-context fit is that it tells you where you will find the form. The form is in the context. To find a good relationship, you do not start by saying, “I want a relationship that looks like this”—that would be starting in the wrong end, by defining form. Instead you say, “I’m just going to pay attention to what happens when I hang out with various people and iterate toward something that feels alive”—you start from the context.

The context is smarter than you. It holds more nuance and information than you can fit in your head. Collaborate with it.

If you want to find a good design—be that the design of a house or an essay, a career or a marriage—what you want is some process that allows you to extract information from the context, and bake it into the form. That is what unfolding is.

The opposite of an unfolding is a vision. A vision springs, not from a careful understanding of a context, but from a fantasy

Anything that increases the rate and resolution of information you get from the context will help. And anything that makes it easier for you to act on the context.

A common reason we filter information and become blind to the context is that we bundle things when we think. Thinking about our career, we might think in abstractions like “a job.” But really a career is made up of a bunch of different things like a salary, an identity, relationships, status, a sense of meaning, and so on. It is often easier to find a fit if you unbundle these things, and think about the parts that matter to you individually. Do you actually need more status? Or can you find a better fit if you go low status?

Another common reason the feedback loop of unfolding often works poorly is that people have decided on a solution already. They have turned on their confirmation bias. They have decided that a certain solution is off-limits. Let’s say you are 34 and haven’t found a partner but want kids. If we unbundle this, it is clear that the problem of having a kid and the problem of love are not the same thing, so you could solve your problem by having a kid with your best friend instead. But this feels weird. It is not the vision you have for your life. And it seems dysfunctional. Observe that feeling—it is, perhaps, a part of the context. There is some information there. But to unfold, do not write off any solutions. Leave them all on the table; let them combine and recombine. Many good ideas look bad at first. To increase the rate at which you understand the context, you want to develop a certain detachment. When the context thrashes one of your ideas, you want to say, “Oh, that’s interesting.” It takes practice. But it is worth getting better at. Reality is shy—it only reveals itself to those who, like honest scientists, do not wish it to be something else.

The faster you can collide your ideas against reality, the faster you get feedback.

The school system is centered around visions, not unfolding. You are asked to make decisions about realities that are five, ten years down the line, and you get no feedback on your decisions.

you’re less torn by anxious attachments when you recognize how something must naturally and necessarily unfold.

Knowledge is freedom from getting mad at facts.

Detachment does not mean you don’t care what happens. It just means you don’t care whether a specific thing happens or not. You want to know the outcome of the coin-toss (you care), but you don’t care whether it is heads or tails even if you’ve bet on heads (you’re not attached to a specific outcome). The important thing is that something happens, which means you’ve successfully kept play going, but without keeping score.

Emotional Self-Management: I like to think of this as accepting the emotions you have instead of having emotions about having emotions in an endless stack.

Fear. Not fear, plus anxiety about fear, plus guilt about anxiety about fear, plus shame about displaying guilt about experiencing anxiety about having fear. This is emotional focus. Instead of retreating from an emotion through layers of additional emotions until you find one you can deal with, you experience the actual emotion for what it is.

Flirting isn’t limited to romance. Flirting is an attitude that only playful and happy people can have and enjoy. It’s the virtue of being uncommitted—to people, to philosophies, to bets. Flirting turns uncertainty, something we usually fear, into pleasure. It’s being able to take yourself less seriously. It’s being able to react to discomfort with humor. Fortune is a lady and she favors whoever makes her laugh. Most people can sting like a bee but not everyone can float like a butterfly. You can change a conversation you don’t want to have by turning your shoulder, lowering your chin, giving a mischievous smile—a gesture my mother would call “coquettish”—and asking a slightly provocative personal question. Flirting lets you turn the tables without killing the tête-à-tête.

I could diligently craft an ideal existence, over years and years of sleepless nights and industry. Or I could just marry it early. So naturally I began to lug a heavy suitcase of books each Saturday to the Harvard Business School to work on my Nabokov paper. In one cavernous, well-appointed room sat approximately 50 of the planet’s most suitable bachelors. I had high breasts, most of my eggs, plausible deniability when it came to purity, a flush ponytail, a pep in my step that had yet to run out. Apologies to Progress, but older men still desired those things.

I was competitive by nature, an English-literature student with all the corresponding major ambitions and minor prospects (Great American novel; email job). A little Bovarist, frantic for new places and ideas; to travel here, to travel there, to be in the room where things happened.

Restless one Saturday night, I slipped on a red dress and snuck into a graduate-school event, coiling an HDMI cord around my wrist as proof of some technical duty. I danced. I drank for free, until one of the organizers asked me to leave. I called and climbed into an Uber. Then I promptly climbed out of it. For there he was, emerging from the revolving doors. Brown eyes, curved lips, immaculate jacket. I went to him, asked him for a cigarette. A date, days later.

I used to love men like men love women — that is, not very well, and with a hunger driven only by my own inadequacies.

I had grown bored of discussions of fair and unfair, equal or unequal, and preferred instead to consider a thing called ease.

The greater and more visible the difference in years and status between a man and a woman, the more it strikes others as transactional. Transactional thinking in relationships is both as American as it gets and the least kosher subject in the American romantic lexicon. When a 50-year-old man and a 25-year-old woman walk down the street, the questions form themselves inside of you; they make you feel cynical and obscene: How good of a deal is that? Which party is getting the better one?

The truth is you can fall in love with someone for all sorts of reasons, tiny transactions, pluses and minuses, whose sum is your affection for each other, your loyalty, your commitment. The way someone picks up your favorite croissant. Their habit of listening hard. What they do for you on your anniversary and your reciprocal gesture, wrapped thoughtfully. The serenity they inspire; your happiness, enlivening it. When someone says they feel unappreciated, what they really mean is you’re in debt to them.

There is a boy out there who knows how to floss because my friend taught him. Now he kisses college girls with fresh breath. A boy married to my friend who doesn’t know how to pack his own suitcase. She “likes to do it for him.” A million boys who know how to touch a woman, who go to therapy because they were pushed, who learned fidelity, boundaries, decency, manners, to use a top sheet and act humanely beneath it, to call their mothers, match colors, bring flowers to a funeral and inhale, exhale in the face of rage, because some girl, some girl we know, some girl they probably don’t speak to and will never, ever credit, took the time to teach him. All while she was working, raising herself, clawing up the cliff-face of adulthood. Hauling him at her own expense.

My younger brother is in his early 20s, handsome, successful, but in many ways: an endearing disaster. By his age, I had long since wisened up. He leaves his clothes in the dryer, takes out a single shirt, steams it for three minutes. His towel on the floor, for someone else to retrieve. His lovely, same-age girlfriend is aching to fix these tendencies, among others. She is capable beyond words. Statistically, they will not end up together. He moved into his first place recently, and she, the girlfriend, supplied him with a long, detailed list of things he needed for his apartment: sheets, towels, hangers, a colander, which made me laugh. She picked out his couch. I will bet you anything she will fix his laundry habits, and if so, they will impress the next girl.

Adulthood seemed a series of exhausting obligations. But his logistics ran so smoothly that he simply tacked mine on.

we live in a world in which our power has a different shape from that of men, a different distribution of advantage, ours a funnel and theirs an expanding cone.

She has raised her fair share of same-age boyfriends. She has put her head down, worked laboriously alongside them, too. At last she is beginning to reap the dividends, earning the income to finally enjoy herself. But it is now, exactly at this precipice of freedom and pleasure, that a time problem comes closing in. If she would like to have children before 35, she must begin her next profession, motherhood, rather soon, compromising inevitably her original one.

Overlay the years a woman is supposed to establish herself in her career and her fertility window and it’s a perfect, miserable circle. By midlife women report feeling invisible, undervalued; it is a telling cliché, that after all this, some husbands leave for a younger girl. So when is her time, exactly? For leisure, ease, liberty?

There is no brand of feminism which achieved female rest. If women’s problem in the ’50s was a paralyzing malaise, now it is that they are too active, too capable, never permitted a vacation they didn’t plan.

the great gift of my marriage is flexibility. A chance to live my life before I become responsible for someone else’s — a lover’s, or a child’s. A chance to write.

I dream of new structures, a world in which women have entry-level jobs in their 30s; alternate avenues for promotion; corporate ladders with balconies on which they can stand still, have a smoke, take a break, make a baby, enjoy themselves, before they keep climbing.

A significant body of work has investigated the effects of acute exercise, defined as a single bout of physical activity, on mood and cognitive functions in humans. Several excellent recent reviews have summarized these findings; however, the neurobiological basis of these results has received less attention. In this review, we will first briefly summarize the cognitive and behavioral changes that occur with acute exercise in humans. We will then review the results from both human and animal model studies documenting the wide range of neurophysiological and neurochemical alterations that occur after a single bout of exercise. Finally, we will discuss the strengths, weaknesses, and missing elements in the current literature, as well as offer an acute exercise standardization protocol and provide possible goals for future research.

As we age, cognitive decline, though not inevitable, is a common occurrence resulting from the process of neurodegeneration. In some instances, neurodegeneration results in mild cognitive impairment or more severe forms of dementia including Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, or Huntington’s disease. Because of the role of exercise in enhancing neurogenesis and brain plasticity, physical activity may serve as a potential therapeutic tool to prevent, delay, or treat cognitive decline. Indeed, studies in both rodents and humans have shown that long-term exercise is helpful in both delaying the onset of cognitive decline and dementia as well as improving symptoms in patients with an already existing diagnosis

The biggest takeaway was that I didn’t know it was even possible to experience this much happiness in a single moment. It was like an emotional singularity inside of my brain and body.

The happiness had a palpable physical presence around me. At some points it felt like I was breathing in happiness particles. Not like dust or something I had to cough up, but some gas or elementary particle-- like a photon. When the sun peaks out from behind the clouds, you can feel it all over your skin and it coats the landscape. The music was just like that, but instead of photons, the crowd was awash in happitrons. Billions and billions of happitrons rushed toward me with every beat, propogating through the air, riding along the musical jet stream from the stage straight into my body.

The beat was pumping through the ground and it needed something to escape through. I realized that was my job. It was my responsibility to let the music out. I needed to dance in order to let the beat out of the ground!

I felt invincible with my friend group, like going to the festival was a team sport, and I loved everyone there.

I felt like my senses were normally small straws that I used to sip up the world around me. But in that moment, they became 10 foot wide industrial pipes that were pouring the concert straight into my head.

Whatever we decide to measure units of happiness in, it feels appropraite that “bliss” is the maximum amount of happiness you can experience per unit of time.