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By Category1 — Creativity & Curiosity
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Sprouts are ideas that I’ve made into useable components
Sprouts are individual ideas that might at some point contribute to the growth of something else. These typically result as I work with the individual seeds I’ve collected—in reading on the internet or books, as well as in my day to day—and thrown onto my “compost pile.” My action with sprouts is akin to “turning the compost heap” to transform quotes, observations, and other ideas into useable components that I can work with in my own process.
FAQs About Sprouts
What is a sprout in my garden?
A sprout is my interpretation, context, and rephrasing of a seed idea. By restating it as a standalone idea, I prepare the idea to use in my own creative process.
How do I decide what is worth adding as a sprout?
Duplicate this template in Notion and Copy the code in Bullet Dashboard. You should be able to use this template.
How do seeds in my digital garden compare to the Zettelkasten method?
Yes, you can use any language for this template.
SproutsProgress
To ProcessWe can live out what we want to see in the world
True diplomacy = safety
We have to decide what work is ours.
The world we build will need a greater focus on care
It is normal to be waiting for an idea- just be ready to get out of the way and let it drive when it shows up.
Saying no is saying yes to your work, to what you need and what you want.
Sometimes curiosity doesn’t feel safe; just opening the news…
Life provides some cruel limits
Overwhelm shuts us down
Example - making as a way to find something or get somewhere
Example - we’re not here to service the machine
Curiosity just requires that you turn your head an inch
Curiosity is just a tiny nudge
Passion feels impossible, but curiosity is always in reach.
Disrupt the common scripts
Maybe images of cheese will help you sleep?
What if being off the map is the POINT?
CO2 is a good tool to gauge risk but it’s not fool proof. It is better to use as a way to ensure ventilation is working, and recognize when you are in a poorly ventilated space.
Outdoors isn’t necessarily safe, although it is safer than inside. There are a number of factors that determine if air particles are dispersed. This includes: wind, wind speed, direction of wind, temperature, etc.
3 min.→ 1 idea and 10 bullet points to capture an idea
Art = experience → something
It takes all of our attention to capture other people’s attention
We make art to experience becoming, to make our souls grow.
Resting is doing something.
Aim to carry both the terrible and the beautiful
Every time I share something, I ask for someone’s attention. In a world where everything is vying to steal our attention, it’s important to ask if what we have to share is worth stealing someone’s attention for.
Adding structure is like deciding what to do with a pile of groceries in order to make a dinner.
To witness is just to be there, to remain with eyes open. It is a way of seeing.
To go big, we need the capacity to step beyond the rules we know
If you build/write/make it, they will come.
Build it and they’ll come
Midlife crisis = transition = healing. It’s an opportunity, not a challenge.
The Semmelweis Reflex can help us understand when people—an entire society, profession, or community—reject new information and instead choose to observe outdated norms.
We have to aim to create an environment where learning/growth can occur.
We have to deprogram our old ways in order to move forward.
Confidence can be understood as the energy of being right.
What if certainty isn’t the goal? What if the POINT is to be off the map?
Our minds know before our bodies can know, and most times, our bodies take awhile to integrate the new information.
Patriarchy is about control, not men.
Accumulation of stuff begins as a response to a loss of trust.
Release fairness and live based on what is possible, without regard to what others are doing
Staying exhausted hides things
We are wired for connection.
Beethoven provides an example of what you can do when your inputs are limited.
PVT explains adaptive changes to challenge
PVT is a lens or a perspective that can help to frame our inquiry. It is not however a static theory.
PVT offers a way of understanding how autonomic function relates to behavior.
PVT gives us a context to understand movement “toward or away from people, places, and things”
Joy makes ventral vagal more accessible!
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There’s a concept in ecology of ‘niche creation.’ And the idea is: it’s not the case that a species will sort of come along and go, ‘oh, I could do well here, there’s lots of food,’ and things like that. A species comes along and just does his thing, and by acting in the world, he sort of creates the very environment he needs to survive.
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“People who you wouldn’t think there’s an obvious place for them in the world, but they just do their stuff regardless, and a place sort of builds around them.” - John Higgs
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There is a difference between knowing what you need to do (be independent and true to the potential in your ideas) and something else entirely to know how to embody that. Orienting in the right way to your thoughts is a skill. Like all skills, it takes practice. You also need to have a rich mental representation of how it is supposed to feel to embody the state so that you can orient toward that. This feeling is what you use to measure the relative success of whatever techniques you employ
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Being highly impressionable and introverted, he is crafting a defiant personality in the notebooks, a protective gear that allows his larval ideas to live, even those who seem too banal (“a man learns that he is dying and discovers that life is beautiful,” which turns into Seventh Seal ).
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If he had not known the shape of his interests and aims, he would have been more vulnerable to the standards and norms of the community—at least he seems to think so.
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The three years of solitary work at Montpellier had not been wasted in the least: that intellectual isolation was what had allowed him to access the cognitive space where new ideas arise. He had made himself at home there.
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If he had not known the shape of his interests and aims, he would have been more vulnerable to the standards and norms of the community—at least he seems to think so.
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Jul 28, 2023 05:40 PM GMT+0
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After his three years of solitary work, Grothendieck did integrate into the world of mathematics. He learned the tools of the trade, he got up to date on the latest mathematical findings, he found mentors and collaborators—but he was doing that from within his framework. His peers, who had been raised within the system, had not developed this feel for themselves and so were more susceptible to the influence of others. Grothendieck knew what he found interesting and productively confusing because he had spent three years observing his thought and tracing where it wanted to go. He was not at the mercy of the social world he entered; rather, he “used” it to “further his aims.” (I put things in quotation marks here because what he’s doing isn’t exactly this deliberate.) He picked mentors that were aligned with his goals, and peers that unblock his particular genius
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Grothendieck had a talent to notice (and admit!) that he was subtly bewildered and intrigued by things that for others seemed self-evident (what is length?) or already settled (the Lebesgue integral) or downright bizarre (as were many of his meditations on God and dreams). From this arose some truly astonishing questions, surfacing powerful ideas, such as topoi, schemas, and K-theory.
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People show much more originality in solving problems than in deciding which problems to solve. Even the smartest can be surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who’d never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.
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It is this capacity to surface questions that set Grothendieck apart, more so than his capacity to answer them. When he writes that his peers were more brilliant than him, he is referring to their ability to answer questions ¹ . It was just that their questions were unoriginal.
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One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion. To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions
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Einstein reinvented parts of statistical physics. Pascal, self-teaching mathematics because his father did not approve, rederived several Euclidean proofs. There is also a lot of confusion and pursuit of dead ends. Newton looking for numerical patterns in the Bible, for instance. This might look wasteful if you think what they are doing is research. But it is not if you realize that they are building up their ability to perceive the evolution of their own thought, their capacity for attention.
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there is often an element of reinventing the already known.
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As the philosopher Bertrand Russell remarked, the development of gifted and creative individuals, such as Newton or Whitehead, seems to require a period in which there is little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which they can develop and pursue their interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.
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what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like “a state of mind.” They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them.
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What if, instead of trying to get back to being a version of me I recognize, I embraced moving forward into the unknown?
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We learn the words before we embody them, and we embody them once we’ve had enough experience and integration.
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One of my favorite developmental models, the Loevinger scales, indicates that boundaries come only after the stage/level of conformity — typically during the level of self-awareness (where we start to question norms and develop more nuanced conceptions of ourselves) or even later, during the stage of conscientiousness . Applied singularly, a person learning the term boundaries but not actually having reached the level of maturity to embody boundaries (someone moving from conformity to conscientiousness) might do what a lot of us are doing, which is use the word excessively, incorrectly, and in a way that works to reinforce/defend less developed behaviors or stages of awareness.
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We don’t try to create things from a mountaintop of experience or wisdom. We try to stay very low to the ground to examine what’s not working in our lives, to try to find creative antidotes to that and to craft them collectively. (View Highlight)
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Your brain needs deep, consistent sleep, rest, and silence to make new connections, for memory retention, and to download.
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My body is an antenna for infinite ideas and inventions when I disconnect from the energy of technology and when I rest.
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Simon sees that if lies prevail in social life and if truth is necessary for one’s full humanity, daily life with others is virtually unbearable. What, after all, does daily social life consist in? A disparaging remark about another group; a rumor or story meant to draw outrage; a news story dug up by partisans seeking advantage; a crude expression of allegiance to an institution as flawed as its denigrated rivals. All of these are fundamental to the fabric of social life, especially in times when social life is unusually politicized, as it was in Simon’s time and as it is now, for us. (Location 1306) - Yves Simon, "Freedom in Daily Life"
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“I do not know, I cannot imagine, any group which does not include among its current ideas an enormous dose of lies. That being the case, the alternative is inevitable: either one must like falsehood, or one must dislike the familiar setting of daily life.” - (Location 1302)
Yves Simon, "Freedom in Daily Life," in Freedom and Community, ed. Charles P. O'Donnell (New York: Fordham,
1968), 5.
Yves Simon, "Freedom in Daily Life," in Freedom and Community, ed. Charles P. O'Donnell (New York: Fordham,
1968), 5.
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Life feels like an exercise in double-think, she said. “To participate in society right now,” she said, “you have to either be blissfully unaware or to dissociate and carry on as if there isn’t a pandemic.”
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Einstein said, “And I am thrilled by the beauty of my theorems.”
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[Einstein] worked for seven years as a patent clerk, and in his spare time he wrote his seminal papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and the theory of special relativity—papers that turned physics upside down. He called the patent office “that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.”11 By calling the patent office a “worldly cloister,” Einstein means that this place of legal business, where a normal employee would go to earn a living in exchange for performing a certain public service, was for him a place of removal and retreat. For someone else it might have been the launching pad for a sparkling career in the civil service. But it is a cloister for Einstein, since in the office there were no hotshot professors to impress, no university administrators to placate, no students to whom he had to justify his existence. It is, then, chiefly a place where the love of learning is put to the test, where ambition is frustrated, where his work has to run on its own power without the grease of seeking out carrots and avoiding sticks. In the quiet of the patent office the beauty of the structures of nature can take hold of him and display itself with clarity.
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Jun 26, 2023 01:52 PM GMT+0
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Here are just some of the works that I am most proud of. If you would like to read something and can’t access it because it is behind a paywall, shoot me an email and I will get it to you. (View Highlight)
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I have spent over a decade in higher education teaching and doing research. I am an interdisciplinary scholar who pulls from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to understand (and often completely rethink) the way that we define, understand, and treat mental illness.
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The e” is what the Village Voice reporter drew for Bradley many years ago. The beginning of the line is the present or somewhere near the present. (Frankly, you can start wherever you want in terms of time, but the present or recent past is fairly common.) And, typically, there’s a character doing something — a sequence of events.Then, at the point where the e loops up, the story leaves the present and, perhaps, goes back in time for history and or it widens for context. When the loop comes back around, you pick up the narrative where you left off and develop the story further to the end. Somewhere in that second straight line the story may reach it’s climax then the denoument or resolution of the story. (View Highlight)
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Developing a structure is seldom that simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins. The narrative wants to move from point to point through time, while topics that have arisen now and again across someone’s life cry out to be collected. They want to draw themselves together in a single body, in the way that salt does underground. But chronology usually dominates. As themes prove inconvenient, you find some way to tuck them in. (View Highlight)
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Art can’t nourish us physically, can’t change the history of what has already happened. But art can help us build the emotional scaffolding that supports our processing, it can lay the cultural groundwork for change, it can cultivate the connections that we need for deeper empathy, and it can help to create a new story, a new future. Art can be a place that we find solace, and find community.
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Alexander, the researcher of the Rat Park experiments, argues..that addiction stems from an increasingly dislocated capitalist society—not from medical pathology.. addiction is a direct or indirect outgrowth of society; humans are becoming increasingly addicted not because some mutant addict gene is flooding the pool or because alcohol or addictive chemicals and behaviors are increasingly available, but because we are becoming more disconnected from our purpose, nature, culture, and each other (View Highlight)
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Dislocation is identified psychologically as a “lack of attachment, belonging, identity, meaning, [and] purpose”. Social and economic forces beyond the control of the individual – among them free-market capitalism, ecological devastation, consumerism, gross inequality, [LMIC] “development,” corporate culture, high speed [sic] technical change, financial market crises and more – work to alienate and dislocate the individual from structures of meaning. Our modern social arrangement, Alexander argues, means that we have to sacrifice “family, friends, meaning, and values” in order to be more “efficient” and “competitive” in the rat race. In this framework, addictive behaviors are adaptive responses meant to fill that void of meaning and purpose. Using substances can provide a temporary sense of community (with other users), purpose (to acquire the substance), and meaning (feelings of euphoria or calm from using the substance) [emphasis mine]. Substance abuse and addiction help to fill the gaps in meaning and purpose left by modern society. (View Highlight)
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Addiction is not a new phenomenon resultant of the current cultural context—Dr. Carl Erik Fisher traces back the earliest depictions of it to the Rig Veda (roughly 3,000+ years ago), and addiction, viewed through the learning model, is not a disease but adaption—humans are wired for it, and it’s always been there as both a potential and an expression. However, our current cultural context and economic system—end-stage American capitalism—is a system of addiction, an unprecedented schema no human body, nervous system, brain, and dopaminergic pathway has historically encountered, which feeds off and exploits that inherent wiring we’ve always had, demolishing the naturally occurring elements that keep us feeling whole as an individual and inherently belonging to a larger community and purpose, replacing them with an increasing supply of artificial and addictive compensations that are often for sale or at least profiting someone. Capitalism as a system of addiction is also known as the dislocation theory of addiction (proposed by Bruce Alexander in Globalization of Addiction). (View Highlight)
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We still largely mistake addiction to be something that destroys the lives of a select few with faulty wiring who succumb to a certain set of (compulsive, eventually addictive) behaviors, and narrow the “real” addictions to a handful of mostly social deviant behaviors (according to the puritanical ethos which still underpins our current social context), like gambling, drinking, smoking tobacco, using drugs, and fucking. An addict is a person that went too far with a substance or behavior they either were not supposed to partake in at all or were supposed to partake in moderation/socially accepted norms.
In other words: we’re all addicts. It’s just we think the real, fucked up people are over there shooting tranq and fentanyl and dying on the street, not over here snorting skincare routines or TikTok to fill an unfillable void. This is a mistake (View Highlight)
In other words: we’re all addicts. It’s just we think the real, fucked up people are over there shooting tranq and fentanyl and dying on the street, not over here snorting skincare routines or TikTok to fill an unfillable void. This is a mistake (View Highlight)
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When it came to assembling the vignettes, it was almost like with a poetry manuscript. I printed hundreds and hundreds of pages, lay them out on the floor of my living room, and color coded the different threads. I built the forward narrative, and I had all of these color-coded pieces–the other threads in the book. I would be like, “oh wait, the pink kind of drops out for 50 pages. I need some pink here.” I don’t even remember what pink was, but there was pink. Then I would go back and reorganize because I really wanted most of the threads to carry through without falling away. It was multiple breadcrumb trails in the woods, and I didn’t want one to drop off. (View Highlight)
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Yeah like a long long time ago and I was thinking about it even then I suppose but my sort of deeper understanding of burnout came from learning how it was autistic and the autistic community talk about burnout a lot because it's a it's like a really live issue for us and that helped me to see patterns of burnout across my life. Like it's it's just something that's unavoidable if you're trying to fit in with a society that isn't really made for you. But I think what I've really noticed is how that spread to the much broader community and that it's not a rare event for anyone anymore but it's actually this almost constant experience. It's how we experience life is in in this really burnout way and like we've got so far to go to unravel all the threads that have produced that. We're living in this environment that's hostile to our basic good health, mental and physical and it's going to be hugely complex to unravel that and I'm not even seeing the will to unravel that yet. It's enormous and I think it's going to be it's going to carry on being enormous for a decade to come.
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How do we actually embody accountability? I think we have to start with knowing that it's really hard. It's hard in our context to do. I don't think it's hard necessarily always or will always be hard, but I think given what we are embodied in, it's a really scary thing. I think a lot of us think about accountability in this moment as what are we going to do when something bad happens? What are we going to do when somebody did something wrong? That's when we start thinking about accountability. As opposed to accountability is a way that we live in relationship to one another. That's actually a component of the everyday that we are in the kind of relationship with ourselves. First where we know that we are changing, that we are growing, that we are making mistakes, and we live inside of communities that have that same knowledge. I think that begins to have it be so that accountability doesn't become an event, but is a daily practice of, oh, I could have done this differently. (Time 0:12:20)
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But being unlikeable wasn't the reason she was alone. She
was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so
she could hear herself living.p. 9
was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so
she could hear herself living.p. 9
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Over time, I got good at modeling these reactions ahead of time. This changed my writing, and it changed me. I became shrewd-cute and the writing became not a line of words on paper but an instrument to manipluate my audience. This shaping is not bad in itself. The problem was rather this: the gravity field of this particular audience did not align with my ethics and aesthetics: their expectations pulled me away from the places my thoughts needed to go. The poems, in conforming to their laughs and tears, hollowed out. (View Highlight)
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Frusciante has an uncommon discipline about what he lets into his senses; he is uncommonly deliberate about curating his milieu. His mode of writing songs is to select a set of guitarists and play along to their recordings (**“**I'm playing along with music that I'd like to be influenced by”) until new ideas start to emerge. He arranges a constellation of nodes and channels the input they send him into new music. (View Highlight)
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As Nadia Asparouhova writes:
If “grit” – the desire to persevere when faced with a challenge, popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth – has been the human trait du jour of the last fifteen-odd years, I suspect that “agency” – a belief in one’s ability to influence their circumstances – could be the defining trait of the next generation.
Grit is the node’s eye’s view. You are struggling against the graph. Agency, on the other hand, is the view from the graph. You are the graph. By changing it, you are changing yourself. (View Highlight)
If “grit” – the desire to persevere when faced with a challenge, popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth – has been the human trait du jour of the last fifteen-odd years, I suspect that “agency” – a belief in one’s ability to influence their circumstances – could be the defining trait of the next generation.
Grit is the node’s eye’s view. You are struggling against the graph. Agency, on the other hand, is the view from the graph. You are the graph. By changing it, you are changing yourself. (View Highlight)
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The milieu around you—which shapes you, and which you shape in turn—we can model as a directed graph. The nodes are people and objects and ideas connected to each other. And the graph is directed because you have nodes that send you input and nodes you send output to. (View Highlight)
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It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself (View Highlight)
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By replacing a peer group that is low-skilled (such as a peer group in a school) with one that is exceptional (such as Mersenne’s mathematical salon), we can leverage our human capacity to internalize our culture to foster exceptional talent. Erik Hoel calls this the peer replacement theory of genius. (View Highlight)
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There is so much that I cannot control. When my mind, my awareness, is overcome with the pain and the sorrow of the world, and my deepest prayer is to alleviate the suffering of others, I have a choice. I can choose to spiral into despair and panic and overwhelm, which generally makes me quite useless to others. Or I can choose to embody that which I want to flourish in the world. Presence, peace, love, care. I can embody that with the gas station attendant, the grocery store clerk, the neighbor at an airbnb I’m only calling home for two nights
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That’s what true diplomacy is. Helping people feel safe enough to stay, to listen, to speak, to stay in relationship.
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And I believe the only way to know what work is ours is to ask ourselves, to answer truthfully, to consult our bodies and our cells and our nervous systems, to trust what we hear without consulting, without making sure someone else approves. (View Highlight)
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the new world we are building is going to require us to care more about each other’s well-being and survival and flourishing, and less about who is right and who is wrong. (View Highlight)
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Jul 16, 2025 04:33 PM GMT+0
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But what I learned is that igniting your curiosity doesn't have to do with what's going on in the outside world, but it has everything to do with how you interact with the outside world and your ability to be present in the outside world, with the outside world, with your community, with your larger community, smaller community, family, friends, work, everything. And I didn't realize at the time that it was my curiosity that had been shut down, but that's what it was. And as an artist, like, holy crap, that's essential. As a parent, very depressing and boring to try to be a parent without curiosity. Like, it's not good for you, it's not good for your kids because they're showing you things and you're like, ugh.
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Jul 15, 2025 10:11 PM GMT+0
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And with everything that was going on in the outside world, I did not want to be curious because I felt like being curious was like opening myself up to how many more black men were shot today, how many more acts of racism and sexism and hatred went on today.
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Jul 15, 2025 10:07 PM GMT+0
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Jul 15, 2025 09:48 PM GMT+0
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And there was so much going on politically in 2016, that summer, that I was feeling it. Trump was running, like, oh my God. Hillary was running, she was going to win. Oops. You know, there was a lot going on. Black men were being killed more times than I can count. And my daughter was coming home from camp, and I was just feeling like I needed something to clean my palate every day. And I already had a daily yoga practice. I'm a yoga teacher, I was doing that. And it still wasn't, it wasn't enabling me to pick her up and look at her and feel like tomorrow is full of promise. I was like, no, tomorrow is going to be full of more misogyny, more racism, more hatred. How do I parent this, right?
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Jul 15, 2025 09:38 PM GMT+0
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“The machine can try to compress you into something two dimensional, digestible, but that’s not you. And we’re not here to service the machine.” (Location 2521)
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Jul 15, 2025 08:03 PM GMT+0
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“But there’s another way of making things too. Irene’s stuff…every time I look at it, I can’t help but feel like she was trying to find something. Or maybe get somewhere. Like she was bushwhacking through a very dense forest because something she just had to know lay on the other side.” (Location 2272)
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Jul 15, 2025 07:58 PM GMT+0
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The trick is to just follow your small moments of curiosity. It doesn't take a massive effort. Just turn your head an inch. Pause for a instant. Respond to what has caught your attention. Look into it a bit. Is there something there for you? A piece of information?
Sprout published
Jul 15, 2025 07:51 PM GMT+0
Jul 15, 2025 07:53 PM GMT+0
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Passion is a tower of flame, but curiosity is a tiny tap on the shoulder — a little whisper in the ear that says, "Hey, that's kind of interesting…"
Sprout published
Jul 15, 2025 07:49 PM GMT+0
Jul 15, 2025 07:49 PM GMT+0
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But curiosity, I have found, is always within reach.
Sprout published
Jul 15, 2025 07:47 PM GMT+0
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Much of the work of living a meaningful life right now — and how I view my work as a writer — is reminding myself and others how to be human.
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Jun 13, 2025 09:37 PM GMT+0
Jun 13, 2025 09:54 PM GMT+0
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What we want to point out here is that the physical manipulation of things, like direct personal experience of any kind, generates sensory images of all sorts and thus enables thought. Hands-on tinkering leads to minds-on thinkering. Bodily engagement with nature teaches much more than any amount of words or numbers in science books. Doing produces a personal understanding that symbols simply can't.
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Jun 9, 2025 10:20 PM GMT+0
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journal page from Austin Kleon
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Jun 9, 2025 09:04 PM GMT+0
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When we collaborate with reality, we are makers. We are makers when we act in response to life from our true being, instead of merely doing. On the making path we remember we are in relationship with a living world, not just conquering things on our to-do list or molding the world to our utilitarian purposes. (Location 215)
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May 6, 2025 01:54 PM GMT+0
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“As artists, we're always practising alternative realities, we're always exploring beyond our current paradigm. Is there something about what it is to be an artist in the first place that we can harness, that we can sort of convene and use that as a power to say, how do we want to reimagine the world?”
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Nov 10, 2024 10:43 PM GMT+0
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“Imagination has people thinking they can go from being poor to a millionaire as part of a shared American dream. Imagination turns Brown bombers into terrorists and white bombers into mentally ill victims. Imagination gives us borders, gives us superiority, gives us race as an indicator of ability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone else’s capability. I often feel I am trapped inside someone’ else’s imagination, and I must engage my own imagination in order to break free.”
Sprout published
Nov 10, 2024 10:36 PM GMT+0
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Individualism is leading us to the path of exhaustion and death. Community care will save us, and we can dream up all the ways to manifest and strategize the care of communities. (Location 1862)
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Nov 10, 2024 10:05 PM GMT+0
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Imagine a life outside of grind culture right now. You can create it because you are more powerful than you believe. We are more powerful than we believe. What liberation can you craft outside of grind culture? What information can you exchange with yourself and others to find rest? Are you ready to begin slowly by imagining what it would feel like to have everything you need? Are you curious enough to try rest? (Location 1351)
Sprout published
Nov 10, 2024 09:59 PM GMT+0
Apr 9, 2025 02:21 PM GMT+0
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Sprout published
Nov 10, 2024 09:31 PM GMT+0
Jun 12, 2025 05:29 PM GMT+0
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“Perhaps my indescribable suffering at being unable to produce is my most accurate response to the present situation + I would sooner submit to that suffering than make any concession in the essential.”
Sprout published
Nov 10, 2024 07:20 PM GMT+0
Jun 12, 2025 07:50 PM GMT+0
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'If you change, the countenance of the world changes' (2009: 273). —Jung
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Nov 10, 2024 06:39 PM GMT+0
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Jul 4, 2024 03:38 PM GMT+0
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Jul 1, 2024 02:53 PM GMT+0
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Sprout published
May 19, 2024 03:43 PM GMT+0
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Sprout published
May 19, 2024 03:20 PM GMT+0
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“When you use Covid as the excuse or the reason, then you almost don’t have to come up with a solution, because you just acknowledge that this was something that globally impacted everyone,” (View Highlight)
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May 19, 2024 03:06 PM GMT+0
Apr 10, 2025 12:25 PM GMT+0
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He wanted to understand a seeming paradox: Even though we live in a relatively safe time — with life expectancies steadily increasing — young people are consumed with worry and see risks and existential danger all around them. (View Highlight)
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May 19, 2024 02:34 PM GMT+0
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She has long followed the mantra “meet your students where they are.” But she says if she meets them any further down, she’ll feel like a cruise director organizing games of shuffleboard. (View Highlight)
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May 19, 2024 02:33 PM GMT+0
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The essence of making art is having play and rigor in pretty much equal balance or child and adult in pretty much equal balance. It’s so hard. It’s so hard to get the equilibrium right.
You’re too childish, and you can make a glorious mess, but it has no structure to it. It becomes unintelligible to another human being. Too much adult and the thing has no fire. There’s nothing animating it.
So this crazy middle ground in all of these cases that we’re talking about is somehow where you have to live. And it’s very hard to be there. (View Highlight)
You’re too childish, and you can make a glorious mess, but it has no structure to it. It becomes unintelligible to another human being. Too much adult and the thing has no fire. There’s nothing animating it.
So this crazy middle ground in all of these cases that we’re talking about is somehow where you have to live. And it’s very hard to be there. (View Highlight)
Sprout published
May 19, 2024 02:18 PM GMT+0
Apr 9, 2025 02:21 PM GMT+0
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Tessa Hulls wrote a graphic novel called 'Feeding Ghosts' but found the process challenging. Despite its success, she doesn't plan to write another graphic novel and is now focusing on promoting her book. The novel delves into her family's history, blending personal stories with cultural exploration.
But she never wanted to be a graphic novelist. And though she does draw comics, she’s never really had passion for the form. “This was the only way I could tell this story, and so I learned for this,” she said. (View Highlight)
But she never wanted to be a graphic novelist. And though she does draw comics, she’s never really had passion for the form. “This was the only way I could tell this story, and so I learned for this,” she said. (View Highlight)
Sprout published
May 19, 2024 01:58 PM GMT+0
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I wasn’t “chatting.” I was spending hundreds of hours putting together FAQ pages to refute the conventional narratives. If someone repeated a rage-inducing simplification about criminal law, I sent them to this page. If someone offered a rage-inducing simplification about the DOJ investigation, I sent them to this page.
I can tell you from experience that if you dare go against the collective thinking, you’d better come with receipts because people will be furious. Recipts look like this.
I can tell you from experience that if you dare go against the collective thinking, you’d better come with receipts because people will be furious. Recipts look like this.
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May 17, 2024 01:27 PM GMT+0
Apr 9, 2025 02:21 PM GMT+0
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In beginning such work we take endings into our own hands, perhaps for the first time. And this is exactly what I see students doing; acknowledging the despair and rage of countless unchosen endings, and asking again and again “what life must become going forward.” It is an empowering and world-making shift.
Sprout published
May 13, 2024 11:27 AM GMT+0
Apr 9, 2025 02:21 PM GMT+0
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“Work is what we do by the hour. It begins and, if possible, we do it for money. Welding car bodies on an assembly line is work; washing dishes, computing taxes, walking the rounds in a psychiatric ward, picking asparagus – these are work. Labor, on the other hand, sets its own pace. We may get paid for it, but it’s harder to quantify… Writing a poem, raising a child, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms — these are labors.
Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.” (View Highlight)
Work is an intended activity that is accomplished through the will. A labor can be intended but only to the extent of doing the groundwork, or of not doing things that would clearly prevent the labor. Beyond that, labor has its own schedule.” (View Highlight)
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May 6, 2024 01:14 PM GMT+0
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Groundwork is the practice of asking: What are the rituals and practices that help me feel more grounded, connected, and expansive?
Groundwork is engaging with those rituals and practices before you decide whether or not you are “in the mood” to be creative.
Groundwork is how you show the muse that you are dedicated to showing up. (View Highlight)
Groundwork is engaging with those rituals and practices before you decide whether or not you are “in the mood” to be creative.
Groundwork is how you show the muse that you are dedicated to showing up. (View Highlight)
Sprout published
May 6, 2024 01:13 PM GMT+0
Jun 9, 2025 09:24 PM GMT+0
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In beginning such work we take endings into our own hands, perhaps for the first time. And this is exactly what I see students doing; acknowledging the despair and rage of countless unchosen endings, and asking again and again “what life must become going forward.” It is an empowering and world-making shift.
Sprout published
May 6, 2024 12:50 AM GMT+0
Jun 9, 2025 09:52 PM GMT+0
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When an entire society or profession rejects new information and chooses to hug outdated norms, they're demonstrating the Semmelweis Reflex
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Sep 28, 2023 11:54 AM GMT+0
Jun 22, 2025 09:37 PM GMT+0
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The most important person in the learning process is the learner. The next most important is the teacher… The teacher does not fill up bottles—it’s much more like gardening. You don’t grow plants by going out with Scotch tape and sticking leaves onto the stems. The plant grows. But the gardener creates as far as she or he can the conditions for growth—in the case of plants, soil, fertilizer, acidity, shade, water, etc. It’s simple with plants. With children, it’s more complicated. What the teacher does—and the parents at home—is to create an environment, which is in part physical—there are books, records and tapes, and tools—and in part emotional, spiritual, moral, intellectual, in which growth can occur. Now that’s a very subtle, very difficult, very interesting task. Nobody in any school of education that I’ve ever heard of would describe it that way.
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Sep 27, 2023 01:27 PM GMT+0
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The options seemed to be: If I went for it, I’d be penniless, and if I didn’t go for it, I’d be bitter. I’d be bitter going forward. Penniless certainly beats bitter. So I made the decision. And that was ten years ago! And I’m still going.
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Jul 28, 2023 07:46 PM GMT+0
Jun 22, 2025 09:42 PM GMT+0
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You sort of create the niche that need. It’s not like the world was going, ‘Oh, there’s a real need for books by John Higgs, where are they?’ But if you do them, the world sort of reacts around them
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Jul 28, 2023 07:44 PM GMT+0
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It was when I made the decision to attempt to become a full-time writer — knowing full well the absurdity of it given all the business models of writing — there was a sort of act of faith that if I just did it, people who read my books would start to appear. And slowly over time, I’d build people who would go, ‘Oh, that guy’s interesting, I’ll read his next book.’ Just enough to support me.
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Jul 28, 2023 07:41 PM GMT+0
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But the point is: being exceptionally talented and trained was, in the long run, not enough to do groundbreaking work because they lacked the capacity to go beyond the context they had been raised in.
In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from the perspective of 30 or 35 years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They’ve all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they’ve remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have had to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birth-right, as it was mine: the capacity to be alone.
In fact, most of these comrades who I gauged to be more brilliant than I have gone on to become distinguished mathematicians. Still, from the perspective of 30 or 35 years, I can state that their imprint upon the mathematics of our time has not been very profound. They’ve all done things, often beautiful things, in a context that was already set out before them, which they had no inclination to disturb. Without being aware of it, they’ve remained prisoners of those invisible and despotic circles which delimit the universe of a certain milieu in a given era. To have broken these bounds they would have had to rediscover in themselves that capability which was their birth-right, as it was mine: the capacity to be alone.
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Jul 28, 2023 05:41 PM GMT+0
Jun 22, 2025 10:29 PM GMT+0
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Write down 1 idea that's top of mind to write about
• Brain dump 10 bullet points on that idea without judgement
• Brain dump 10 bullet points on that idea without judgement
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Jul 28, 2023 04:43 PM GMT+0
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“Sometimes, when I can’t sleep because I’m nervous, I look up cheese on Google Images and I just . . . scroll. I scroll infinitely. And I feel peace.”
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Jul 28, 2023 04:30 PM GMT+0
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What if this old kind of confidence is, in fact, gone—and what if that’s okay? What if not knowing, and not pretending to know, is the path now?
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Jul 28, 2023 02:45 PM GMT+0
Jun 24, 2025 10:16 PM GMT+0
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what I recognize as confidence is also the thing that made me want to build a business empire (and nearly murder myself in the process); it’s the kind of swagger-y assuredness so valued by capitalist (white, male) culture. It is the energy of being right.
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Jul 28, 2023 02:43 PM GMT+0
Jun 22, 2025 08:48 PM GMT+0
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American culture tells us the middle place should only be a quick stop on the way back to certainty. But what if certainty isn’t the goal?
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Jul 28, 2023 02:43 PM GMT+0
Jun 22, 2025 08:43 PM GMT+0
New Seed
New Seed
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Sprouts!
Seed Quote ->
Growth Status
Garden Tags Database
Source
Original Seed
Planted on:
Tended on:
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Refusing the need to reconcile what is too late to change or take back, forgiveness makes way for “the only possible future” that can come of it. And though it’s often taken up with some amount of hesitation, forgiveness always entails “a stance of openness toward the future,” from which a “refusal to forget its wrong imagines what a wronged life lived well might be.”
New Seed
May 6, 2024 01:29 AM GMT+0
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We’re also big fans of nature, and we love its unique, gorgeous colors, and using those colors to connect to the powers of each season. We love to create seasonal sacred spaces that invoke the essence of each season: the deep rich orange of autumn leaves, the soft lush green of grass, the craggy gray of mountains, the golden sand of deserts, the turquoise of ocean waves.
That’s one reason why we love creating seasonal altars and incorporating bits of seasonal magic into our sacred spaces. This blog will share a few ideas to help you create your next seasonal altar!
That’s one reason why we love creating seasonal altars and incorporating bits of seasonal magic into our sacred spaces. This blog will share a few ideas to help you create your next seasonal altar!
New Seed
May 6, 2024 01:29 AM GMT+0
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In beginning such work we take endings into our own hands, perhaps for the first time. And this is exactly what I see students doing; acknowledging the despair and rage of countless unchosen endings, and asking again and again “what life must become going forward.” It is an empowering and world-making shift.
New Seed
May 6, 2024 01:29 AM GMT+0
Jun 9, 2025 04:42 PM GMT+0
Composting...
Composting...
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Sprouts!
Seed Quote ->
Growth Status
Garden Tags Database
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Original Seed
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Tended on:
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Imagine what it would feel like, taste like, and smell like to believe you don’t have to prove who you are by your accomplishments and labor. (Location 1581)
Composting...
Nov 10, 2024 10:03 PM GMT+0
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(see tweet thread at source)
Composting...
Jul 28, 2023 04:34 PM GMT+0
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CO2 is a tool to help gauge risk, but has many limitations and so you might assume a high risk space is low risk or vice versa.
A better use of CO2 is to ensure the ventilation is working as designed and identify poorly ventilated spaces.
A better use of CO2 is to ensure the ventilation is working as designed and identify poorly ventilated spaces.
Composting...
Jul 28, 2023 04:22 PM GMT+0
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Patriarchy, which isn't about men. It's about control. Because patriarchy is about the father child relationship. That is the only way that you pass on accumulation. And if the father child relationship is important, then controlling women becomes important.
Composting...
Jul 7, 2023 10:14 PM GMT+0
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Sprouts!
Seed Quote ->
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There’s a concept in ecology of ‘niche creation.’ And the idea is: it’s not the case that a species will sort of come along and go, ‘oh, I could do well here, there’s lots of food,’ and things like that. A species comes along and just does his thing, and by acting in the world, he sort of creates the very environment he needs to survive.
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Jul 28, 2023 07:39 PM GMT+0
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“People who you wouldn’t think there’s an obvious place for them in the world, but they just do their stuff regardless, and a place sort of builds around them.” - John Higgs
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Jul 28, 2023 07:36 PM GMT+0
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There is a difference between knowing what you need to do (be independent and true to the potential in your ideas) and something else entirely to know how to embody that. Orienting in the right way to your thoughts is a skill. Like all skills, it takes practice. You also need to have a rich mental representation of how it is supposed to feel to embody the state so that you can orient toward that. This feeling is what you use to measure the relative success of whatever techniques you employ
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Jul 28, 2023 05:44 PM GMT+0
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Being highly impressionable and introverted, he is crafting a defiant personality in the notebooks, a protective gear that allows his larval ideas to live, even those who seem too banal (“a man learns that he is dying and discovers that life is beautiful,” which turns into Seventh Seal ).
New
Jul 28, 2023 05:44 PM GMT+0
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If he had not known the shape of his interests and aims, he would have been more vulnerable to the standards and norms of the community—at least he seems to think so.
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Jul 28, 2023 05:43 PM GMT+0
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The three years of solitary work at Montpellier had not been wasted in the least: that intellectual isolation was what had allowed him to access the cognitive space where new ideas arise. He had made himself at home there.
New
Jul 28, 2023 05:42 PM GMT+0
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If he had not known the shape of his interests and aims, he would have been more vulnerable to the standards and norms of the community—at least he seems to think so.
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Jul 28, 2023 05:40 PM GMT+0
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After his three years of solitary work, Grothendieck did integrate into the world of mathematics. He learned the tools of the trade, he got up to date on the latest mathematical findings, he found mentors and collaborators—but he was doing that from within his framework. His peers, who had been raised within the system, had not developed this feel for themselves and so were more susceptible to the influence of others. Grothendieck knew what he found interesting and productively confusing because he had spent three years observing his thought and tracing where it wanted to go. He was not at the mercy of the social world he entered; rather, he “used” it to “further his aims.” (I put things in quotation marks here because what he’s doing isn’t exactly this deliberate.) He picked mentors that were aligned with his goals, and peers that unblock his particular genius
New
Jul 28, 2023 05:39 PM GMT+0
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Grothendieck had a talent to notice (and admit!) that he was subtly bewildered and intrigued by things that for others seemed self-evident (what is length?) or already settled (the Lebesgue integral) or downright bizarre (as were many of his meditations on God and dreams). From this arose some truly astonishing questions, surfacing powerful ideas, such as topoi, schemas, and K-theory.
New
Jul 28, 2023 05:38 PM GMT+0
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People show much more originality in solving problems than in deciding which problems to solve. Even the smartest can be surprisingly conservative when deciding what to work on. People who’d never dream of being fashionable in any other way get sucked into working on fashionable problems.
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Jul 28, 2023 05:37 PM GMT+0
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It is this capacity to surface questions that set Grothendieck apart, more so than his capacity to answer them. When he writes that his peers were more brilliant than him, he is referring to their ability to answer questions ¹ . It was just that their questions were unoriginal.
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Jul 28, 2023 05:36 PM GMT+0
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One thing that sets these intensely creative individuals apart, as far as I can tell, is that when sitting with their thoughts they are uncommonly willing to linger in confusion. To be curious about that which confuses. Not too rapidly seeking the safety of knowing or the safety of a legible question, but waiting for a more powerful and subtle question to arise from loose and open attention. This patience with confusion makes them good at surfacing new questions
New
Jul 28, 2023 05:36 PM GMT+0
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Einstein reinvented parts of statistical physics. Pascal, self-teaching mathematics because his father did not approve, rederived several Euclidean proofs. There is also a lot of confusion and pursuit of dead ends. Newton looking for numerical patterns in the Bible, for instance. This might look wasteful if you think what they are doing is research. But it is not if you realize that they are building up their ability to perceive the evolution of their own thought, their capacity for attention.
New
Jul 28, 2023 05:33 PM GMT+0
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there is often an element of reinventing the already known.
New
Jul 28, 2023 05:33 PM GMT+0
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As the philosopher Bertrand Russell remarked, the development of gifted and creative individuals, such as Newton or Whitehead, seems to require a period in which there is little or no pressure for conformity, a time in which they can develop and pursue their interests no matter how unusual or bizarre.
New
Jul 28, 2023 05:24 PM GMT+0
Jun 9, 2025 04:43 PM GMT+0
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New
Jul 28, 2023 05:22 PM GMT+0
Jun 9, 2025 04:43 PM GMT+0
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what they are referring to as solitude is rather something like “a state of mind.” They are putting themselves in a state where the opinions of others do not bother them and where they reach a heightened sensitivity for the larval ideas and vague questions that arise within them.
New
Jul 28, 2023 05:15 PM GMT+0
Jun 9, 2025 04:43 PM GMT+0
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What if, instead of trying to get back to being a version of me I recognize, I embraced moving forward into the unknown?
New
Jul 28, 2023 02:46 PM GMT+0
Jun 9, 2025 04:43 PM GMT+0
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We learn the words before we embody them, and we embody them once we’ve had enough experience and integration.
New
Jul 28, 2023 02:15 PM GMT+0
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One of my favorite developmental models, the Loevinger scales, indicates that boundaries come only after the stage/level of conformity — typically during the level of self-awareness (where we start to question norms and develop more nuanced conceptions of ourselves) or even later, during the stage of conscientiousness . Applied singularly, a person learning the term boundaries but not actually having reached the level of maturity to embody boundaries (someone moving from conformity to conscientiousness) might do what a lot of us are doing, which is use the word excessively, incorrectly, and in a way that works to reinforce/defend less developed behaviors or stages of awareness.
New
Jul 28, 2023 02:13 PM GMT+0
Jun 9, 2025 04:43 PM GMT+0
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We don’t try to create things from a mountaintop of experience or wisdom. We try to stay very low to the ground to examine what’s not working in our lives, to try to find creative antidotes to that and to craft them collectively. (View Highlight)
New
Jul 20, 2023 06:57 PM GMT+0
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Your brain needs deep, consistent sleep, rest, and silence to make new connections, for memory retention, and to download.
New
Jul 7, 2023 11:01 PM GMT+0
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My body is an antenna for infinite ideas and inventions when I disconnect from the energy of technology and when I rest.
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Simon sees that if lies prevail in social life and if truth is necessary for one’s full humanity, daily life with others is virtually unbearable. What, after all, does daily social life consist in? A disparaging remark about another group; a rumor or story meant to draw outrage; a news story dug up by partisans seeking advantage; a crude expression of allegiance to an institution as flawed as its denigrated rivals. All of these are fundamental to the fabric of social life, especially in times when social life is unusually politicized, as it was in Simon’s time and as it is now, for us. (Location 1306) - Yves Simon, "Freedom in Daily Life"
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“I do not know, I cannot imagine, any group which does not include among its current ideas an enormous dose of lies. That being the case, the alternative is inevitable: either one must like falsehood, or one must dislike the familiar setting of daily life.” - (Location 1302)
Yves Simon, "Freedom in Daily Life," in Freedom and Community, ed. Charles P. O'Donnell (New York: Fordham,
1968), 5.
Yves Simon, "Freedom in Daily Life," in Freedom and Community, ed. Charles P. O'Donnell (New York: Fordham,
1968), 5.
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Life feels like an exercise in double-think, she said. “To participate in society right now,” she said, “you have to either be blissfully unaware or to dissociate and carry on as if there isn’t a pandemic.”
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Einstein said, “And I am thrilled by the beauty of my theorems.”
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[Einstein] worked for seven years as a patent clerk, and in his spare time he wrote his seminal papers on the photoelectric effect, Brownian motion, and the theory of special relativity—papers that turned physics upside down. He called the patent office “that worldly cloister where I hatched my most beautiful ideas.”11 By calling the patent office a “worldly cloister,” Einstein means that this place of legal business, where a normal employee would go to earn a living in exchange for performing a certain public service, was for him a place of removal and retreat. For someone else it might have been the launching pad for a sparkling career in the civil service. But it is a cloister for Einstein, since in the office there were no hotshot professors to impress, no university administrators to placate, no students to whom he had to justify his existence. It is, then, chiefly a place where the love of learning is put to the test, where ambition is frustrated, where his work has to run on its own power without the grease of seeking out carrots and avoiding sticks. In the quiet of the patent office the beauty of the structures of nature can take hold of him and display itself with clarity.
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Here are just some of the works that I am most proud of. If you would like to read something and can’t access it because it is behind a paywall, shoot me an email and I will get it to you. (View Highlight)
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I have spent over a decade in higher education teaching and doing research. I am an interdisciplinary scholar who pulls from philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience to understand (and often completely rethink) the way that we define, understand, and treat mental illness.
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The e” is what the Village Voice reporter drew for Bradley many years ago. The beginning of the line is the present or somewhere near the present. (Frankly, you can start wherever you want in terms of time, but the present or recent past is fairly common.) And, typically, there’s a character doing something — a sequence of events.Then, at the point where the e loops up, the story leaves the present and, perhaps, goes back in time for history and or it widens for context. When the loop comes back around, you pick up the narrative where you left off and develop the story further to the end. Somewhere in that second straight line the story may reach it’s climax then the denoument or resolution of the story. (View Highlight)
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Developing a structure is seldom that simple. Almost always there is considerable tension between chronology and theme, and chronology traditionally wins. The narrative wants to move from point to point through time, while topics that have arisen now and again across someone’s life cry out to be collected. They want to draw themselves together in a single body, in the way that salt does underground. But chronology usually dominates. As themes prove inconvenient, you find some way to tuck them in. (View Highlight)
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Art can’t nourish us physically, can’t change the history of what has already happened. But art can help us build the emotional scaffolding that supports our processing, it can lay the cultural groundwork for change, it can cultivate the connections that we need for deeper empathy, and it can help to create a new story, a new future. Art can be a place that we find solace, and find community.
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Alexander, the researcher of the Rat Park experiments, argues..that addiction stems from an increasingly dislocated capitalist society—not from medical pathology.. addiction is a direct or indirect outgrowth of society; humans are becoming increasingly addicted not because some mutant addict gene is flooding the pool or because alcohol or addictive chemicals and behaviors are increasingly available, but because we are becoming more disconnected from our purpose, nature, culture, and each other (View Highlight)
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Dislocation is identified psychologically as a “lack of attachment, belonging, identity, meaning, [and] purpose”. Social and economic forces beyond the control of the individual – among them free-market capitalism, ecological devastation, consumerism, gross inequality, [LMIC] “development,” corporate culture, high speed [sic] technical change, financial market crises and more – work to alienate and dislocate the individual from structures of meaning. Our modern social arrangement, Alexander argues, means that we have to sacrifice “family, friends, meaning, and values” in order to be more “efficient” and “competitive” in the rat race. In this framework, addictive behaviors are adaptive responses meant to fill that void of meaning and purpose. Using substances can provide a temporary sense of community (with other users), purpose (to acquire the substance), and meaning (feelings of euphoria or calm from using the substance) [emphasis mine]. Substance abuse and addiction help to fill the gaps in meaning and purpose left by modern society. (View Highlight)
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Addiction is not a new phenomenon resultant of the current cultural context—Dr. Carl Erik Fisher traces back the earliest depictions of it to the Rig Veda (roughly 3,000+ years ago), and addiction, viewed through the learning model, is not a disease but adaption—humans are wired for it, and it’s always been there as both a potential and an expression. However, our current cultural context and economic system—end-stage American capitalism—is a system of addiction, an unprecedented schema no human body, nervous system, brain, and dopaminergic pathway has historically encountered, which feeds off and exploits that inherent wiring we’ve always had, demolishing the naturally occurring elements that keep us feeling whole as an individual and inherently belonging to a larger community and purpose, replacing them with an increasing supply of artificial and addictive compensations that are often for sale or at least profiting someone. Capitalism as a system of addiction is also known as the dislocation theory of addiction (proposed by Bruce Alexander in Globalization of Addiction). (View Highlight)
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We still largely mistake addiction to be something that destroys the lives of a select few with faulty wiring who succumb to a certain set of (compulsive, eventually addictive) behaviors, and narrow the “real” addictions to a handful of mostly social deviant behaviors (according to the puritanical ethos which still underpins our current social context), like gambling, drinking, smoking tobacco, using drugs, and fucking. An addict is a person that went too far with a substance or behavior they either were not supposed to partake in at all or were supposed to partake in moderation/socially accepted norms.
In other words: we’re all addicts. It’s just we think the real, fucked up people are over there shooting tranq and fentanyl and dying on the street, not over here snorting skincare routines or TikTok to fill an unfillable void. This is a mistake (View Highlight)
In other words: we’re all addicts. It’s just we think the real, fucked up people are over there shooting tranq and fentanyl and dying on the street, not over here snorting skincare routines or TikTok to fill an unfillable void. This is a mistake (View Highlight)
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When it came to assembling the vignettes, it was almost like with a poetry manuscript. I printed hundreds and hundreds of pages, lay them out on the floor of my living room, and color coded the different threads. I built the forward narrative, and I had all of these color-coded pieces–the other threads in the book. I would be like, “oh wait, the pink kind of drops out for 50 pages. I need some pink here.” I don’t even remember what pink was, but there was pink. Then I would go back and reorganize because I really wanted most of the threads to carry through without falling away. It was multiple breadcrumb trails in the woods, and I didn’t want one to drop off. (View Highlight)
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Yeah like a long long time ago and I was thinking about it even then I suppose but my sort of deeper understanding of burnout came from learning how it was autistic and the autistic community talk about burnout a lot because it's a it's like a really live issue for us and that helped me to see patterns of burnout across my life. Like it's it's just something that's unavoidable if you're trying to fit in with a society that isn't really made for you. But I think what I've really noticed is how that spread to the much broader community and that it's not a rare event for anyone anymore but it's actually this almost constant experience. It's how we experience life is in in this really burnout way and like we've got so far to go to unravel all the threads that have produced that. We're living in this environment that's hostile to our basic good health, mental and physical and it's going to be hugely complex to unravel that and I'm not even seeing the will to unravel that yet. It's enormous and I think it's going to be it's going to carry on being enormous for a decade to come.
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How do we actually embody accountability? I think we have to start with knowing that it's really hard. It's hard in our context to do. I don't think it's hard necessarily always or will always be hard, but I think given what we are embodied in, it's a really scary thing. I think a lot of us think about accountability in this moment as what are we going to do when something bad happens? What are we going to do when somebody did something wrong? That's when we start thinking about accountability. As opposed to accountability is a way that we live in relationship to one another. That's actually a component of the everyday that we are in the kind of relationship with ourselves. First where we know that we are changing, that we are growing, that we are making mistakes, and we live inside of communities that have that same knowledge. I think that begins to have it be so that accountability doesn't become an event, but is a daily practice of, oh, I could have done this differently. (Time 0:12:20)
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But being unlikeable wasn't the reason she was alone. She
was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so
she could hear herself living.p. 9
was alone so she could hear herself thinking. She was alone so
she could hear herself living.p. 9
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Over time, I got good at modeling these reactions ahead of time. This changed my writing, and it changed me. I became shrewd-cute and the writing became not a line of words on paper but an instrument to manipluate my audience. This shaping is not bad in itself. The problem was rather this: the gravity field of this particular audience did not align with my ethics and aesthetics: their expectations pulled me away from the places my thoughts needed to go. The poems, in conforming to their laughs and tears, hollowed out. (View Highlight)
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Frusciante has an uncommon discipline about what he lets into his senses; he is uncommonly deliberate about curating his milieu. His mode of writing songs is to select a set of guitarists and play along to their recordings (**“**I'm playing along with music that I'd like to be influenced by”) until new ideas start to emerge. He arranges a constellation of nodes and channels the input they send him into new music. (View Highlight)
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As Nadia Asparouhova writes:
If “grit” – the desire to persevere when faced with a challenge, popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth – has been the human trait du jour of the last fifteen-odd years, I suspect that “agency” – a belief in one’s ability to influence their circumstances – could be the defining trait of the next generation.
Grit is the node’s eye’s view. You are struggling against the graph. Agency, on the other hand, is the view from the graph. You are the graph. By changing it, you are changing yourself. (View Highlight)
If “grit” – the desire to persevere when faced with a challenge, popularized by psychologist Angela Duckworth – has been the human trait du jour of the last fifteen-odd years, I suspect that “agency” – a belief in one’s ability to influence their circumstances – could be the defining trait of the next generation.
Grit is the node’s eye’s view. You are struggling against the graph. Agency, on the other hand, is the view from the graph. You are the graph. By changing it, you are changing yourself. (View Highlight)
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The milieu around you—which shapes you, and which you shape in turn—we can model as a directed graph. The nodes are people and objects and ideas connected to each other. And the graph is directed because you have nodes that send you input and nodes you send output to. (View Highlight)
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It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself (View Highlight)
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By replacing a peer group that is low-skilled (such as a peer group in a school) with one that is exceptional (such as Mersenne’s mathematical salon), we can leverage our human capacity to internalize our culture to foster exceptional talent. Erik Hoel calls this the peer replacement theory of genius. (View Highlight)
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