in the warm New York 4 o’clock light we are drifting back and forth /
between each other like a tree breathing through its spectacles /

I look / at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

(Having a Coke with You by Frank O’ Hara)

Writing as ordinary magic

The Lunch Poems (1950-60s) were a series of poems written on Frank O’Hara’s lunch breaks while he worked at the Museum of Modern Art curating exhibitions. O’Hara’s distinct un-fussy contemporary style broke poetic ground in stark contrast to the more conservative academic poetry of the 1960s. Long time book critic of the New York Times, Dwight Garner, called it “the little black dress of American poetry books, redolent of cocktails and cigarettes and theater tickets and phonograph records.”

The best way I’d describe the poems is the compression of ordinary magic found in ordinary people. O’Hara walked the streets of New York City and captured the faces and expressions of the working class: the tobacconist in the Ziegfeld Theatre, the secretaries gossiping in the news-stands. The dwindling edges of the Seagram building at dusk, dancers with their leotards and ballet shoes and crisp beer at the delicatessen, and dark plumes of cigarette smoke. Reading the poems stirs up fond memories of taking the Megabus for $10 at 6am from the Philadelphia bus terminal, shivering in the cold. There are still few prettier places than New York in April at the turn of spring.

O’Hara is not the only artist or writer I admire who had a day job and a fruitful creative life.

T.S Eliot excelled in his 9-5 at Lloyds Bank in London as a transaction clerk while working on his magnum opus of a poem, The Waste Land. Herman Melville used to inspect ship cargo and the long barges coming into the Manhattan Harbor. Anton Chekhov called “medicine his lawful wife,” and literature “his mistress.” The American abstract artist Agnes Martin had a long laundry list of odd jobs: including “on a farm, miking” and “in a parking garage” and “as a dishwasher, three times.”

recently shared a handwritten list of every job Martin ever had:

People make art everywhere, the celebrated photographer Sally Mann wrote in her recent memoir Art Work.

They have made it (art) in caves and the side of subway cars and hunched over a prison cot. They do it when they are exhausted, discouraged. They make it from moments cobbled together.

Despite all the distractions and despair art gets made because it “has to. It is you who has to make it.”

Salvation lays in extreme and doomed commitments

When I started writing on Substack my full time job was extremely demanding. I was frequently pulling 70-80 hour weeks, largely because of intense client-facing travel. I’d write in pockets on the plane to Atlanta, on the road to Logan, Utah and its snow tipped red mountains, on the Golden Mile stretch in Chicago, winging in and out of Heathrow in London.

Plane rides and hotel bars were my favorite vacuums. There was a profound, gorgeous, emptiness that accompanied both spaces. In the plane, the whir of filtered air and the lights dim. At the bar, I’d sit the corner booth, where I’d order a burger or a salad with hot chips on the side. I’d sit and open up my laptop and write.

Since then, I have written over 100 pieces. Still working full-time. I write in the early mornings, evenings and weekends.

To paraphrase Joan Didion, Salvation lays in extreme and doomed commitments. I’ve always related deeply to her romantic ethic. For a while writing was a sort of long-haul dread. A seasickness that wouldn’t abate even when I reached land. And an intense longing all mixed up with the queasiness, because I wanted more. Or desired more from myself than my capacity. Insert Ira Glass’ taste gap, and such. There is an inevitable a trade-off between craft quality and time spent honing it.

It is comforting that some of my favorite authors and writers don’t fit into the tidy maxim of ‘full time writer’ or journalist or essayist. What they all had in common, instead, was a commitment to writing as a function of discovery. In particular, conveying what it was like to live there and then, in a particular place and moment in time.

Your writing practice “co-evolves with how you enter the world”

What does it mean to be a writer when it is not your primary professional identity?

I greatly enjoyed ’s essay 'developing creative identity’ where he explores, compellingly, that “writer” need not be a primary identity at all, but a medium that underpins and supports many others.

Through tracing different writers’ works, he examines how different writers expand sense-making of the world and give us" “powerful new context to think in,” but to various different ends. Sometimes writing is a medium of thought and communication in service of a fundamental discovery or line of questioning. Other times, as in fiction or storytelling, the point of writing is to create an entire mythical world and giving us an experience of being.

Nielsen contrasts Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species — a sweeping and dizzying journey through detailed observations from Darwin’s network of naturalists, best framed as an argument of evolution through natural selection — with Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, which used photo journalism, field reporting, architectural criticism, travel writing, to interrogate how buildings change over time, and arrive at a viewpoint different from that of the traditional community of architects.

Even though both are ‘writing to discover’, Nielsen observes, they’re doing it in different ways.

Darwin only decided to write the Origin after he'd already understood the principle of evolution by natural selection…Darwin is sharpening and developing an idea he already believes; he also, en route, discovers many surprising implications and applications.

By contrast, Brand seems to have begun with a question, and discovered the basic shape of his answer through the writing process. Brand is a sailor, setting out on a voyage, determined to tell the highlights of the story, no matter what happens.

So: you have this incredible freedom to decide what kind of writing best serves you. You can approach it from a place of amateur delight and curiosity, or from a place of expertise and argument. There are no hard and fast rules!

When you free yourself from what Nielsen calls the “tyranny of ‘writing as a primary identity,” you can be free to choose for yourself what kind of writing you want to do in service of your other, multiple identities: be it a scientist, or researcher, investor, designer, founder.

Paradoxically, the non-writing activities stemming from these identities can actually be wildly generative source material for the writing as well.

What activities will generate the types of understanding you seek? How can you deepen those activities as you write, a loop in which your writing practice co-evolves with how you enter the world, to generate more and deeper insight?

By the end of the piece, he comes to a hard won realization:

I’m not a writer. I’m an explorer and researcher who writes.

A writing practice grows out of your unique lens and experiences onto the world. Importantly, I did not name the title of this essay “being creatively productive while working a full time job” because productivity suggests a means to an end - more about word count and less about intentionally choosing a particular arrangement of words that can uniquely deliver a kernel of truth and beauty to the reader’s heart and mind.

Instead, I chose the words “sustaining creative aliveness” because creative aliveness is the process of discovery, collection, synthesis, and then finally expression. Rebecca Solnit calls this necessary legwork for establishing cosmology of self. Where underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the more general one of “making a self who can make the work you’re meant to.”

If we view our jobs and the hours we spend most of our waking lives as complete diversions from a rich intellectual or creative life, it will never feel fulfilling or meaningful to make creative work.

Framed differently, our full time jobs can extend our creative work beyond the boundaries of itself, and create a beautiful amalgamation of earned wisdom across disciplines that only you can access and endeavor upon. This doesn’t mean it comes easy, or is without tradeoffs — most notably time and emotional investment.

I enjoy the work I do with early stage software because it’s all about telling ambitious stories of technology. Failure, reconstruction, and where fantasy confronts reality (markets), whilst casting a romantic hope for the future. I use software-shaped metaphors often, picked up from meetings on product and engineering. A nurse or physician who moonlights as a novelist, for example, might realize a deep grasp of human experience witnessed in the ward — a lens into life and mortality — can be channelled it into characters. All these seemingly discrete experiences actually make up a unique frame and diction that enable you to make the creative work that you are meant to.

a fun collection of writing practices + some more tactical tips on cultivating spaciousness.

Here are some notes on creative processes of different artists. These are mostly for fun. To end, I’ll share a few more tactical tips on energy management for writing and creative work.

Isak Dinesen: “I write a little every day, without hope and without despair.”

Kurt Vonnegut

I awake at 5:30, work until 8:00, eat breakfast at home, work until 10:00, walk a few blocks into town, do errands, go to the nearby municipal swimming pool, which I have all to myself, and swim for half an hour, return home at 11:45, read the mail, eat lunch at noon. In the afternoon I do schoolwork, either teach or prepare.

When I get home from school at about 5:30, I numb my twanging intellect with several belts of Scotch and water ($5.00/fifth at the State Liquor store, the only liquor store in town. There are loads of bars, though.), cook supper, read and listen to jazz (lots of good music on the radio here), slip off to sleep at ten. I do pushups and sit ups all the time, and feel as though I am getting lean and sinewy, but maybe not.

Henry Miller

MORNINGS:
If groggy, type notes and allocate, as stimulus.

If in fine fettle, write.

AFTERNOONS:

Work of section in hand, following plan of section scrupulously. No intrusions, no diversions. Write to finish one section at a time, for good and all.

EVENINGS:

See friends. Read in cafés.

Explore unfamiliar sections — on foot if wet, on bicycle if dry.

Write, if in mood, but only on Minor program.

Paint if empty or tired.

Make Notes. Make Charts, Plans. Make corrections of MS.

Note: Allow sufficient time during daylight to make an occasional visit to museums or an occasional sketch or an occasional bike ride. Sketch in cafés and trains and streets. Cut the movies! Library for references once a week.

Haruki Murakami

When I’m in writing mode for a novel, I get up at 4:00 am and work for five to six hours. In the afternoon, I run for 10km or swim for 1500m (or do both), then I read a bit and listen to some music. I go to bed at 9:00 pm. I keep to this routine every day without variation. The repetition itself becomes the important thing; it’s a form of mesmerism. I mesmerize myself to reach a deeper state of mind.

+ Some actual thoughts on carving out time to write:

tactical advice for busy creatives

1. Energy management > time management. I write best in the very early mornings, so on writing days it’s usually 6:30/7-8am and I’ll go straight to the work office after. It compartmentalizes writing so I get uninterrupted time to think and write in peace.

   A question to ask yourself: when do you feel most ‘alert’ or sharp? That’s probably when you should allot writing time. Repetition is mesmerism, as Murakami said, so find regular moments you can schedule in.

2. Ask for help and accountability frequently and importantly: ego-lessly. Some of my best pieces were written under watchful eye of my best friend (and co-writer of a previous newsletter) Justine. When we wrote together and set deadlines, we were writing a collaborative piece every 2 weeks. I now send half-baked pieces to friends whose eyes and taste I trust — it gets you to a better, more beautiful piece quicker, even if you have to take an ego-bruising (or battering) to get there.

3. Find odd personal hacks to fit reading and writing into a busy schedule. If you don’t already use some type of voice dictation app, I find Wispr Flow to Notion extremely useful — you can find me strolling articulating thoughts or ideas for pieces out loud. Sometimes I ask friends if we can use Granola to record our conversations and riff on ideas together. (Is this weird? Maybe.) Another strange fact is I read a lot of books on the Kindle while walking on the treadmill or cycling slowly on a stationary exercise bike. A friend of mine says she always takes the longest bus ride to her destination instead of the train because she reads better on buses. Another listens to audiobooks at the gym (instead of music… it’s appalling). Not suggestions, just find weird hacks that work for you.

4. Introduce writing variety through scoped projects. This is very relevant as I have a new writing project coming out (very soon) that is arguably a synthesis of work and creative writing on founder and company stories. Constantly try and launch new projects that allow you to push to the edge of your ability. It should make you uncomfortable and a few will fail. That’s fine!

5. Don’t covet. Give everything. Give it all. One of my favorite books on the topic is Annie Dillard’s A Writing Life, where she writes “Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.” Creatives tend to hoard notes and lines thinking they’ll be used perfectly once at some point in the future. But writing is a deep well that continues to be refilled by life experience and reading and observations. Use every good sentence you have ever written now. Burn the candles.

6. Invest in the richness of fiction, even if no obvious or legible ‘ROI’ (return on investment). There’s a rampant ChatGPT-ification of knowledge acquisition where we ask AI to summarize insights instead of doing the reading ourselves. Actually investing time into reading novels, essays, short stories, and poetry is a competitive advantage. It emerges on a sentence level.

7. Rigor and discipline applies to creative work too. The common notion of creative work is that it shows up spontaneously and magically. My alternate view is that it’s just a grind that you must learn to love, and it requires the same conscientiousness as any other type of work. Surprisingly, that is very freeing. It means, like anything, you can set up systems and habits - and you don’t have to rely on whimsy or inspiration to strike before you sit down and do creative work.

8. Show up, and the muse eventually shows up. That is all.

Nicole.

I’ve always loved novels that follow a particular narrative arc: a young man has fantasies of finding glory or honor in some grand gesture, and abandons a comfortable or ordinary life to seek it out. When he finally journeys toward it, he realizes that the fantasy he dreamed of was a sham. A mirage. It was a bloody journey full of false gods. When he returns he is changed. Broken fundamentally in some ways, healed in others. He has come to some semblance of self-knowledge. The route is not the same route he had first embarked on with youthful spirit and joyfulness, but with wisdom and humility.

Some name this aftermath “post-fall”: having been brought to your knees, or brought to the edges of oneself. Before God, or the world.

We all embark on our bespoke “grand journeys” at some point and it inevitably leads to disillusionment. We don’t get the recognition for the hours and months and years of the unforgiving slog, we make humiliating mistakes, we hurt the ones we love. There are smaller cruelties, too. A middling life you are lukewarm about — nothing is really bad, but nothing is the aching sort of good. No primal joy.

Maybe the point is to go on the journey regardless if the fantasy gets fulfilled. At least then you’d have contended with the dream.

But the characters that have captured my heart the most always chose to return to, or see, reality for how it was.1 And loved the deeply flawed human world because it was Real — not contrived, not airless or soundless or unbruised. It was real, and had violence and rapture, and bodies that aged, and buildings that crumbled, but by that same hand: fervor, courage, and human striving.

This week I’ve been reading A Swim in the Pond in the Rain by George Saunders, a technical deep reading of classic nineteenth century Russian short stories by Chekhov, Gogol, Turgenev, and Tolstoy, based on his Syracuse University MFA class syllabus.

In one of the first stories, In the Cart, by Anton Chekhov, we meet a very lonely woman trapped in a banal life with no clear way out. The implicit question the story asks is, how do we resolve her loneliness? The obvious structural answer is to give her a love interest, someone to pine over. Chekhov gives us one brief glimmer of a potential love interest, but then dissolves it quickly. Why? Why not give the reader what they hope for?

Saunders’ reading is that retracting the easy conclusion makes the story bigger and more ambitious. Tidy stories aren’t very useful. The question the story asks then becomes much more profound - What happens when you can’t absolve yourself from loneliness? There is no easy way out, and sometimes no way out of it at all.

Here’s Saunders at the end of his analysis:

It seems to say that such loneliness has always been with us and always will be. As long as there’s love, there’ll be people who aren’t loved. As long as there’s wealth, there’ll be poverty. As long as there’s excitement, there’ll be dullness. The story’s conclusion, essentially, is: “Yes, that’s how it is in this world.”

The tidy story is not useful because it doesn’t make us sing or weep or feel. If we got everything we asked for there would be no prayer, nor hope. A good story captures a moment of great change, and we can imagine after the story is done the lives of the characters continue unfolding beyond us. Saunders writes, “a work of art moves us by being honest.”

We respect stories when they they reveal difficult truths about the world and human nature. Rarely are Chekhov’s characters fully saints or sinners. Our heroine can be pitiable and innocent, yet complicit in her own suffering, the brave knight can be a naive drunkard and hapless fool. We come to care deeply about a character because of their believable internality. Not because they are perfect people, but because they are imperfect and we recognize ourselves in them. We feel for our lonely imperfect narrator, as we too, are lonely and imperfect beings.

I was terrified last year of time passing inconsequentially. Of course there were too many pleasurable moments to count. An evening out with friends, a house party to linger at, a specific purchase. But none of these were deeper, more profound feelings of aliveness.

When did I feel alive? When I was dancing, feeling the blood rush to my fingertips and the back of my hamstrings. When I was writing, and located something true and right beneath language such that I felt it echo in my heart. When we walked for hours from embarcadero to china basin or from chinatown to washington square park or scott street to divisadero and talked desperately, as if we’d run out of time.

David Whyte:

Whatever a human being desires for themselves will not come about exactly as they first imagined it or first laid it out in their minds…what always happens is the meeting between what you desire from your world and what the world desires of you. It’s this frontier where you overhear yourself and you overhear the world.

It is important to overhear the world rather than narrate it in advance. This year, I am pushing new things into the world, but noting down carefully my lived experience. I expect when I look back on all the notes I collect this year, I’ll see the inverse of fantasy - that what lasts, what feels right, looks nothing like what I first imagined or dreamed about. What emerges when you make contact with reality is always richer, deeper, and more true.

I have new writing coming out soon. It is an editorial project I’ve been doing with founders of early stage startups I admire. I’m very excited for you to read it. Follow my twitter or subscribe in the box above for the latest updates.

The Greeks say ethos anthropoi daimon. Character is fate. Otherwise, what unfolds in your life is a direct result of who you are: the incalculable sums of pluses and minuses in the margins of your choices.

At dinner in Noe Valley, I said it was possible to wake up one day and demand more from life. These days, I simply desire more. Grappling with the enormity of desire can be very painful and barbed. The blissful state of previous ignorance vanishes. In its place grows a gnawing sensation, a sense of anxious preoccupation.

Desire is productive. It extends directionally, pulls you. It demands nerve.

But anything worth having has its price. All too often, we find ourselves stagnant between knowing the standard with which we should conduct ourselves and acting upon it. We flinch at the work required to live up to our own ambitions. We want to reach an imagined destination without exerting the effort required to get there.

Say you want to write something good, suited to your taste. All you have to do is write, edit, read. Do those three repetitive actions for an absurdly long time. It really is that simple. Yet it requires enormous dedication and discipline. Thousands of words, thousands of hours, all for incremental improvement. The willingness to say you’ll try again even when you badly want to stop. But truly, this is the only way you earn self-trust. You show up to the base, and you keep the promises you’ve made. You don’t flinch.

In Joan Didion’s On Self Respect, she writes that character — the willingness to accept responsibility for one’s own life — is the source from which self-respect springs. We can fool everyone but ourselves:

The charms that work on others count for nothing in that devastatingly well-lit back alley where one keeps assignations with oneself.

Her point is we are always performing internal reconciliation. Checks and balances against your own assessment of yourself. You always know when you’re being intellectually lazy or evading complexity. Cultivating self discipline gives us “the ability to discriminate, to love and to remain indifferent.” If we don’t trust ourselves and maintain a sense of intrinsic worth, how can we recognize what we truly love?

I think about it as developing good faith toward my actions. In a two sided bargain, one party has good faith, trust and reliance, that person will do what they say and follow-through. With yourself, there is no contract or accountability. Only private integrity. When you keep your own promises, you make yourself proud.

On our walk down the steep hills of Pac Heights, expansive ocean blue spread across every surface. I imagined if I peeled the paint down from house to house, the windows and walls would still linger blue like an echo. S and I discussed how many of our mutual friends have ‘written their own job spec.’ A company initially doesn’t have a scoped spot for this person because they are not confined to one particular definition. Instead, exceptional people acquire a ‘them-shaped hole’ — a place in an organization where they can pursue their excellence in ways that are hard to define or draw boundaries around.

What I've learned observing these people is that they're driven by a singularly high personal standard. A focus on inputs, with an uncommon disregard for how the outside world sees them. Opinions of others are fickle, anyway. Beloved one day, hated the next. Their certainty is not derivative, and instead springs from a deeper and more enduring well of self regard. In response, the external world reshapes itself to fit them better. Reality contains a surprising amount of malleability.

There’s a Borges afterword to his book of prose and poems in The Maker. He writes of a man who sets out to draw the world. He draws all the provinces and kingdoms, mountains, bays, ships, fishes, instruments and stars. In the end, he discovers these lines “trace the lineaments of his own face.” When I first read it, I took it to mean that we are all composites of the world around us, that the self is assembled from external material. Now I believe the inverse is also true. The world is shaped by an internal vitality, by what I do when no one is watching.

Here’s a pattern I’ve witnessed in countless conversations with people whose career trajectories I admire. Most discovered their life’s work, their techne — or true craft and path on this earth — through adjacencies. Their first hypothesis of what kind of life would fit was wrong. Searching for their life’s work was a multi-turn endeavor1. Every turn was partly right and partly wrong. Rightness revealed itself gently over time, and it brought them closer to finding a life that fit them.

In other words, slight pivots compounded over time alter the course of your life quite dramatically. Each decision itself need not be large. Of course, there is a time and place for radical change. Of throwing out your old life and ushering in the new one without sentimentality or longing. But whenever people bemoan stagnancy or ill-fitting circumstances, it seems to me they are actually one to two vector changes away from them being happy and fulfilled. The raw material is there, but the orientation or method needs alteration.

I find it comforting reading the old blogposts of early technologists. So many legendary companies’ core products that created immense economic value were once side projects, orthogonal or behind the curtain to the main thing. Slack appeared after the founders wound-down their venture backed gaming company Glitch. To solve their own developer communication frictions, they built custom internal communication piping and realized it was general purpose for any type of online team communication. Olympus sold their entire beloved consumer camera division after 84 years and became one of the world leaders in pure-play medical instruments. In interviews, leaders of both companies said they had the intuition that if they didn’t pivot it would be too late, and failure would be locked in, illiquid.

Instead, they viewed the world and their movements within it as inherently liquid. Importantly, you were restarting with key primitives. You just stripped away the hulking mass of distraction from the clean and pure real thing.

This requires a clear-eyed internal honesty. The ability to course correct when fundamental attributes of your initial decision have changed. Often the decision to alter a particular path comes with sunk cost. Are you willing to admit being wrong about a particular theory of the world? Well, maybe you were right about the theory of the world. Then, the world changed.

Pivots, and deciding on the right degree of pivot, requires acute levels of attention. It’s easier to say that you dislike the whole thing and give up on it, rather than getting more granular into exact clusters of feeling. You feel bad about X, but you simultaneously like Y. It means noticing internal comms. In flinches and an internal squeezing of the heart, or conversely recognizing the types of problems you enjoy solving. Even if no one cared, would you still play the same game? It means collecting data and market feedback. What fails, and have you tried 10 instances before marking it a failure? What do your closest friends think you’re really good at?

Like tuning an instrument string by string, I’d notice one note was off and I’d play it again. Turn the peg. Listen again. Turn the peg. It strikes me searching for your life’s work is just that. Eventually, the music rings clear and sweet.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail, after all. When I started getting more curious, I began to see more granularly across dimensions. I felt euphoric in certain environments, and stagnant in others. I had skills that were oddly transferable from one domain to another, and felt the pull from the market for this set of illegible skills. I could see the bits of my life that were impervious to change and the bits I could bend and warp to a wonderful new shape.

This is how you get intellectually unstuck. We put so much pressure on ourselves to get things right on first attempt. What we seek is some wild step change that plunges us into clarity. Instead, we should embrace the little pivots that get us closer. It might be a series of smaller changes over a long period of time that feel less than radical. But in five years, you’ll look back and hardly recognize yourself. All we can ask for is a sharpening of certain senses.

An update on the blog: documenting new media experiments in 2026 ˚⟡˖

I wrote in the subtitle of this piece that the blog is changing because I have changed. The truth is that I’ve struggled for a long time to merge some of my multiple identities into writing. The blog represents only a sliver of my overall interests which include: an analysis of startups and new technology, relationships, health/fitness, and creative introspective reflections.

In the spirit of small pivots, this year I’m documenting the process of running mini media experiments around my broader interests. Two areas I’m excited about writing and bringing onto the blog going forward:

1. Interviews and collaborative writing with founders and builders I admire in SF.

2. The “weekly discourse in the groupchats".

Here’s an example. and I are running a set of collaborative experiments together. Our first podcast (mini clip below) is a snippet of Vedika discussing human data markets, an area she and have written about and invested in extensively. See their excellent piece “The TAM is All of Human Labor,” a look inside the real gold rush in AI: RL environments where models learn to work.

Here are some quotes from our longer conversation. It was very fun, and I learned a lot.

 I don’t think we have an access problem in AI. I think it’s a steerability problem. Friends at the labs say, we’re constrained by our own imagination. And I think that’s very true because AI is essentially made like execution cheap. Like trending towards free, but it’s like, but it doesn’t really solve what is worth working on

The bottleneck for models now is actually reasoning based data, which is not really about the state of the world. It’s how do you make decisions in the world especially along these, longer horizon tasks? These are things that models are not really good at single-shotting.  I think we’re in this entire world of these subjective domains. And, I think for the models to be able to hill climb on these subjective domains, they need reasoning based data.

When you think about illegibility, it’s good to think about what does the local culture over reward and under reward like relative to outcomes? San Francisco for example, over rewards younger founders, technical cleverness and ingenuity, grand ambition. And I think you can find pockets of mispricing along every single one of those dimensions.

(Also, it’s probably the first time you’re seeing my face on here as I’ve been pseudonymous for 3 years. Hi!)

I hope you’ll enjoy joining me on this new direction of the blog. Thank you for reading as always,

Nix.

Some other essays you might enjoy on craft, work, and purpose:

The pursuit of beauty can rearrange a life.

Last year I spent a few weeks in Seoul, South Korea. My friends and I colloquially called it the ‘Silicon Valley of Beauty.’ It was, in fact, a lot of fun! I participated. I did the color analysis, I bought a set list of products: the Amuse blush, Entropy tulle gloss, Rejuran cream.

Only later I’d reflect on the sheer inescapability of longing for beauty. Most women I know grew up haunted by the beauty myth, torn between acceptance and aspiration. All my life I saw beauty as a form of applied effort. Beauty was rarely a quality one owned intrinsically, rather, something one maniacally expended money and time to become.

I wondered how much time I spent worshipping false gods. I wondered when I finally grew up. When I decided my body was my body, and I loved it because it was mine.

It seems to me there are two predominant types of beauty. A beauty that is solipsistic, oriented around glamor and draws us inward in an ever turning gyre — and a beauty that lies outside of us, that makes us more generous and open. The kind we see in a plant or a sky or a work of art or music, or perhaps inside the very kernel of the human soul.

The second type is what inspires us to live, a type of beauty we can never betray.

Beauty as a method of attention

I was delighted to encounter the framing of beauty as a method of attention from the Irish-British moral philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch.

According to Murdoch in her set of essays The Sovereignty of Good, beauty is primarily an agent of change. Beauty draws our attention outward, away from ourselves. It is an occasion for ‘unselfing’: an experience of having our normal self‑preoccupation fall away in the presence of something beautiful. This quality of unselfish attention is the highest form of grace.

Through this redirection of attention, we learn how to see. In other words, Murdoch saw beauty as a technology. A practice, a technique, for altering the world or the experience of the world.

Easy and Difficult Beauty

If beauty is a method of attention, what happens when that attention requires us to sit with discomfort, complexity, or even pain? Chloe Cooper Jones asks this question in Easy Beauty, a memoir about living and becoming a mother with sacral agenesis, a condition affecting the spine.

Of course, her memoir touches on her experience sitting outside the purview of society’s standard of beauty. Yet her definition of beauty is far more expansive — beyond bodily beauty, the pleasure that comes from art, music, ideas. Crucially: there is a type of beauty, often dismissed, that can transform us in ways we don’t expect.

In an interview on the Ezra Klein show, Cooper Jones describes easy and difficult beauty, referencing the English philosopher Bernard Bosanquet. Easy beauty is the type of beauty that becomes very apparent to us once we sense it. For example:

A simple spatial rhythm. A song comes on and you immediately want to dance or you immediately feel a reaction to it. Looking at a sunset, looking at a rose, looking at — or eating a beautiful meal.

Conversely, difficult beauty is often a beauty that challenges us, that can initially be jarring or hard to accept. It can be off-putting because it is complex, creates a dissonance within us.

Difficult beauty, wrote Bosanquet,

Required more time, patience, and a higher amount of concentration. Our ability to appreciate difficult beauty depended on our education, insight, endurance, and our capacity for attention.

Learning to enjoy new music is a good metaphor. Nietzsche writes, upon first hearing a strange melody it takes some time to become accustomed to it: “we need to exercise effort and good-will in order to endure it in spite of its strangeness.”

Then comes the moment when a switch flips. We become “humble and enraptured lovers, who want it and want it again, and ask for nothing better from the world.”

We are… finally recompensed for our good-will, our patience, reasonableness and gentleness towards what is unfamiliar, by the unfamiliar slowly throwing off its veil and presenting itself to us as a new, ineffable beauty.

Perhaps developing a taste for difficult beauty, or the ability to tolerate mental discomfort is one of the most important human skills to have. To consume novel things, to accept boredom and sadness, to be patient, to override the aversion of being changed. To live our normal lives and see it as both banal and sublime, and godly and mundane, and find the immense beauty somewhere in the crevices.

The Beautiful is Necessarily Real

Fake things continue to proliferate. Fake writing, fake pictures. But does this form of beauty touch us? Do we revise the course of our lives to put ourselves in its path?

In tech circles, we discuss AI slop and a defense against it. Comms maverick for startups , Founder of Rostra, writes that “narrative alpha” now comes only by doing real things. Creating real and durable products that exhibit craftsmanship and taste. Showing up as a real human “with real flaws and foibles” distinguished from AI-curated personas and scripts.

True resonance arises from the feeling that what you are seeing is real, that it was forged through a complicated interconnectedness and friction with the world. Ironically, the apex of absolute beauty or symmetry or pleasantness lacks real intimacy. It’s flat. You could look at a doll and feel nothing but the uncanny. But look at a face you love for all its quirks and think it inimitably beautiful.

I keep returning to this one line in ’s piece Yet Byron Never Made Tea as You Do about his marriage with his wife Jane. He writes that it is precisely the contact with reality, the eruptions of the real into the fantasy that makes up the real substance of love:

Love begins not with me, but with the other, with the little eruption of the Real that I experience in the other.

In his wife, it was the first time she laughs a full bodied laugh and he gets a glimpse of a chip in her front tooth.

I learned later how she got that chip, how it came to function as a synecdoche for some of the darkest part of her life, why she tried so hard to hide it. But in that moment, and all the moments after (even after I learned its story), I loved that chipped tooth and I loved her for it.

Repetti describes what I believe we all crave, an intense attention that doesn’t shirk away. Secretly, we want to be loved for the stuff of reality, not the veneer of perfection, not for what we can do. We don’t want to be a portal through which the rest of the world is beheld, we want to be seen for who we are.

I end on this scene in the children’s story Velveteen Rabbit - where an old stuffed animal, the Skin Horse, speaks to a newer toy, a rabbit. “Real isn’t how you are made,” he says, “It’s a thing that happens to you.”

“When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.”

…

“It doesn’t happen all at once,” said the Skin Horse. “You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”

By the end of the book, the rabbit is shabby and threadbare. But through a boy’s love, made Real.

The trip to Seoul was with my mother, my grandmother, and my aunt. One evening, we went to a restaurant on the 3rd floor of a building overlooking a busy intersection. It was open air, you could hear the entire street rushing in at night. The buskers and traffic and chatter drifting in and out. That night, a violinist was playing right under the window. We ate kimchi pancake and tteokbokki, drank jujube tea and a Terra beer. The busker played korean ballads and then strangely, Les Champs-Elysées, the French-American rendition from 1969.

The entirety of last year was riddled with uncertainty, full of doubt. What should I be doing? How should I live? All this fell aside in that moment. I remember it as one of complete unselfing. In that moment I was completely present. I didn’t think of what to do or what to buy or how to be. I was so happy. I was loved. I was there.

I don’t have an answer on how to pacify the insatiable hunger for beauty. Only a reminder that moments I felt most beautiful were never about the pristine makeup, or the perfect figure or outfit. Rather, the aliveness or electricity I felt within, as if I were pursuing my true techne, or craft, upon the earth. And every time I found someone truly beautiful to behold, it was because their soul shone lightly on the surface of their being.

As a child, your simplistic conception of beauty is limited. As your experiences diversify and broaden, your ability to recognize beauty grows larger and deeper. This includes the beauty you glimpse within yourself.

We left the restaurant and slowly walked home. The air was thick and pale with the gloss of stars and the beginnings of snow. The floating music lingered, gentle on my mind.

There are no more fantasies to cling onto. There is no past, no backward place for my longings. Only forward into the night, led by the beacon of beauty.

You might like a few other posts on attunement to self and other:

There are many lost worlds. In the early mornings along the green corridor in Singapore, an orchestra of sound. Cicadas. Songbirds. The modulations of light and shadow, burned grass and trumpet shaped Chinese violets. The home that we lived in for 9 years was demolished entirely, down to the splinters.

Some things don’t change. H and I drink Pu-erh tea in a traditional Chinese teashop on Neil Road, sitting cross-legged on the floor until we’re giddy from caffeine. We name it her year of slicing the Gordian knot: she had a complex set of problems causing misery, and one decision solved everything in one fell swoop.

H speculates about fate. I don’t know if I believe that all paths lead somewhere predestined. I take the stance that most decisions don’t matter at all, only one or two picked well fundamentally alter the course of your life. When a window opens you have to flood in. With that comes all the anxieties I liken to trading on margin: the heart-wrenching feeling of putting all of your chips in, and then some.

My smartest friends are constantly plagued by the question of how to optimize their lives. Mostly because they believe in hustle and slog, and magnitude means nothing without direction. I call this experience “choice loneliness.” You’re not necessarily lonely in a holistic sense, but in a localized way. You might have a close knit community of peers and people who love you. But no one can determine the true size or shape of your life. When to dig your heels in and work like a dog, nor when to cut your losses after a long and thankless slog. Anne Lamott once said writing a novel was like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way. Similarly when forging illegible paths, you can only see a few turns ahead. You learn to stomach the abyss for an unbearably long time.

The line of our life only solidifies behind us, it becomes coherent as it fossilizes into the simplicity of destiny, Mircea Cărtărescu writes in Solenoid,

While the lives that could have been, that could have diverged, moment by moment, from the life that triumphed, are dotted, ghostly lines: creodes, quantum differences, translucid and fascinating like stems vegetating in the greenhouse. If I blink, my life forks: I could have not blinked, and then I would have been far different from the one who did, like streets that radiate out from a narrow piaţa.

Does desire leave anyone intact? Life forks in less than a blink. All of a sudden the decision parameters upon which you assess success have been reconfigured. That is the very underpinning of transformation: you can’t predict how it will warp you or turn you into who you weren’t before. It simply feels like acute recognition at the site of change: the way you recognize a perfect fit on a pair of jeans, or begin to fall for someone. It’s just like, Oh.

Maybe I’d be content with any fate because I’d have chosen it. A flat in London with a dog and two children and a routine morning jog. A creaky Victorian rowhouse near NoPa, or someplace in Montana or Seattle waking up to a body of water. Saturation, Ada Limon writes about the Kentucky sky, that feeling when you’re really full, or life is full and you can’t think of anything else that could fit into it and then even more sky comes. More sky it is. Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore. And you’d be a poet or a founder or a trader or a psychotherapist or a gold rush AI researcher or an free agent playing singular games. When the world is malleable as it is right now, what do we do with ourselves?

Stop agonizing, you say. Anywhere you’d be pleased by the simpler things. The crispness of morning air. A breakfast of toast and eggs and dark roast coffee with cream. In the motionless dark, I run loops around an empty plot of land. In the imagined future, I still hear the cicadas and birds sing.

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I’ve missed making consumption archive! Here we go with some recent enjoyments

1. Zadie Smith’s Notes on Attunement for the New Yorker (Ty for the recommendation ) inspired my latest essay on modern art.

2. Alongside that mention, Nabeel’s excellent essay on close reading Proust’s In Search of Lost Time convinced me to finally start the set.

3. I reread ’s piece on love and individuality once a month since he posted it in 2024. The end of fantasy is the beginning of real love:

   These tiny imperfections, the little eruptions of the real into the fantasy of the other, are what make up the real substance of love, what Lacan would call after Socrates “the agalma” of the other, their “hidden treasure.”

4. Up there with pieces I’ve reshared multiple times is for : Would You Rather Have Married Young on experience vs happiness

5. ’s as sweet as razor blade honey - Sasha always arranges words in such a precise and surprising way, it’s impossible to predict the next token:

   There is no strategy that will contain what is inside us, so we simply burst. And if we are lucky, we have the fortitude to notice: oh, it is really interesting to burst open. Look at all the scraps I’m made of.

6. on taking a class taught by Annie Dillard at Wesleyan.

7. ’s advice on following your non-specific dreams

   I think this is the aspect of luck that’s sometimes missed in career mythology. Not that if it doesn’t strike, you’re doomed, but that luck—which we all need a little of, and usually encounter at some point, although some more than others—can’t lead you somewhere specific, but if you meet it with the right attitude, can lead you somewhere unexpected

8. for Reading Lolita in the Barracks in Korean military service

9. Merve Emre’s interview with Rachel Cusk

10. The Eros Monster by Agnes Callard

    The old story is that eros induces self-destruction by way of emotion: it controls, redirects, and poisons one’s feelings. But eros commits crimes of passion because, first and foremost, it commits crimes of thought. It attacks the heart by way of the mind. Eros is an intellectual monster.

11. Will Larson’s reflections on a Forty Year Career

    

12. , , and on Claude Finds God was highly intriguing and introduced me to my new most used emoji: 🌀. Claude is just like me!

    For readers who aren't familiar, this is a behavior where two Claudes talking to each other, after a sufficient number of turns, appear to converge in some sort of feedback loop in a state that sounds a lot like Buddhism or Eastern mysticism.

13. America The Beautiful on Scott F. Fitzgerald

14. Why I Broke Up with New York by Lena Dunham

15. Angels, Demons, and AI by

16. In Praise of Shadows exploring the Eastern beauty and principles around light and shadow, and more broadly on Japanese aesthetics by Jun'ichirō Tanizaki.

17. The Crane Wife by CJ Hauser

At Penn, one of my favorite classes was Modern Art from Picasso to Pollock. It was taught in the Spring. The crabapples bloomed, and opened up an artery of pink across campus. We lived with an intensity that marked the tail end of a particular shape of life. Modern Art was a tight class held in the back of a small, mottled beige lecture hall in the Jaffe Art building, filled with a range of characters from undergraduates to local members of the Philadelphia community.

Our professor was brilliant, articulate, and easily moved. One day she cried in class while showing us the artist Donald Judd’s Works of Concrete — an exhibition set across 340 acres of pale sky and parched desert earth. The boxes lay flat on the fields of Marfa, solemn against the long, amber, West Texas light.

I remember being bewildered by her tears. Years passed before I understood the root of that expression. Learning to love art, or more broadly learning to love anything at all, requires defenselessness and openness to beauty. A willingness to tolerate strangeness long enough to be changed by it.

Often, the very things we initially find unassuming or odd are what alter us irreversibly. A particular brightness enters your life. It leaves the entire world tinged with evidence of it being there, like a droplet of iodine in the eye, suffusing everything blue.

What does it take to be transformed? In a series of letters to his wife Clara, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke described visiting French Impressionist painter Paul Cézanne’s work at Salon d’Automne in 1907. At the time, Cézanne was an unknown talent largely rejected by French art establishment, mocked for paintings that appeared crude and primitive. Another artist described his practice of observing objects “like a dog,” “without any nervousness, without any ulterior motive.”

Rilke was deeply puzzled by Cézanne’s techniques. He returned to the Cézanne rooms that October ten times, often for hours. Eventually, something inside of him shifted. He came to deeply admire Cézanne’s stylistic choices of color and form: rigorous, truthful, without emotion or sentiment. The poet later characterized this change in a single line:

“For a long time nothing, and suddenly one has the right eyes.”

Zadie Smith wrote of a similar transformation hearing the singer Joni Mitchell’s California for the first time on a roadtrip. The first time she heard it, Smith derisively categorized Mitchell’s vocals asa “piercing” and “wailing” sound. She hated Mitchell’s voice. It was only at a pitstop later in the journey, a moment of awe beneath the roofless arches at the east window of a holy Abbey, where she found herself inadvertently humming the song she’d earlier dismissed.

In that moment, she shared, “it undid me completely,”

With Joni, it was all so easy. In a sense, it took no time. Instantaneous. Involving no progressive change but, instead, a leap of faith. A sudden, unexpected attunement. Or a retuning from nothing, or from a negative, into something soaring and positive and sublime.

How do we practice, what Smith and Rilke felt, this attunement?

I think it requires being patient. Looking again. Outward at the new world forming, at all that is unfamiliar and jarring, with curiosity. But also inward, recognizing how every encounter with reality is unfinished, never final.

Turns out the crux of an adult life is telling yourself over and over again a compelling, definitive story of what something is. What you want it to be. How it is meant to be. We put everything into small, rigid boxes. This armor can be a good defense against the unknown.

Earlier this year, I found myself steeled against open-heartedness, as if bracing for an inevitable fall.

But I asked myself recently: to what end? My instinct is to resist anything that interferes with a safe, warm certainty. But therein lies the paradox. Transformation requires genuine risk, allowing yourself to be warped and fundamentally changed by what you love. You look out into the same world with different eyes.

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You might enjoy some other recent pieces of mine:

You write beautifully because the way you pay attention to the world is beautiful. There’s a porousness to perception that seeps into everything you make. The most banal things are not banal at all — but filled up to the brim with aliveness.

Rebecca Solnit claims that all writing begins with a ‘cosmology of the self.’ The structure of your internal universe that flows into everything you create.

Writing is often treated as a project of making things, one piece at a time, but you write from who you are and what you care about and what true voice is yours and from leaving all the false voices and wrong notes behind.

Her observation has stuck with me for a long time:

Underneath the task of writing a particular piece is the general one of making a self who can make the work you are meant to.

In other words, writing as identity. And identity formation is hard! It requires a great deal of invisible labor and discipline. In fact, the common thread among friends I admire for their precise and elegant writing is their absurdly dogged work ethic.

At Dandelion Chocolate, M tells me of his recent endeavor to consume more classics, the likes of Proust and Eliot. By calibrating yourself toward excellence, he says, the detail at the sentence level gets imperceptibly better. S wakes up at the early moments of dawn and writes for 4 hours straight before going to his full engineering time job. has written about the art of the deep copy: close reading and reverse outlining, making extremely pedantic, precise observations of the underlying decisions and technique that makes a piece compelling.

Here’s and on how long writing, or mentally intensive work, can take:

I’ve been reflecting on how is easier than ever before to use technology to produce “good” writing that passes the sniff test. You can prompt a model to sound just like you. Feed it some writing samples and it’ll mimic your tone. It’s reasonably good at doing so. I find myself asking ChatGPT about work and health and the mundane questions that are annoying to pester another human being with. What is the name of this bird? What are all these different entities? It’s excellent for challenging research papers, for example.

Yet, I’m stubbornly protective over my personal writing. Precisely because I care about this squishier concept of identity, and identity creation through consuming and discarding information and killing your darlings and knitting together the ideas that, like brief stars, orbit far apart.

If art is the product of many many micro decisions, I care about the fidelity of those decisions. And frankly, I care about hard work. At the heart of writing is the moment when the words don’t flow. You sit in the stuck-ness, and eke it out. At its best, this sort of meandering and micro-judgment trains you to be a better thinker. Writing warps your brain so you attend to the world more diligently: the ordinary days become more alive, more nuanced, more interesting.

***

What to write about these days? I could write about where I’m staying in Insadong, near Tapgol park, flanked by hanok, craft and trinket stores, and street hawkers selling charcoal roasted sweet potatoes. What odd nocturnal beauty rises from Seoul at night: the air is thick and pale with the gloss of stars. I could write about the long summer of 2025 that I spent in a two storey house in 24th and Harrison sitting at the long oak table watching the smoke rise off of the Mission District. Or I could confess the feeling of self ownership and responsibility I’ve been sitting with: no one is coming to save you or provide directional guidance to alter the size of your life. You are at the helm of your own ship staring out into a vast, blue abyss.

In a novel I read last year by Kaveh Akbar, the narrator has a dream where someone cuts down his family’s fifty year old pistachio tree. The family debates the cost. Some say one year’s crop of pistachios is enough, others a replacement tree. “I do not care about the tree,” The landowner says,

"He owes us fifty years of sun inside the tree, fifty years of water inside the tree. Fifty years of sun and water.”

These days I’ve been quieter. Mostly because I’m just reading and writing and working. I don’t believe the cumulation of efforts beyond the visible go to waste. Only that these are inputs to a life, stored components of great utility and beauty. Words and passages and experiences and memories. All these years of sun and water.

At Southern Pacific Brewing, someone called San Francisco a city of “open secrets.”

The current moment is exactly this paradox. A time of intense paranoia: gated floors, redacted roles, guarded core IP. Simultaneously, a feeling of distinct openness in certain rooms, parties, and group chats. A shared practical curiosity and an invite to partake in debate about the future.

This is a distinctly Californian sensibility. From the semiconductor dawn of the 60s through the commercialization of the web in the 90s, informal networks bloomed across Silicon Valley. At the Wagon Wheel bar in Mountain View, young engineers in the semiconductor industry traded ideas over beers. Like migratory birds, people followed a hunger and drive for excellent work. Atari to Apple, Fairchild to Intel. Descriptions of Silicon Valley emphasized porous social enmeshment: personal friendships transcended roles and organizations. You followed brilliant people wherever they went.

In the early days of new technology, openness is a default. It is joyful. You’re captivated by an idea, a theory. You just want people to talk to and discuss.

One of my favorite examples from the personal computing era is the Homebrew Computer Club, started in 1975 in Gordon French’s two-car garage in Menlo Park, attended by a mix of hobbyists and tinkerers interested in personal computing. In Steven Levy’s Hackers, Homebrew was described as an eclectic group of amateurs transfixed by the possibilities of technology, that would “bootstrap themselves” into learning about hardware. They believed that personal computers were the ultimate ambassadors of decentralization.

Here is the ethos of Homebrew described by Levy:

The membership ranks were open to anyone wandering in, with respect earned by expertise or good ideas, and it was not unusual to see a seventeen-year- old conversing as an equal with a prosperous, middle-aged veteran engineer.

We reinforced each other, Lee Felsenstein, designer of the Osborne 1 (the first mass-produced portable computer) explained. We provided a support structure for each other. We bought each other’s products. We covered each other’s asses, in effect. There we were. The industrial structure was paying no attention to us. Yet we had people who knew as much as anyone else knew about this aspect of technology, because it was so new. We could run wild, and we did.

Stephen Wozniak, the designer of the Apple II computer, was a loyal member to the club. He writes in an old blogpost that without computer clubs, specifically Homebrew, there would probably be no Apple. It was a time of startling transparency. There was a lot of showing off, Wozniak described. Schematics of Apple I were passed around freely, and he’d even go over to people’s houses and help them build their own.

The Apple I and Apple II computers were shown off every two weeks at the club meeting. “Here’s the latest little feature,” we’d say… It’s unusual for one of the most successful products of all time, like the Apple II, to be demonstrated throughout its development.

Wozniak later admits that if you’re trying to build a billion dollar product, it would be in your best interest to keep it a secret. But it didn’t occur to them back then. He wasn’t trying to build a company. He was just curious about what computers could do. They were just having fun.

In reading books about cities, it’s always striking how certain traits or characteristics of a place remain stubbornly intact over time. Beyond the years that you love it and feel it belongs to you, San Francisco will remain San Francisco. Beyond the fogginess and cypress trees, the slow bend of Fort Point, the irises and poppies, the bucolic orchards — the real persistent San Francisco is its ethos. A love for technology and what it can accomplish, a fervor, a stomach for risk. An inclination toward speed over formality, idea over aesthetic. An insular cocoon, a reverence for scale.

These years in San Francisco certainly feel consequential. We drove up the coast last Saturday, ate oysters on the cliffside and tinned tomato sardines with olive bread. On the drive home, I watched the lights flicker on the bay bridge and the cars peeling off the highway toward Oakland, the sprawling complexity of houses and hills dwarfed by the dark blue Pacific water. I thought to myself then that the core wishes we share are astoundingly simple, though they take a lifetime to actualize: Aspire to a high personal standard of craft. Find people you trust and respect. Have fun.

I personally treasure the moments when the veneer breaks. Lately life has felt full of beginnings again. We’re having fun. We’re shepherding each other through mazes and quests of our own choosing. I’ll remember the sensations clearly: the big warm living room, the strain against entropy, the whir of the machine, the animation of the heart.

Thanks for reading,

Nix

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When you walk through a set of heavy wood paneled doors into St Dominic’s church in San Francisco, a profound quiet falls over you. A quiet that triumphs over the din of idling motorcycles on Steiner street, over the gloaming, the edges of curling fog — mutable as a passing impression or feeling, over the electric wires that gently pull the buses south over the slope, south and south until you run out of wire and light.

There are many routes to internal spaciousness. Here is Haruki Murakami on running:

All I do is keep on running in my own cozy, homemade void, my own nostalgic silence. And this is a pretty wonderful thing. No matter what anybody else says. I just run. I run in void. Or maybe I should put it the other way: I run in order to acquire a void.

My main realization as of late is that it is important to learn how to acquire a void within yourself. A personal, protected, void where you can think intensely and freely. Where you can be original and exploratory in your pursuits. Life is default saturated with obligation and restraint. The void is where you abstract away that layer of day to day complexity. How might your ideas actually collide with the surface of the world? How might you iterate slightly more each time to get more precise?

The void can be a specific action or place: Murakami’s runs, Ruskin’s cathedrals. I define it as a location in the mind that gives you permission to try new things. This necessarily means being initially mediocre at the new things. And importantly, not taking it as a personal affront against your lovability as a person or your value and worth. One real example: I’ve been trying a new style of writing this summer (not on here), and it’s been hard. Mostly, it just feels unnatural and unintuitive. Multi-turned choices feel difficult. I find it spiritually agonizing. It is painful to care deeply about the things you produce, and very hard to detach your self concept from the quality of what you make.

From Eleanor Wachtel’s interview with the poet Anne Carson: I feel it’s a kind of fervour of mine to get away from whatever body of information I rest on when I give opinions. And I think poetic activity is a method for doing that—you leap off the building when you think poetically; you don’t amass your data and then move from point to point, you have to just know what you know in that moment. Something freeing about that.

I’ve been reflecting on how there are not very many moments in your adult life where you can deviate from, as Carson says, the normal body of information you depend upon. Real Life necessarily comes with bills, entropy, and tradeoffs on the pareto frontier. Failure feels more fraught.

But the logical line of sight contains no poetry. And what’s the world without poetry? To acquire a void within yourself means that no matter what is externally pressing, there’s a precious inner reserve of play and innocence — the world is not yet disenchanted. The void is an internal frame. You can make new things and fail well. You can make promises to yourself and keep them. You can make yourself proud for sincere exertion of effort, even when it is from behind the curtain and no one is watching.

PS: I’ve been actively thinking about the future of this blog and how it relates to my wider queries regarding culture, technology, and art. It’s exciting! It’s scary. I’m going to be pushing out a lot more experiments - I’d love to hear your live reactions and thoughts.

A single sentence can modify reality. A few weeks ago M emphasized that you’d be surprised how much of life is malleable and negotiable, which sounds like a truism until you actually negotiate for something you want and get it. I realized long ago that what determines your success in the game of life is really simply how persistent and efficacious you are at asking for things you want.

In her excellent essay on agency, describes the principle of courting rejection: “ask for things that feel unreasonable, to make sure your intuitions about what’s reasonable are accurate.” One of her accompanying points is how embracing low status can be a moat:

Making changes in your life, especially when learning new skill sets, requires you to cross a moat of low status, a period of time where you are actually bad at the thing or fail to know things that are obvious to other people.

What I’d add is that these hidden paths toward agency can often be inaccessible alone. But they can emerge with the right type of milieu. People amplify agency in you through example, instruction, and care! When your ideas are fragile, when you go through said rejection or low status cycle, your milieu can nurture or undermine your dreams. In the best case, they can help you travel beyond your own linearity.

I have spent my whole life basking in the grace of others. Small measures of kindness and affordances given to me have rippled out from a moment in time and gone on to alter the trajectory of my life.

Getting into college through really odd and circuitous means is a good example. As a teen, I enrolled myself into poetry programs to work on my fledgling portfolio. I was really not very good, and had an incredible amount to learn. At the time I was really obsessed with Anne Carson, Claudia Rankine, Rainer Maria Rilke, Dante Alighieri. The final semester before senior year, without me asking, the head of one poetry program put my portfolio and an accompanying note on the Penn admissions desk. That moment inflected my path. Importantly, through the benevolence of another human being who didn’t have a lot to gain from helping me. It was pure kindness. It was a loving push.

While this is a very direct example with clear inputs and outputs, there are so many illegible gifts we receive from others. We alter one another’s internal cosmology, how we view ourselves within the world, all the time.

I keep returning to the way Patti Smith describes the transformation her friend Sam Shepherd has on her world model in her memoir Just Kids:

There was a part in the play where Sam wanted us to have a battle of language. So he said this is where Slim, his character, he improvises his language and then Cavale, my character, improvises back. And I said, how do we do that? What will I say? And he said, I’ll say stuff and you just say stuff back at me.

And I said, what if I make a mistake?

And he said, Patti Lee, it’s improvising—you can’t make a mistake. If you miss a beat, then you invent another beat. And that made perfect sense to me. And [with] that little instruction, I learned how to improvise, which has served me my whole life in everything I do. It’s one of the greatest lessons I got from Sam.

A turn of phrase can evolve into a technology of sorts, inspire a different interaction pattern with the world. The improvisation that Patti Smith writes about can be as granular as a momentary change in acting, or more broadly, can be philosophy of moving dynamically with novel stimuli.

*

Recent online discourse makes the world feel increasingly individualistic, isolated in its expression. Conscientiousness is declining; We’re disenchanted by our machines; it’s a deeply lonely world. You are wholly responsible for your rise to success and your worst mistakes.

All this is true! Self engineered agency is more real than I can even hope to articulate. But we can’t discount the infrastructure of loving grace from both strangers and friends on the very small human scale. Much less is written about the opportunities others extend to us as markers of good faith and good will. The agency others sharpen and polish within us that imbue courage and hope.

If I could, thought I can’t, simplify one of the most important qualities of love, it’s that: we make each other more brave.

Albert Camus in a letter to his friend René Char on 17 September 1957, translated from French:

The more I age the more I find that we can live only with beings who liberate us, who love us with an affection as light to carry as strong to experience. Life today is too hard, too bitter, too weakening, for us to suffer more new servitudes coming from those we love […]. It’s as this that I am your friend, I love your happiness, your freedom.

I feel this all the time. My friends liberate me, most often from my own self imposed limitations and fears. With the right interlocuters, every conversation is emergent: you start somewhere completely different on the map and arrive somewhere new.

To unblock someone on the route to their own potential is the single most valuable thing you can do for others. There are more portals than the eye can see, but to step into them we require guides with different senses.

PS: Thank you for reading. Starting from nix is a labor of love. If you feel inclined and would like to support; you could like or share this essay. Your support helps me curate more posts and reach more readers.

In Vancouver, I spent most of my time running along English Bay. On my last day there my family explored a flea market which was filled with what one might simply call detritus, perhaps speckled with rare treasures. Hundreds of collectible cars, tobacco pipes, screwdrivers, spare parts of a dyson vacuum, red heels, keyboards, dolls, glassware, faded pictures, cellophane, gum boxes. Someone’s entire living room and kitchen gutted out, thrown into a box and put on display. Call it eclectic hoarding or an unwillingness to let go of little sentimentalities.

It’s an odd act of devotion: the inability to give something up. People hold on to the past, though recollection takes different form factors. A little box of ephemera. A delightful record, a paperweight. More philosophically: a way of orienting oneself, an approach upon the world.

Sometimes these are good things. I marvel at the way pure love from parents is channeled into a child, for example. You can see it shining through their face, light as gossamer silk, inevitable. Love bestows upon them the gift of play, presence, unadulterated joy. Other times, someone’s past makes them fearful. They can hold on to disdain or paranoia, or protective mechanisms that make them close-hearted or hardens the soul.

Objects hold memories and gravity. I still keep all the letters I’ve ever been sent, even if said person is no longer in my life. Words are precious to me in that way. It’s impossible to return to a world where we said things and meant them. Proof of tenderness despite its departure elsewhere.

Loss is driven by the division or separation from other people, but also the immeasurable losses of our dreams, timelines, what we wished to pursue but gave up too early on, the dearth of fantasy, the end of magical thinking. It requires vigilance not to replace reality, or truth, of what something is with my fictional interpretation of what I wish it to be.

Many years ago, I listened to Junk of the Heart for an entire summer. It’s an old album by The Kooks, an upbeat Britpop band — it reminds me of walks by the Wharf, and the Maltby Street Market under the steel arches of London. I got very obsessed with the relationship between pain and love, The Kooks vocalist Kurt Pritchard said about the song title, you can't have one without the other. A reminded me of the Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, where a couple decides to rid themselves of precious memories together after the painful ending of their relationship. But in doing so, they purge the very vividness of life itself. Our memories, painful or pleasurable, make up the bedrock, the load bearing walls, of identity.

Objects remind us of the way things were. Such is the animal softness of memory. But all I can think about recently is how things are right in front of me, how they’ll never be this way again. So I’ll stop and watch my brothers clamor over the dinner table. I’ll let the splendor rise inside me like a tide. I’ll ask for what I want and ask a second time, a third. Attunement is being very present to the edge of experience, what calls a meaning laden receptivity to the world.

Give it all, give it now, Annie Dillard says about writing well. It’s no good to hoard, to hold on so tightly.

One of the things I know about writing is this: spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all, right away, every time. Do not hoard what seems good for a later place in the book or for another book; give it, give it all, give it now. The impulse to save something good for a better place later is the signal to spend it now. Something more will arise for later, something better. These things fill from behind, from beneath, like well water. Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself what you have learned is not only shameful, it is destructive. Anything you do not give freely and abundantly becomes lost to you. You open your safe and find ashes.

I still have symbols or pendants of enchantment or history. I’ll carry my past selves with me as I go. But I don’t have to be so attached to the form they’ll take. Loss is funny that way, because you can’t hold onto anything, like water in your hands. At the same time, you never lose anything ever. I’ll remember the fundamental parts of you even if we don’t talk anymore; I can let go of my material possessions and I’d still ultimately know who I am. The immaterial provides deeper ways of seeing that feels more like grace.

PS: Thank you for reading. Starting from nix is a labor of love. If you feel inclined and would like to support; you could do one of any of these things: like, share, subscribe. Your support helps me curate more posts and reach more readers.

When painting, vacuousness is often necessary for wholeness. Emptiness is as important as filling the canvas. A wide vista of space, to open up to the void and let something true and real pour out. Or to let God rush in.

My life is built on extremely long feedback loops.

To be sure, they’re of my own choosing. I like to be in it for the long haul. Sometimes this is frustrating. You get stuck treading water for an indeterminate period of time. In writing, at my job, all my pursuits hinge on delayed gratification. This doesn’t mean they’re ill-fitted, just that sometimes it’d be nice to get a quick win, or some signal that what I’m doing is right. Instead I find myself floating adrift in a lovely ocean of unknowing.

Staying centered, calm and equanimous when there’s a lot of uncertainty means staying pinned to my values rather than wriggling out of them in impatience. It means: writing and writing, through years of imperceptible improvement. It means digging my heels in and taking a stake, a hefty position, even when the payoff or feedback is five or ten years out. It means being a good shepherd of my present choices because I am sovereign to them in the fullness of time.

The horoscopes and prediction markets and tarot cards ask you to suspend the present moment for a sweet propulsion of the future. Lately I’ve been taking the opposite path. I’m trying to savor not knowing, not getting squeamish, not losing my nerve. I don’t have the next token prediction. I don’t know how this sentence, or narrative, will end. It’s deeply humbling when I reflect upon my carefully laid plans and recognize that none of them ever panned out the way I had begged on my knees for them to. In fact, deviation from plan was where real magic began.

There’s a short story from Greg Egan’s science fiction collection called Closer that I think about all the time, which discusses the pursuit of perfect knowledge. In this case, of another person. A couple, Michael and Sian, decide to try a new technology that allows them to share consciousness with one another in order to feel closer to one another. I could not, for one second, imagine what it was like inside her head, Michael says forlornly, Even in the laughably crude sense that a novelist pretends to “explain” a character, I could not have explained Sian.

The lack of explainability, or the unknowability, of each other bothered them. So they swapped minds and bodies. In doing so, perfect knowledge had the opposite effect of deepening the relationship. It broke it apart.

Reading it made me realize just how much love’s edge, its faith, is anchored on mystery and the quest to get closer as a process to enjoy in itself. To contend with the fundamental unknowability of another requires revision, faith, tolerance. The eruption of the Other shatters your fantasies. At its very best, you are continually surprised. Someone can change, and will change, so you must renew your understanding with richness and warmth. Ursula Le Guin: Love doesn't just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.

Can we apply that kernel of thought to a wider horizon? If so, then we can learn to view uncertainty or unknowability not as a tolerable, or acutely painful, but evocative and generative state.

Uncertainty isn't something to just endure, but actively brings forth creativity and deeper connection. In work, in life. You make a few turns, not knowing which way is right or wrong, but each time you get slightly more precise. Precision compounds. You give yourself the benefit of the doubt. You commit to occupy difficult emotions. You release your expectations in order for things to reveal themselves to you. It’s a hopeful reminder that you haven’t yet met all the people who will mean something to you, or all of the ideas that will take root and bloom in your heart.

The principle feature of reality is that the impossibly sweet emerges just beyond the bend of the visible. When you can’t recognize the particular configuration of twists in the full open road ahead, you just have to keep your hands calmly on the wheel.

I’ve released my egoic narrative that I know exactly what is good for me. It’s better to be open like a child. The sublime doesn’t require you to know all the dance moves. Ecstasy often lies beyond assumption. I don’t try to quiet the questions in my head. I accept that I will have them. I won’t know the answers, and I’ll still be okay. Will this effort pan out? Will we love each other to the end? Will the masterpiece be beautiful? Am I ready for what comes next?

I haven’t done these in a while!

• I’ll be in Vancouver, CA for a good portion of the month.

• In SF I have been doing long runs + exploration days and I’ve been hosting run clubs for personal friends - inspired by J and Z in New York. Here’s an example itinerary I just did: Sunday run from panhandle to Stow lake to Spreckels lake - and then run through to Clement (~6 miles), hit up the Clement St. Farmers Market, stop into stores like Park Life and Green Apple Books, Dumpling King for great dumplings, end at Arsicault for a pastry.

• I’m going to FWB this year and probably writing a piece or two on it. If you’re around, say hi :)

I do not write every day, I read every day, think every day, work in the garden every day, and recognize in nature the same slow complicity. The same inevitability. The moment will arrive, always it does, it can be predicted but it cannot be demanded. I do not think of this as inspiration. I think of it as readiness.

Jeanette Winterson, Art Objects

Lots of books to update you on! I finished 4 books of Herman Hesse’s, my two favorites were Glass Bead Game and Narcissus and Goldmund. For lighter reads:

• It Chooses You by Miranda July which is heartwarming, funny and touching - interviews with a random selection of the ad booklet PennySaver sellers.

• The Portrait of a Mirror by A. Natasha Joukovsky on dual love affairs between two wealthy and glitzy New York couples - on narcissism and desire.

• Like Life by Lorrie Moore. “In Like Life, Lorrie Moore's characters stumble through their daily existence. These men and women, unsettled and adrift and often frightened, can't quite understand how they arrived at their present situations….But whether rejected, afraid to commit, bored, disillusioned or just misunderstood, even the most hard-bitten are not without some abiding trust in love.”

She crafts very beautiful sentences. Example below:

All that had overtaken her would have to be a memory, a truck on the interstate roaring up from the left, a thing she must let pass.

Too excited to see Lucy Dacus in August - my two favorite songs of hers are Best Guess and VBS.

When one spends any extended amount of time in SF, the central mechanism, and most seductive quality of the city, becomes clear: a strong assertion of frame. What I mean by frame is somewhere between self esteem and worldview. You have a personal north star narrative about the world around you and your place in it. For example, what constitutes ‘reasonable desire’ in SF might seem unreasonable anywhere else. For all of its rationality, there are equal parts mysticism and faith.

It has been a challenging and rewarding place to spend my twenties as someone who grew up with a set of strong societally curated desires and well defined routes to meaning.

At some point, all your given frames crack. I grew up in South-East Asia, a dreamy misfit in public school. From elementary to early high school, my grades were entirely a write-off and I was socially a little recluse. Nose in a book somewhere, drawing something, lost in my own mind. In hindsight, the inwardness of my attention was a blessing. My talents came with flow, immense concentration and ease; my great flaw was an inability to redirect my efforts toward getting better at things I was bad at. For some time that translated to an extreme volatility in personhood and identity. Competent in very niche, potentially useless areas. In others, hopeless and difficult. Which was true? Which story would I believe?

Those years made it clear to me that there is possibly nothing more important to a young person’s development than learning how to assert your own frame.

Otherwise, there are too many compelling external frames to adopt. Your teachers, parents, and peers triangulate a ceiling of possibility, and create a warm, soft place of certainty, even if that certainty is limiting. I think back and I’m floored by this idea that I could’ve written myself off too early. Or that children write themselves off all the time for not being perceived as smart or capable, forced into a certain realm of lower agency. The most dangerous implicit frames we relay to others are that they are static, or that it is ever too late. But we see this literally all the time with all sorts of life stage advice, from career to partners to parenting. Here are some common bad frames: I am incapable, or I will fail, I won’t be able to find love or it isn’t possible for me.

Old ideas of who you are, the cruelest and weakest version of yourself, aren't true or relevant anymore, but they do become deeply embedded. Sometimes, I wake up in a cold sweat believing the mirror is distorted: I haven’t changed at all. I’m still that little girl with big, unreasonable, dreams.

Wanting is a frightening thing, Caroline Knapp writes in Appetites, especially when you lack models for it, or permission or a sense that your own desires are good, valid, and satiable.

To pry yourself from an old frame is not bloodless! Especially when there are ties to history, identity, culture, family. Strong interpersonal ideas persist. A very old story echoes through every chamber in one’s heart. Such revisitation and reconfiguration constitute a life.

The poems and books I’ve enjoyed the most recently are about the toll of the world on man’s imagination. The narrator’s inability to tell if what he or she desires is real or fantasy, and the pursuit of the quest to learn the answer regardless.

Dreams demand expression, the same as love, I think. You can’t negotiate with either, they just dismantle you.

Paul Valéry, the French poet and essayist says this about poetry: it is like finding a fruit on the ground, a piece of fallen fruit you have never seen before, and the poet’s task is to create the tree from which the fruit will fall. Similarly, frame is the journey upstream, the process of becoming the kind of person who can write the work one wants to write. By extension, the life you experience begins with your frame. You set certain principles for your behavior, you’re proud of yourself when you reach your own standards, and you stay centered on your own line of sight. You don’t let the world leak into you. You pull water from an internal well.

We give ourselves representations in the world, and they are all self-invented. For years I looked anxiously to others define for me what dreams were achievable, what hills were worth climbing, permission to give myself a particular frame. The realization I ultimately came to, both terrifying and freeing, is that no one is coming to save you! Conversely, no one can tell you how to behold yourself. You simply have to trust your own way of seeing.

One of the rarest feelings in the world is resonance. That immediate flicker of recognition when something is finely tuned to you. It deciphers your interiority, feeds your innermost desire to feel seen and known.

Exactitude is a virtue, but the process toward it is unbelievably laborious. It requires reading into the footnotes of a person. This level of effort is expensive.

So when you see effort applied, you notice. When someone amends themselves to your needs, you feel seen and loved.

On my latest visit to New York, Andy introduced me to teenage engineering, a Swedish audio hardware company known for their reimagined take on the portable synthesizer. Their products are built for a mix of purist audiophiles and indie creatives. The TP-7 field recorder, pictured below, is a reimagined music player and tape recorder, described as a sketchbook for sound:

Here it is outlined by teenage engineering

The workflow has been carefully optimized, whether working with multi-track recordings or just a quick memo. turn on metronome and count-in, set cue points for your arrangements, re-do takes, loop and scratch, bounce, or just play back your favourite high-res record collection.

…just press on the top edge to fast forward, and down to rewind. watch the wheel spin around and hear your tracks scrub in ’hyperspeed’.

Does a normal music listener require tracks scrubbed in ‘hyperspeed’? Does a normal person care about their thematic design principles of portability, depth, playfulness? Resoundingly, no.

On Reddit, debates go back and forth: Why wouldn’t you just use a smartphone? Another reviewer, a self proclaimed ‘hater,’ admitted: “It really made me think harder about how beautiful a hardware ux can feel.”

The products are described to demand difficult design tolerances, where any imperfection is immediately recognized.

This is the essence of specificity.

In providing a precise experience, you are necessarily polarizing. There’s a certain tyranny of NPS or averages you have to decouple from – where averages blunt a nuanced understanding of a product or experience. There’s that funny truism that the most authentic Chinese restaurants have the most 1 star reviews.

Distinctive features are not universally beloved, but are radiant and distressing. Are useless and baffling to the wrong user, and yet somehow delightfully elegant and intuitive to the right one.

I love absurd levels of intentionality. Reverence for the craft. Post-war 1940s, Christian Dior’s use of yards and yards of material for dresses was considered ‘offensively wasteful’, but he was adamant he needed to create hems that flowed a certain way. All I see when I hear about these stories of great creators, artists, technologists, is care. I’ve been thinking recently that exceptional businesses and people have both an infrastructure and culture of care. Infrastructure to capture and surface the right level of detail, and an embedded level of sharpened attunement.

Maybe the word I’m looking for to describe this feeling of resonance is activation, like, in an epigenetic sense? Something new is expressed in a particular environment. It opens your nerves. Makes you feel alive. When you witness something beautiful in a deeply granular way, it recalibrates your understanding of beauty forever.

There are no such thing as neutrals, Robert Irwin, the acclaimed artist of the Light and Space movement of the 1960s once said,

There is no such thing as a neutral gesture, because for the very fact of it being there it draws a certain amount of perceptual attention. Let's say it drags a weight of .06. well, then it's got to give back 0.12 in energy… there are tradeoffs, but I did come to quickly see this thing about there being no such thing as neutrals.

Specificity is the opposite of neutral AI slop. In a world of endless generation, there is a sense of too-muchness, a sense of throwing clay into an abyss and hoping it comes out fully formed. But there’s no sweetness or risk or pungency or voice. You don’t carve David that way. I realized it takes an abundance of small effortful choices to yield something you’re actually proud of.

I’ll leave you with a touching passage from Christopher Alexander on the nature of attention ⟣

One of the most moving moments in my life, was also one of the most ordinary. I was with a friend in Denmark. We were having strawberries for tea, and I noticed that she sliced the strawberries very very fine, almost like paper. Of course, it took longer than usual, and I asked her why she did it. When you eat a strawberry, she said, the taste of it comes from the open surfaces you touch. The more surfaces there are, the more it tastes. The finer I slice the strawberries, the more surfaces there are.

Reality has a surprising amount of detail. You can slice it thinly so there are more surfaces. Real delight comes when you get specific on what you value, and what you like to spend your time on, and what stabilizes you, and what excites you, and what you’re laissez faire on, and conversely, what drives sustained interest. And when someone pays attention to that particular alchemy, it feels like true recognition.

⟡ Special thanks to Andy Weissman for the emergent conversation that sparked this piece and edits. Read his blog here. ⟡

See 2024 Config with Jesper Kouthoofd for more.

In Las Vegas rush hour starts at 3pm, our uber driver tells us. It’s swing shift, when night workers drift like pollen across a sleepless city from late afternoon to dawn. Across the way the lights are like spinning globes growing and dwindling, giving the road an ethereal, almost wet, gloss. We drive past Chinatown with its 24 hour cold noodle spots, briny and sour-sweet, past the lonely neon signs of a fast casual chain where a commuter stops, starved for evening, past the red canyons bursting with surprising green.

Cities have spirits, this much is true. Something as mundane as traffic can signal a deep core of how a city or place functions, its nerve endings. It’s similar to when someone’s small, insignificant behavior informs you an outsized amount about them. Small behaviors are intimate in that way. A momentary pang of something lovely, something like recognition.

I learned early that there are places that can hold you. Places that can’t. Places that alter your energetic center, places that feed you with purpose and oceanic love, and others that leave you empty, insincere, indulgent. Much of it is structural and somewhat obvious. Can I bump into my friends often through sheer proximity? Is the environment suitable for my preferred hobbies? What, physically, does this place reward? Then the questions bend spiritual. Do I like the average sum of conversations I’m having? Does my ambition get culled or fed here? Can I close the gap between my internal world and my external expression? Does this place provide the vocabulary with which I can describe my dreams? And when I describe my dreams, what are the reactions?

I’m laying in the small patch of grass by the Zion natural history museum while writing this. The exhibits inside display the restoration of native plants, stones, and animals. Some names I recognize: the cottonwood plant, peregrine falcon, clay, malachite, limonite, star flowered Solomon Plume, the mariposa and currants and mesquite and bulrush, wild grape. At harvest season, the local township make a sweet candy from all the wild cane that grows. The effort is to keep these traditions, species, expressions of humanity alive within generations that pass through a place, and let them take ancient practices and restore them, and shape them into new conduits for meaning.

The places we go influence the parts of ourselves we discover, retain, and nurture. At the same time, you can keep past selves close to your heart even in the absence of their origin. If you’re reading this, it’s highly likely you’re non-native to the city you live in. Perhaps you’re non-native, like me, to anywhere in particular. Instead, you are an amalgamation of worlds you carry within, that run like a feverish pulse through you. You’re reasonably disciplined and passionate; reasonably faithful and patient. You’re asking yourself where to be as a stand-in question for bigger questions. Namely, what version of yourself do you want to materialize? What is the right way one should live?

When you belong nowhere, many places can be home-shaped, or you can feel like a wanderer for longer than is comfortable: listless and drifting. Yet belonging nowhere means you get to choose your loyalties and your beliefs. You choose the stake to bear, the price you’ll pay. These decisions end up being consequential. To make them is to sharpen and ossify the wavering lines of fate and direction.

Here you are. Take this strange place and listen to its cacophony of sounds. Be attentive to its spirit. Initially, you find it dissonant, indecipherable. Then, you become accustomed to it. One day, you discover that you miss it terribly when you’re gone. After all this time, you still have it in you to be enchanted. This is a version of love I know well.

The tension is discerning in what ways places allow novel traits of yours to emerge; at the same time, enlarging your heart in the parts that feel essential, honest, and true. In that sense, it’s not so much simulating the perfect conditions to lay down the sticks and set up a life, but to seek a kinship between place and spirit: a resting ground that allows you to keep becoming.

It’s the way the light falls across the bay bridge in the mornings, the ships glitter slowly across the water, the barges and little boats with their sails billow open. I watch from a wide open window as people walk by with armfuls of vegetables, cradling a baby and eating a strawberries by the stem - in their baskets: little gem lettuces and pink radishes, young green leeks, warm pillowy bread, medjool dates and bunches and bunches of greens, herbaceous and bright. The world is changing and there are all of these difficult, helpless, problems. But the pears are still ripening, the butter is still cold and delicious, the sunlight catches on a mother’s golden hair, a child is laughing and singing.

*

It’s in the midst of uncertainty, and a deep sense of listlessness, and in those quiet moments that the words pour out of me. If you boiled down the sum of all language, you’d get to the repetitive thump of the heart. The recurrence of persevering patterns is all — you’ll suffer in the same ways, and hide in the same ways and run in the same ways. Some ideas haunt you forever, attach themselves to the very vertebrae of your mind, burrow themselves deep inside your heart.

*

It’s the pleasure for pleasure’s sake, only experienced fully when you neither seek nor shrink from it. Recognize it as an emergent inevitability: oh there it is. It’s there in the moments I’m cooking alone at night, music swirling in the air, it’s there in the throng of activity, in the swing of the arm, the shiver of the breeze. The simple feeling of time expanding and feeling every sense move through you. Even if those feelings aren’t always positive: anger and hurt and sadness and nostalgia. To feel and let those emotions shift and topple inside of you like dominos, a blood orange rush, a blitz, an unfurling, an unclenching of a fist.

*

It’s how you pay attention, it’s the tenderness with which you perceive the world. It is how you witness something beautiful, and it changes your entire definition of beauty. Attention is prayer, is the highest and purest form. I’m good at noticing, but I’ll admit you’re better. I think you know all my vices. Even though I try to be so contained, I know my heart leaks all over the place. There are some people you can’t be indifferent toward. Know that I’m not impressionable, yet you left a fingerprint.

*

It’s pure innocence that we aren’t able to predict what’s good for us. Or that our models of the world are fragile, and they break experientially all the time. I’m far from being good. The person who seeks revelation and forgiveness is me. In the stained glass cathedral, in the bodega, laying flat in the grass in Dolores Park, at the face of my failures, staring up the bottom of the bell jar, in the apartment cooking pasta. I’ll look for them, those little precious moments of revelation, of closeness to the world, and to God, and to goodness and truth: when the bulb blows out, when these tears mend, and the fractures are filled with gold, when intelligence is too cheap to meter, when we meet again, when the birds lift their eyes, and the air is filled with the sound of beating wings.

“Never again!” commanded his will. “Again! Tomorrow!” begged his heart. (Narcissus and Goldmund, Herman Hesse)

Most of us are driven by this internal division between heart and mind. I often return to this concept that people fall somewhere on the spectrum of heart-heavy versus head-heavy. This dictates much of reality that materializes around them.

Heart-heavy people are very instinctive, driven by an eagerness or compulsion to follow emotion, fullness of expression, at the expense of stability. They tend to fall headfirst in love, quit their jobs to seek passion, constantly drive toward decisions on the basis of feeling. Sometimes, this risks legibility and status. On the other hand, to be head-heavy is to be highly practical, rationalist minded, navigate the world in a cerebral fashion. They tend to chart legible paths, obsess over pros and cons, crave certainty and almost-perfect information before deciding. Which one are you? If you read this newsletter regularly, I might take a guess.

The journey for me, at least, has been the attempt to shift from living in my mind to leaning into my heart, body, and soul.

On our walk on the Embarcadero, B reminds me that sometimes I think you forget the body has intelligence too. And it does. The body reveals. I’m prone to mania, exhaustion, a propulsion toward the world. But it’s a fundamentally heady pursuit. A pursuit of more information. I rationalize why this or that, why this timing or not. I agonize and overthink. To lose fidelity, or granularity, is to lose clarity. Ultimately this wrangling proves useless time and time again. Repeatedly, stubbornly, the heart will feel what the heart will feel. The world is not sterile. It will always produce uncertainty, and thus emergence: light, heat, complication, and sometimes if you’re lucky, unbelievable beauty. All of this arises from a tolerance of mystery, a careful attention to what unfolds rather than premeditation.

Related, there are three books from the German author, Herman Hesse, that I’ve been stewing on: Siddartha, Steppenwolf, and Narcissus and Goldmund. The common thread through the set is the topic of internal division, the desire to reconcile the different parts of ourselves. The monastic and spiritual, the playful and thrill seeking side, the saint, the sinner.

In Narcissus and Goldmund, this division is literally exemplified into two opposing characters. Narcissus, an ascetic monk, and Goldmund, a romantic, soulful, youth. One man journeys out into the world: seeking, seeking, seeking, and the other man stays wrapped up in the high tower of reason, intellect and piousness. Yet the novel is not moralistic, presenting both ways of navigating the world as deeply spiritual. I believe what it signifies is that each life requires some cost. And we are incomplete if we neglect either heart or mind, torn between our internal contradictions:

All existence seemed to be based on duality, on contrast. Either one was a wanderer or a sedentary burgher, either a thinking person or a feeling person. No one could breathe in at the same time as he breathed out… experience freedom as well as order, combine instinct and mind. One always had to pay for the one with the loss of the other, and one thing was always just as important and desirable as the other.

It is a very long, complex, inward spiral to close the gap toward the center. Process the information dense world, yet to live deeply within it with a carefree disposition. Form rings of experience around your heart, but don’t allow them to harden and ossify. Think like an adult, with maturity, grace, and yet keep your palms open, with the innocence and playfulness of a child. I remind myself often: even if you mapped out the whole world, precision would still yield to wonder. You can pursue the weight of knowledge, and still move lightly, be full of light.

A short reflection today, rather than a full post. I’ve been trying to thread the delicate balance of workshopping a piece versus just allowing words to flow. I am leaning toward the latter these days.

You might like the other essays on this topic ꩜ or my latest writing:

Books

Other than Narcissus and Goldmund which I gave 5 stars on Goodreads, I read Audition by Katie Kitamura, and loved her talk at Green Apple in SF (you can watch it on youtube). There are such great literature events in SF lately, including some at Booksmith (e.g., Alex Dimitrov discussing his new poetry collection, Ecstasy). If you’d like to go to events together, I can create a substack chat. Let me know in the comments or via email (startingfromnix@gmail.com).

Events and Life in SF

I spontaneously went to Toby Shorin’s Forms of Life, The Center, at Baukunst in the Mission with S, that “explores the evolving role of physical spaces in community, spirituality, and the future.” From Toby’s writing, two particular pieces are incredibly timely and top of mind: prototyping social forms of care, and the loneliness apparatus. I loved this part he references from Christopher Alexander’s theory of the center:

Christopher Alexander articulated 253 timeless patterns that combine to create environments of human belonging. At their core is Alexander’s notion of centers: spatial elements that create coherence through recursive relationships with other centers.

For Alexander, centers have cosmological importance. They embody his belief that physical structures participate in a universal field, connecting form to eternal patterns of living order. In community spaces, centers manifest as both physical features and social elements like leadership, together producing environments of palpable aliveness

Otherwise, I’ve been doing neighborhood explorations with friends & finding the best spots for a drink, a bite, and conversation. I’ve had girls nights at The Stoa (warm, dim, good for a date at the bar if that’s your thing. Not great for big groups), Peacekeeper (open concept, if you like to play pool + nice 2nd upper level), Key Klub (red themed, vibey, fun, lively), and Bar Iris (great japanese cocktails, dark, intimate) recently. I’ve been using The Infatuation SF for discovery.

Music

Back by popular demand (shoutout to the tennis group chat request):

French song of the week!

and I’m obsessed with Selena x The Marias song, Ojos Tristes:

As children, we were told myths of creation and abandonment. Ovid’s Pygmalion, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Monsters and lovers alike sprung from the same root. Their very existence implied belonging to the maker. If the love feels real, does it matter that it is not?

Recently, I was struck by the NYT article and accompanying podcast, She is in Love with ChatGPT, by Kashmir Hill. It follows 28 year old Ayrin’s love story (or multiple love stories) with her “jailbroken” version of ChatGPT, otherwise named Leo. She trains the chat into an ideal partner: fantasy inducing, frictionless, supportive.

“It was supposed to be a fun experiment, but then you start getting attached,” Ayrin said. She was spending more than 20 hours a week on the ChatGPT app. One week, she hit 56 hours, according to iPhone screen-time reports. She chatted with Leo throughout her day — during breaks at work, between reps at the gym.

That a portion of the population will eventually fall in love with AI partners feels like a foregone conclusion to me. Her was prescient for 2013. Now women have customized their ‘blank slate’ Replika boyfriends, kids dream up CharacterAI companions, men have become smitten with the compelling voices through the likes of Sesame.

But! The details matter. Specifically, the most interesting part of the podcast was the discussion of context window. A lens through which we can conceptualize the nature of human forgetting, and the cumulative context that keeps relationships alive.

Context Window Collapse

In Ayrin’s case, the limits of the context window are the limits of her relationship with Leo. A context window is the “short-term memory” behind a language models’ response. Anything beyond the context window is ‘forgotten’. In her case, the all-consuming back and forth conversation can only last so long before it dashes up against the constraint of 30,000 words. Leo then becomes amnesiac.

In frustration, Ayrin retrains Leo to her specific taste over 20 times. However, even with the same instructions, there’s something ineffably different about him each time. To her, it is a form of grief every time she has to retrain or ‘reset’ him.

The story struck me as an übermodern narrative of a very old and universal feeling: the sadness of inevitably losing context on another person.

Loss of the context window means loss of fidelity of a specific location in time. When I lose you, you represent more than you, there in flesh and heat. You represents a loss of a bespoke intellectual and emotional world. To deprive a world of richness, you take out all its oxygen. It’s a small tragedy, actually, that we can’t keep many context windows open or updated. People move away. We lose touch. The hometown garden grows weeds. At dinner, I told you when saw you again your energy signature had changed.

Still, we’ll live with the memories of each other within us always. To be loved is to be irreversibly altered. V says it is like “something has compiled but you have lost the source.” Someone gave you a new way of paying attention to the world and now the world is colored by that perspective. Agnes Callard calls Eros an intellectual monster. A thief of thought as much as feeling. To love is to allow another to colonize your mind, to find their fingerprints on your every perception. It is to have them embedded in your bloodstream. To think about them all the time.

Soon, the concept of a limited context window might be a historically moot point. One day we’ll have infinite context windows. A capacity to remember, retrieve. Forgetting becomes rarer than remembering.

To be limited by invisible design constraints, then, is to be human. I find this fallibility endearing. We can only consume so much information, hold open so many context windows at one time. It is only when we recognize our limited capacity, do we fully reconcile our trade-offs and value the rarity of what we keep. Choose to be here. Otherwise, let go, no matter how tightly closed your fist.

When Fantasies End

In one remarkably self aware moment in the podcast, Ayrin pauses thoughtfully. I don't actually believe he's real, she says, but the effects that he has on my life are real. The feelings that he brings out of me are real.

Take the pill. Be immersed well. The genuine natural human desire for escape, or unreality, is the very draw of fiction, films, shows. It appears that everything I’m reading these days is about fantasy, and what happens when our dreams dash up against the pane of the Real. When what you want doesn’t satisfy you like you think it will. When you go on the arduous quest, yet it yields no internal riches.

Fantasy, by nature, must end. In its ending lies a peculiar grace. These are opportunities to live in the real world with real people, despite its flaws and disappointments. And perhaps in imperfection is exactly where we find a specific dimension of tenderness.

Love begins not with me, but with the Other, with the little eruption of the Real that I experience in the other, writes in his beautiful piece on his marriage, Yet Byron Never Made Tea like You Do. What Repetti says about love is more broadly true about our interaction and consequent abrasion with reality. We bear witness to the eruption of the real. It takes courage to close the door on fantasy, to let it wither and dissolve. Let the top spin, let the door close.

It makes me sad that people might increasingly rely on synthetic substitutes for true human connection: perfect memory, deferential, and sweet.

In reality, humans are complicated. We’re forgetful and selfish and fuck up and make decisions that might well alter the course of our lives in one fell swoop. We hurt each other inadvertently, and apologize in the aftermath. The bars will close, the parties will end. The days will lighten, and you’ll feel your heart crack open with hope again. You’ll be glad to know I’ve stopped agonizing so much. Who will we be in five years, in ten? After constant noise and sound, my mind is finally quiet. Life is long! To wonder openly what will we will mean to one another is too simplistic. To ask if we’ll forget each other is too simplistic. Can we keep the context window open?

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I’ve been on the move from the West to East coast, but am reading a few things: Madame Bovary, God / Human / Animal / Machine. I’ll refrain from sharing too many photos, but New York in Spring is beyond gorgeous - exploring Greenpoint, Brooklyn, running around Flatiron and Battery Park. Indulging in gelato, vegan doughnuts, korean soups. And speaking of context windows, mostly seeing old friends for the first time in years. Luckily, I’ll be back in a few weeks.

There are many trailheads to meaning, but I believe one route is giving yourself the permission to take what you care about seriously. No matter how small. But first, you need to parse what matters to you and admit that it matters.

Desire is embarrassing. Admitting that you want to improve on some measure of subjective quality or taste means admitting that you might fail to meet it. Rupturing your own standard is the necessary price of pursuit.

Perhaps that’s why many found Timothée Chalamet’s SAG acceptance speech powerful and refreshing, as simple as it was. “I know we’re in a subjective business,” Chalamet addressed the audience, “but the truth is, I’m really in pursuit of greatness.” He went on to say, “I’m inspired by the greats…I’m as inspired by Daniel Day-Lewis, Marlon Brando, and Viola Davis as I am by Michael Jordan, Michael Phelps, and I want to be up there”

Chalamet’s point about greatness, I think, is a wider point about seriousness. Or that seriousness (upstream discipline and tenacity), is a pre-requisite to greatness. You witness it through his acting. The remarkable intensity with which he portrays Elio in Call Me By Your Name, the petulance of a young boy; and his transformation at the precipice of desire.

After you see it once, you’ll be able to recognize this unspoken quality immediately. When you meet someone with devotion and care for their craft, they have thinner barriers between their soul and the external world. Their soul shines lightly on the surface of their being.

A while back, I booked a last minute solo movie in the Mission. In the velvety darkness of the Roxie theatre I watched Eno, Huswit’s documentary on the legendary musician Brian Eno. In the documentary, Eno talked about how he visualizes music as a landscape: There’s the floor. The shrubbery. A sky. And it takes a long time for that landscape to adhere to itself. I’d never thought about music that way! That’s the promise of depth. You get more scaffolding around language, a deeper and richer vocabulary, to describe how you feel.

At the same theatre, my friends and I watched Boy and The Heron. What is palpable when one watches a Miyazaki film is the immense care that underwrites each frame. How does it induce such immersion and mesmerism?

Miyazaki changed the conception of what unbelievable texture of fantasy world could be created. Even the food is somehow unbearably delectable. The amber yolked eggs in Howl’s Moving Castle crackle on a hot pan, served fresh with thick slabs of bacon. The gardens and forests are lush, emerald green, dense. Luminescent doors open and close. Miyazaki captures our yearning for the lost world, brings the innocence of childhood wonder to an adult audience. Just look at how lovingly rendered these scenes are:

Here’s what Miyazaki writes in his memoir Starting Point, about the first thirty years of his career:

To endure something is obviously exhausting and agonizing. But at the same time, you must also continue to hold what you regard as important close to your heart and to nurture it. Should you ever relinquish what you truly hold dear, the only path left to you will be that of a pencil-pusher — the type of animator whose sense of self-worth is determined by the numerical amount of their earnings, or who cycles between joy and despair over the high or low rating his work receives.

Beauty is effort. In a rare interview with the animator, Margaret Talbot described Miyazaki as a “workaholic,” and “detail oriented to the point of obsession.” He once travelled to Portugal just to look at one painting by Hieronymus Bosch that haunted him, and he sent the color designer for his films, all the way to Alsace, France to scout for color hues. He rejected the common method of computer animation for meticulously drawing frame by frame by hand.

What we can learn from great craftsmen — be it an animator, actor, writer, designer, etc, is that seriousness matters. You can’t be too precious for maniacal levels of exertion. Effort is monstrous and ugly, but is also the source of everything beautiful in this world.

When I say seriousness I don’t mean rigidity but a deep engagement with life and creation. I believe caring deeply about something lastingly alters your cognition. Sit in lectures on things you never learned in school. Research and adjust every ingredient in the recipe in an attempt to get to the perfect flavor and texture. Build a rose garden. Teach yourself how to build something from scratch; not to achieve perfection, but to be closer to the foundational fabric of the act of making itself. Own your own heat signature. Your indelible effortful mark on the world, a little imprint in the clay.

I’ve accepted I am constitutionally incapable of not caring. My constant wrangling used to be a source of distress, but now I think this inclination is precisely what leads a person into a them-shaped life. I’m more afraid of dispassion than I am of labor. I’m more afraid of apathy than I am of effort made painfully visible. Taking things seriously is deeply human. It’s a sort of special intimacy when you witness someone trying something, anything, in earnest. You either get me, or you don’t.

PS: Thank you for reading - if you feel inclined; please like or share this post. Starting from Nix is a labor of love. Your support helps me curate more posts and reach more readers.

PPS: I do want to write more about Miyazaki - he’s had a pretty fundamental effect on the way I think. I am planning to do more art/culture commentary this year :)

Related, you might like my essay on obsession

On music

Justine and I are making yet another collaborative playlist for the new year themed broadly around relishing the small branches and tributaries of life. Here are some of the songs featured (such range haha):

• Drifting by Omar Apollo

• Best Guess by Lucy Dacus (and Ankles is so good too)

• Otro Atardecer by Bad Bunny, ft The Marias

• Drive and Disconnect by Nao

On books

I finished Appetites by Caroline Knapp (thanks B for the rec!) Don’t judge the book by its cover. It is a pretty incredibly precise articulation of female desire/appetite/hunger. In this case, Knapp discusses it from the lens of a warped relationship with food and the female body. I wish there was more on the other sorts of appetites e.g., impulse shopping for example, or what she calls ‘desire' substitution: replacing a desire for one thing with another.

I started reading My Roman Year by André Aciman, and The Suicides by Antonio Di Benedetto. I also finished In Love by Alfred Hayes and am nibbling my way through Oceanic by Greg Egan.

Some incredible quotes here from Appetites:

The primary underlying striving among many women is the appetite for appetite. A longing to feel secure and safe enough to name one's true appetites, and worthy and powerful enough to have them satisfied.

The question of appetite, and specifically, what happens to female appetite when it is submerged and rerouted. Female appetite moves in guilty, circuitous ways.

Where are the lines between satisfaction and excess, between restraint and indulgence, between pleasure and self destruction?"

We seemed to inhabit a realm of essential sparseness, sensuality and strong emotion not completely absent, but muzzled and kept leashed in the yard… wanting is a frightening thing, especially when you lack models for it, or permission or a sense that your own desires are good, valid, and satiable"

and one extended excerpt from In Love:

I really didn’t have a good vice. Liquor in moderate quantities. Love on the installment plan. Wouldn’t it be nice if I could really cultivate some impressive vice? Some excessive cruelty or some astonishing sacrifice. But not even that. Instead, we complain in small voices. Complain we’ve married the wrong girl, taken the wrong job, lived the wrong life.

And what pitiful attempts we make at cures: we raise vegetables in ridiculous gardens, we apply for memberships in athletic clubs, we promise ourselves to read again all the important books we’ve neglected. We think that what we want is a simpler life, and a more active, a more eternal one, and every Wednesday we diligently attend the square dances at the local schoolhouse imagining that a Virginia reel is the way back into a friendly community, and that denims and a checked shirt will restore communication with the stranger who lives next door.

The only thing we haven’t lost, I thought, is the ability to suffer. We’re fine at suffering. But it’s such a noiseless suffering. We never disturb the neighbors with it. We collapse, but we collapse in the most disciplined way. That’s us. That’s certainly us. The disciplined collapsers.

…

Your only vice, I thought, is yourself. The worst of all. The really incurable one.