Last summer, I walked into Quimby’s bookstore in Williamsburg (the one with the famous cat called Gracie) and stumbled upon an A6 paper zine series called Awesome Things. Inspired by the simple and delightful premise of listing just that—awesome things—I bought the first three instalments and resolved to create a bi-annual ritual of my own.

Here’s my first attempt, past deadline. It’s loosely chronological and follows my desire to get beneath the surface of my own experiences, however small.

There are so many awesome things:

Noticing there are certain phrases you say and intonations you make because of spending lots of time with people who are important to you.

Writers writing about writing.

Eating a crisp green grape. The crispness is the point; taste is secondary but a bonus if the acidity and sweetness balance. You bite into the next with high expectations.

Commencement speeches. Always so rousing.

When I hear the tinnitus in my left ear and realise I can’t recall the last time I heard it. Though it’s disappointing to notice it now, I’m grateful for all the time I didn’t.

Arranging objects in space; the never-ending quest for spacio-visual harmony. Since any object changes how all other objects appear relative to it, the current arrangement gets called into question any time a new object comes home. In which case, I will arrange and re-arrange until my eyes decide they are at rest, losing all sense of time, but not place.

Stepping off a train just as the one you need on the opposite platform is pulling in, knowing the timing is such that you won’t need to run to beat the closing doors, so you don’t. And you make it.

Some people’s skin smells like tears even though they aren’t crying. How is this possible?

Egg and soldiers for dinner, as a two, by choice, at the tail end of a long winter. Salted butter melted through, egg and bread still warm.

Anything ever written or spoken by Ursula K. Le Guin, esp. the blog about an egg.

The earnest pursuit of anything.

’ piece on aliveness and where to find it.

Misheard lyrics. When I was little, I thought k.d. lang’s “Constant Craving” was called “Can’t Stand Gravy”, much to the amusement of my parents. As an adult, I still couldn’t help but hear those words whenever listening to the song, and I thought I was the only one in the world who did. Until recently, I discovered, by the good grace of the Instagram algorithm, that I was not.

Being two people’s daughter.

Waking up without an alarm on weekdays.

Being in a city where everyone has somewhere to be except you. You have nowhere to be, except with yourself.

7-Eleven onigiri in Tokyo. An unexpected breakfast hit.

Accepting the paradoxical state of being both happy and sad. Because in this case, getting to feel sad about what you felt sad about was a reason to be happy.

Writing in the margins. Turns your books into memory maps.

The headspace that comes from being alone on a plane with no wifi. Many of these aphoristic thoughts surface while I’m in the air, as if trying to soothe against the absurd reality of how out of control I am.

The person who told my colleague, who then told me, that jet stream turbulence is like a plane wobbling in jelly.

Acknowledging you didn’t handle a situation as well as you should have, and resolving to do better next time.

Rounding off lunch with a single espresso and small hazelnut praline, the Italian kind with FIAT written on it in capital letters. Why does Fiat sponsor chocolate pralines? I’m yet to look this up as I love the incongruence and don’t want to be disappointed by the real reason for it.

The first sip of still water after drinking an espresso. The water always tastes thicker, smoother.

The sound and meaning of the word fractal.

Holding a set of keys in one hand and feeling like a functioning adult.

Lying in Savasana at the end of Bikram, in the heat, sweat trickling down into your ear, and you are desperate to wipe it away. And yet, you resist. You actually accept the temporary discomfort like they say you should, and it’s much more satisfying than you expected.

Waking up with a cat on your belly or legs, and you can feel the cat’s full weight because it’s sleeping, not just perching.

Stumbling upon the phrase “sometimes, you just have to pretend the hard things are easy” at just the right moment.

The man with the dog in Soho who said “great pants” as you walked by and meant it.

Writing a 40-minute script, memorising it, then speaking it aloud in a room filled with other human beings as if there was nothing more important in the world, feeling the room opening to my words. And that room being inside the New York Public Library.

Loving the people you work with and realising that this love is in fact the point of the work.

Robert Henri’s definition of art as simply the process of doing anything well.

Entrainment.

Trees in Mexico City. As if the pavements were built around them first and foremost, roots cracking concrete.

Buckminster Fuller’s book title, Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth. The contents are also excellent. We live on a spaceship.

Giving away your Legos at work, and watching others build great things with them.

Bees in the low grass, doing their thing, minding their own business. Watching them hop between the small white flowers (are they weeds?) and thinking: I should tread more carefully. Important work is being done here.

When a writer’s syntax invades your mind: you start narrating your life in their voice. This is what happened when I was reading Helen Garner’s diaries, and I loved it. She made me more resolute.

Butterflies flying in pairs. Knowing who she will be thinking of as we watch them.

Being called “Auntie Lauren” by my friends’ children.

Scottish dancing for the first time. At a small parish hall, in the late-June England heatwave. Soaking through our wedding eve outfits, laughing at the messy, sweaty joyfulness of it all. Twirling in and out and around each other, in and out of time—us, their loved ones.

The name of an old song you used to love pops into your head out of nowhere. You play it immediately, and it’s even better than you remembered. So you play it several times more. My most recent: After Hours by We Are Scientists.

A smart person explaining something with just the right level of context and zero hubris.

Salted popcorn.

The PostNord delivery man who handed over the package and looked me in the eye before saying goodbye with so much warmth that my eyes welled up.

Buying an item of clothing online in the sale, somewhat on a whim, but with the gut feeling it’s going to be great. It arrives, and you try it on to discover that yes, your intuition was spot on: it’s perfect for you.

The tips of the green money plant leaves turned apple red because I moved it into a spot with more direct sunlight.

Unmade bedsheets so unexpectedly, perfectly dishevelled; you have no choice but to leave the bed unmade.

The sun heating the pine trees in our communal garden, releasing the fresh smell of their sap into the air, sweetening it through warmth.

Three baby seagulls were born opposite our apartment this summer. From our kitchen window, we watched them grow until they flew away. Their feathers turning from grey to white. At night, curled up, they were almost indistinguishable from rocks. I was sad when they left, but my partner reassured me they’ll return next year to have their own babies, because that is what has happened every summer since we moved in. I was shocked that I had never noticed this cycle, and prouder to live with someone who had.

Accepting that growth is pain, body and mind.

Reframing work as craft instead of growth, courtesy of Mandy Brown.

The morning light hit the cat’s moist black nose and revealed a tiny surface glimmering like an ocean.

Conversations with the kind of friend who was meant to help you evolve and vice versa. You don’t spend time catching up on life; you get straight to the roots of things, to the heart of matters. You want to see each other keep becoming. In Drake speak, these people are woes, your Working on Excellence peeps. They are special.

In the shower after yoga, hearing Swedish words under the running water. I thought I was flicking too many suds in her direction; she was asking to use some of my shampoo. Two women strangers, naked yet unashamed, overcoming their fear of inconveniencing the other.

Eight paws waiting for you at the door.

Nick Cave’s sentence, “prepare for the impossible darlingness of things”, which sums up most of the above.

The concept of Awesome Things, by Liz Mason.

I haven’t published anything here for a few months because nothing I’ve thought about or written has seemed interesting enough to share. I think this newfound self-consciousness is symptomatic of a broader anxiety in the creative/knowledge/online writing worlds that warrants unpacking.

In essence, AI agents started working this year, and we’re all trying to understand what that means for us—how we create value, and how we derive meaning from our work. AI slop is now a real phenomenon, and many writers on Substack and beyond have taken to their platforms to decry it. Human-only writing is the only writing of value; use em-dashes at your own peril! Did you pause over the one above and wonder if it was mine?

As AI has driven the cost of content creation to near zero, we’ve rallied around the value of human skills like taste and judgment that sit higher up the creation stack. AI might be able to execute, but it can’t reliably choose what’s worth executing in the first place or what’s good enough to publish. That’s on us. At first, I was energised by this narrative, especially when influential figures like Anthropic’s Daniela Amodei started attributing the development of these skills to the Humanities. At long last, the STEM reign is over! But as time’s gone on, I’ve found the online discourse around the value of human work, especially writing, increasingly stifling and tinged with judgment.

To be clear, I think the response is understandable. AI is a confronting technology, and the uncertainty is real. Just this month, Meta announced it would install tracking software on its US employees’ computers to record their mouse movements and keystrokes as training data for their AI agents. In the same week, the company announced its intention to lay off 8,000 people. Amazon has laid off nearly 10% of its white-collar workers in recent months, and in February, Block slashed 40% of its staff, citing AI as the primary reason. It’s also unsurprising that we’d be so sensitive about writing, given that AI’s dominant mode of output is text. But beneath the “who produced what” argument lies an even more important question: what ideas are worth making and sharing in the first place?

I’ve long associated good ideas with size and complexity. I guess because the surface intention seems more ambitious, wanting to wrestle with big, difficult thoughts. There’s a perception aspect to this, too (wanting to be seen to be wanting to do hard things), and our professional incentive structures are set up to reward it. Nobody gets promoted for simplicity because handling complexity is a proxy for being smart. I’ve always cared about being perceived as smart, which is why I’ve been getting tripped up lately, because my thoughts haven’t been big or complex at all. They’ve been small.

For example, I’ve been thinking a lot about my cat’s fur. Specifically, about the fact that it smells like a chocolate bourbon biscuit. British readers will know the kind I’m talking about: cocoa buttercream, malty, hint of vanilla, not too sweet. It’s been at least twenty years since I’ve eaten or even seen a chocolate bourbon, but patches of my cat’s fur smell exactly like one, and I’m obsessed with the fact they do. It’s so immediately familiar and comforting and delicious. I want to draw every single biscuit-scented molecule of fur into my nostrils and carry them with me for the rest of time.

I’ve also been thinking about how Swedish people behave when the sun is shining. It’s one of the absolute highlights of experiencing the first spring days in this country. You can bet that any patch of sunlight in any given outdoor area (on benches and steps, at bus stops, even if only a narrow sliver) will be occupied by unapologetically basking Swedes. Head tilted, eyes closed, mouth corners on the verge of a smile. Some friends and I nicknamed this phenomenon Swedish Sun Face when we first moved here. You can perform Swedish Sun Face in groups or alone; both modes are socially accepted. The winters are so long here that when the weather finally turns, our collective sense of biological gratitude for naturally occurring vitamin D draws everyone to the sun’s warm embrace. I love watching and experiencing it in equal measure.

These two small sensory fixations are probably instances of what philosophers call qualia, the felt quality of being. I think it’s fair to say that many of us take qualia for granted. After all, being could just be nothing, except it’s not; it feels like something. We all know this intuitively to be true, even though we cannot know what it feels like to be being anyone other than ourselves.

It seems to me that qualia are the building blocks of a beautiful life, and the least we can do is try to notice them. We live in a world of infinite scrolling and high expectations. Daring to follow the sparks of our felt curiosity, however mundane, and linger there without shame or expectation, is a radical act. We come closer to our own way of being and seeing in the world. We experience life more deeply.

I’m someone who tends to experience life at the surface layer, and the problem with the surface layer is that it’s slippery. A week can pass filled to the brim with interesting tasks and encounters, yet come the following Monday, I can barely recall what happened because most of the experiences just slid straight off me.

To get beneath the surface, you have to slow down to a pace that feels incompatible with modern life. This is uncomfortable at first and takes practice. You can’t distribute your attention either, to another screen or thought. You have to stop and allow yourself to feel what it’s like to be being. If you manage to do that, and you stay there long enough, the sensation of the experience sinks in beneath the surface, deep enough that it starts dissolving into you. I’m not proposing anything original here: Buddhist traditions have been making this point about attention and presence for two plus centuries. I just think we’re overlooking it as a valid source of inspiration and meaning at a time when we’re trying to re-lay our path to both.

Part of the problem is how narrowly we define and measure intelligence. Most of the Large Language Model benchmarks and tests are for advanced science and mathematics. Plenty of people say artificial general intelligence (AGI) is already here despite the shortcomings of the Turing Test. From what I can see, our default response to differentiating ourselves from this competing intelligence is largely intellectual and, ironically, machine-like. We treat the problem like an equation:

Better taste → better differentiation from AI
Better inputs → better taste
∴ Refine your inputs.

Then we execute: curating and consuming a more nuanced set of articles, podcasts, books, art, music, etc., in the hope they will rewire a more discerning mind. But what about what goes on everywhere else? What about the qualia? Are they not a form of intelligence, too?

AI might be able to describe what it’s like to feel the first warm rays of sunlight on skin, but it hasn’t felt them, not yet. Not to mention your experience of those rays could be completely different from mine and from that of anyone else on the planet.

This is why art is so important. It is our best attempt at sharing what it feels like to be being with each other. We all move through the world differently, and there is so much to take in. That makes the combinatorial space of all possible art unfathomably large. What a gift that some of us feel compelled to record certain experiences over others.

A few weeks ago, my dad visited me in Stockholm. It was the first real Spring weekend and the entire city was outside, so naturally, I’d told him all about Swedish Sun Face shortly after he arrived. Towards the end of his first day, we decided to take a long pre-dinner walk from the city centre down to an area called Södermalm, which meant passing through the Old Town. We waded through the tourists on the pedestrianised roads and eventually reached a quieter main street. Keen to point out any potential landmarks, I turned to look up the cobbled side street and noticed an older lady sitting on a stool in the early evening sunshine. I told my dad to stop walking. That’s Swedish Sun Face, I cried. He paused to take in the woman, who was now lighting a cigarette, and we both stood to watch her take the first drag and tilt her head back in silent, sun-kissed bliss. Then we laughed and walked on. I think I will always remember this.

It took four drafts to get here and months of holding, exactly as describes, a fear that what I needed to write about might be boring. Biscuit-smelling fur, Swedes in the sun: why should anyone care? My taste inputs must be failing me. A great writer (who knows who they are if they’re reading this) once told me that anything new we discover needs to sit or it instantly becomes a commodity, and that a pause allows more to happen. We shouldn’t let the immediacy of the online world or the pressure to perform taste get in the way of exploring what we feel compelled to try and understand. For whatever reason, my small sensory encounters were signposts I couldn’t ignore. Writing is what helped me figure out why.

Most things will never have the chance to exist. Yet I exist, my dad exists, my cat exists. The Swedish woman on the sun-kissed stool exists. Four living products of a 3.8 billion-year-old causal history, being together in the world. So much had to happen across time and space for this to be so. This is true of everything that exists, which in turn makes every existing thing extraordinary.

Instead of trying to make ourselves more interesting, we’d probably be better off noticing that everything already is.

At my stepmum’s funeral in 2017, I read aloud the lyrics to a song called Time by Joyce Grenfell.

Grenfell was a British woman of many talents: comedian, monologuist, singer, writer and actress, most active from the 1940s to the 1970s and probably best known for starring in the St Trinian’s TV series. Many of her wittiest monologues allegedly came from stories about her eccentric socialite mother.

My stepmum loved Joyce Grenfell, but I only discovered this after she died. My dad mentioned it when we were discussing the funeral reading and how I might pay tribute to my stepmum’s wicked sense of humour—one of the things I had loved most about her. Even though I didn’t make the connection myself, the choice felt right.

Time traces a woman’s life across four stylised verses. It’s a cabaret-like piece that relies heavily on Grenfell’s speech—her pace, pitch, and timing—to carry the song’s emotional weight.

In the first two verses, time is embarrassingly abundant. Girlhood and early adulthood unfold as a series of parodied activities, from lazing, flirting, and embroidery to picnicking, dancing, and attending parties. Grenfell’s voice races through them all at top speed, the piano chasing after her. Before each verse list unfolds and ends, we hear a similar refrain:

“When I was a girl, there was always time,
There was always time to spare.
There was always time to sit in the sun;
And we were never done with
[...]
When I was a girl, there was always time to waste.
Thank the Lord.”

–

“When I was a young woman, there was always time,
There was always time to spare.
There was always time to walk in the sun,
And we were never done with
[...]
When I was a young woman, there was always time to enjoy things.
Thank the Lord.”

By the time we hit verse three, the mood has changed. The woman narrator is now elderly, and her spare time is lacking. She’s traded lazing and dancing for the busyness of domestic tasks like babysitting, shopping, and washing up.

In the final verse, the song stops running as Grenfell slows her pace to deliver a parting message:

“But now I’m an old, old woman,
So I want the last word:
There is no such thing as time—
Only this very minute
And I’m in it.
Thank the Lord.”

My voice only faltered at “And I’m in it.” Until that moment, I was standing at the funeral podium, rushing through the song’s lists just like Grenfell. Then I slowed down at verse 4, and time disappeared. I was in this minute but my stepmum was not: my stepmum, who had not lived to be an old, old woman, but who had always known there was no such thing as time. Today would have been her 59th birthday.

Circumstances notwithstanding, performing words aloud is one of my favourite things to do. It’s scary, in a good way. Unlike writing, speaking is a unique event: you can re-read someone’s words but you cannot re-experience someone’s speech; no two live renderings will ever be the same. That gives the whole exercise a special kind of weight.

I particularly enjoy speaking aloud while standing still because it limits all expression of meaning to the voice, forcing you to think even harder about the relationship between word and sound. Whenever I give a talk or emcee an event, I write my script in full and learn it by heart for this reason. People say that being able to riff on stage is a sign of competence, and that may be true; for me, internalising a speech and delivering it with intention is a sign that you respect your audience.

And there is an audience! A live one of human beings, no less. This leads me to another important distinction. Where writing is one-way, speaking is a shared act. Without listeners listening to your words, there is no speech to speak of. We need each other to bring the moment into being:

“Teller and listener, each fulfils the other’s expectations. The living tongue that tells the word, the living ear that hears it, bind and bond us in the communion we long for in the silence of our inner solitude.” — Ursula K. Le Guin, ‘Telling is Listening’, The Wave in the Mind

‘Telling is Listening’ was Le Guin’s attempt at explaining why human communication is so much more than information transmission. It helped me see oral performance in particular as something magical—a living, intersubjective act between people.

I think this is why it’s easier for words to become a part of you when you speak or hear them aloud, because you’ve absorbed them, perhaps even been changed by them, through the bodily experience of speech. I’ve never forgotten Time because those uttered lines will forever connect me to that moment of grasping my loss in a room filled with others. After I finished reading the song, the funeral congregation broke into applause and told me, without saying a word, that I was not alone.

I hadn’t thought about Grenfell’s words for years until they suddenly resurfaced last November on a trip to New York.

“When I was a girl, there was always time, there was always time to spare.”

The line was stuck on repeat in my head.

There I was, in a city where people have no time to spare, accompanied incessantly by a line about infinite time. The cognitive dissonance was almost comic. I couldn’t figure out why the song had returned then or why it had chosen New York. Fortunately, it meant my stepmum came along for the ride. I think both she and Grenfell would have enjoyed the irony of the whole affair.

A week later, back home, I discovered a new book on my desk: No Time to Spare: Thinking About What Matters, by Ursula K. Le Guin. I’d ordered before my trip and promptly forgotten all about it. It felt fitting that Le Guin, who had taught me about the time‑bending properties of speech, was the one who led me back to Grenfell.

No Time to Spare consists of blog posts Le Guin wrote in the final years of her life. Its title comes from her piece about a fusty Harvard alumni questionnaire in which respondents had to select what they did in their spare time. Following golf at the top of the list were creative activities like writing, Le Guin’s 60-year vocation. Her response is characteristically wry:

“The opposite of spare time is, I guess, occupied time. In my case I still don’t know what spare time is because all my time is occupied. It always has been and it is now. It’s occupied by living.”

Like Grenfell, Le Guin refuses to separate being from time; she cannot divide her life into meaningful and leftover hours. All things that are now are worth doing. Yet both of these women also transcend time through their use of language. Their words remain forever available for us to read and re-read, to speak aloud whenever we choose, and to be changed by them when we do.

Thank the Lord for that.

PS I’m switching on paid subscriptions as of today. All posts will stay free. I’m only doing this because Substack allegedly suppresses your reach if you don’t have paid enabled, so I’m trying to game its algorithm. While I don’t currently aspire to this newsletter being a source of income, I would like more people to discover it without having to sink hours into social media promotion.

If you enjoy Pass It On and would like to support it, you can subscribe with a 90% discount here. But there is zero pressure to do so! Reading the words is already more than enough.

The other day, while waiting for a train in the Stockholm metro, I found myself staring at my boots. They’d just come back from the cobbler, re-heeled, polished, and were uncharacteristically shiny. This made me think of my dad and a weekend at his house last autumn.

Within minutes of my walking through the door, he had noticed the boots. Were they new? Yes! A recent investment. He complimented their timeless, elegant style. I told him how much I loved them, but I was troubled by how quickly and deeply the leather was creasing across the widest part of my foot. My dad (and fellow wide-footer) reassured me that this was a good thing: the leather was moulding itself to me, giving the boots a more authentic character which would only add to their beauty. I liked this thought. We carried on with our day.

The next morning, shortly before I was due to leave for the airport, he offered to polish them. I was struck by the gesture. My dad and I haven’t lived together in the same house since I was eight years old, so there have simply been fewer opportunities to experience such small, tactile acts of parental care.

What my dad and I lacked in proximity, we’ve made up for in calls. I’d hazard we’ve averaged one phone conversation a week since 1999. Our best ones always revolve around words. I can remember calling him up to talk through my Year 11 essay on Tess of the D’Urbervilles; a year prior, we had wrestled through the concluding paragraph to my creative writing coursework; not long after was the dreaded university personal statement and probably a handful of undergraduate essays. Then came Pass It On. I’ve published over 100 articles here since 2020, and he has read drafts of every single one. I send, he reads, we discuss. That’s our jam. And lately I’ve realised why it’s been so helpful. Whatever the topic, he has always managed to nudge me that bit closer to two things: saying what I actually mean, and sounding more like me. Since the quest for both is lifelong, I guess this means my dad is stuck as my unpaid editor for the rest of his days. Fortunately, everyone seems content with this arrangement:

There isn’t much subtlety to this post. It’s a tribute to my dad, and I’m privileged to be able to write it. Maybe it’s a sign I’m finally listening to his advice and closing the gap between feeling, meaning, and saying. Plus, he said he didn’t want any Christmas gifts this year, so I consider this post a satisfying festive loophole.

(Just this once, I didn’t send him a first draft.)

Merry Christmas, Dad.

Love,
Lauren

I am a man.

This is the opening sentence to Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1992 essay, ‘Introducing Myself’.

Ursula K. L Guin was an American novelist. She is most famous for her works of fantasy and science fiction, but her 60-year literary career traversed many genres and forms. She was born in 1929 and died in 2018. Last Tuesday would have been her 95th birthday.

Le Guin cared about gender. Her 1969 novel The Left Hand of Darkness is considered the most famous exploration of androgyny in science fiction. It takes place on a planet called Gethen, whose human inhabitants only adopt sexual attributes once a month during a period of high fertility, without knowing if they will assume a male or female role. “The king was pregnant” is the novel’s most famous line.

Radical as the premise then was, feminists criticised The Left Hand of Darkness for its lack of female perspective. The human narrator was male, and Le Guin used male pronouns he/him for the genderfluid Gethenians, which the feminists argued reinforced a male default.

Le Guin took the feedback seriously. The protagonists in nearly all her early works of science fiction were male, and she began asking herself why she had not questioned this sooner:

“So when I was born, there actually were only men. People were men. They all had one pronoun, his pronoun, so that’s who I am. I am the generic he [...] That’s me, the writer, him, I am a man.” — ‘Introducing Myself’, 1992

When I was studying foreign literature at university in the early 2010s, the generic ‘he’ pronoun was still the default in literary criticism. Most of my professors, including the women, still used it. There were rumours that some might mark you down for using ‘she’ or ‘they’ instead. Students dabbled with caution.

Then there was the literature itself. After the first year’s compulsory syllabus, we were free to specialise within a range of great authors. In those three years that followed, I didn’t study a single woman writer.

Goethe, Heine, Hoffmann, Fontane, Balzac, Flaubert, Baudelaire, Breton, Char, Ponge, Kafka, Camus, Sartre, Beckett, Proust, Musil, Rilke, Kundera, Barthes, Derrida.

My literary canon. All men.

I didn’t notice at the time. I didn’t question that my degree revolved around men, what men wrote, what men thought. Like Le Guin, the thought didn’t really cross my mind.

Canons matter. They shape a shared moral-intellectual culture, teaching which traits are honoured and which others, by virtue of their absence, are rejected.

Since leaving university, the culture I’ve been most immersed in is Tech. Tech also has a canon. According to Stripe founder and CEO Patrick Collison, the following works cover the most influential ideas on the industry:

The Tinkerings of Robert Noyce
Seeing Like a State
The Dream Machine
The Sovereign Individual
The Beginning of Infinity
Surely You’re Joking, Mr Feynman
Softwar
Ashlee Vance’s Elon biography
The Mythical Man-Month
Mindstorms
Masters of Doom
Skunk Works
Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs
Thinking in Systems
Superintelligence
The Whole Earth Catalog
Zero to One
The Hard Thing about Hard Things
Founders at Work
Showstopper
Dealers of Lightning
The Making of the Atomic Bomb
Paul Graham’s essays
The Rise and Fall of American Growth
The Big Score
Finite and Infinite Games
A Pattern Language
The Selfish Gene
The Lean Startup
Marginal Revolution
Revolution in the Valley
Uncanny Valley
LessWrong
Slate Star Codex(/ACT)
The PayPal Wars
The Cathedral and the Bazaar
The Diamond Age
What the Dormouse Said
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance
The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt
Titan (on Rockefeller)
The Power Broker
Gödel, Escher, Bach

The list is telling. We find works of speculative or science fiction, books outlining general principles in physics, mathematics, or cognitive science, texts outlining operating principles and business strategy of successful startups, narrative histories of successful startups, and biographies of important men. Of these 42 works, only three are solo-authored by women.

This is not surprising given that empirically-minded men dominate the tech industry. Much like Le Guin could have looked at the male-dominated literary canon in the 1940s and concluded that a young woman with a humanities degree had nothing to offer the science fiction world, one could read Collison’s list and assume that a woman like me, with a humanities degree, has little to offer the tech industry. (We cannot be what we cannot see.)

Fortunately, I did not make that assumption—I’ve spent a decade in Tech. But getting through the door is only the beginning of the story. Once you’re in, you have to decide who and how you want to be, and it’s taken me some time to exist in a way that’s true to myself and my womanhood.

At the height of the Lean in movement, women in tech were repeatedly told their success (and by extension, their feminism) hinged on being more assertive. Speak up more, state ‘don’t ask,’ claim your wins, take up space, stop apologising. In other words, be more like a man.

I internalised the assertiveness dogma for a long time. I deleted my sorrys and shortened my sentences. Culled the exclamation marks. Learned to make more decisive decisions. On the one hand, it felt empowering—attempting to be so self-assured—but just as a new side of myself was emerging, another was quietly shrinking.

Things changed when I started reading more writing by women. I can’t remember exactly when or what triggered the domino effect, but once I started, I couldn’t stop.

Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Ursula K. Le Guin, adrienne maree brown, , Annie Dillard, , Joan Didion, , Rebecca Solnit, Jeanette Winterson, , Julie Philips, Olivia Laing, Zadie Smith, , , Mandy Brown, , Maria Popova, , Lucy Jones, Deborah Levy, , Amia Srinivasan, , Anne Carson, Atluru, ….

It’s taken decades; I had to look beyond the canons in front of me, but I found them. I finally found them: great women, past and present. And for as long as I choose to reflect on their ideas, I get to be brought into being by their words. This isn’t a canon. It’s a lineage.

My essays ‘The erotic power of agency’ and ‘Pilgrim’ exist because of the words of Audre Lorde and Annie Dillard. They also exist because of , who told me my perspective mattered; and because of adrienne maree brown and Mandy Brown, whose works led me to Le Guin.

All of these women’s words have rooted themselves in my body. I can feel the roots spreading, and I like what they are growing: a renewed love for the subjective nature of human experience and the glorious ambiguity of most things. The pressure to be definitive, objective, and assertive is dwindling as a result, and I think that’s a good thing.

Many women I know tell me they want to write but feel held back by internal critique or fear of judgment. I tell them they should write anyway—the world can’t afford their silence.

I’ve spent the past five weeks away from Stockholm. First Italy, then New York—where I began writing this post in my hotel room on the twentieth floor.

Accompanying me on both of these trips was Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. I bought it at a second-hand bookstore in New York last October. My copy is from 1975, and you can tell: it’s browned, musty, and as of three weeks ago, missing its front cover. The back’s days are numbered, too.

1975 is the year after Pilgrim at Tinker Creek was first published. It’s also the year the book won Dillard the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction at 29, making her the youngest woman ever to win the category. Not bad for her first work of prose.

Tinker Creek is part nature writing, part philosophical meditation. Its fifteen chapters are inspired by some twenty journals Dillard kept in the early seventies to record her daily solo walks around a valley in deep, rural Virginia. It is, without question, one of the hardest books I’ve ever read.

At first, I put the struggle down to circumstance. Italy was my first proper holiday in six months; my mind was unfocused because it had forgotten how to unwind. But that was only part of the story. The day I finished Tinker Creek, I missed my stop home on the metro because I was so locked into its final paragraphs.

The main reason Tinker Creek was so challenging is that the book is a product of patience, and I am an impatient person. Most chapters revolve around Dillard heading out to the creek and just waiting. For a muskrat to appear, a praying mantis egg to hatch, a morning light to cast its mountain shadow. Sometimes, nature obliges; oftentimes, it does not. Dillard has to accept either way.

“I think beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”

The painstaking detail with which Dillard describes her surroundings demands undivided attention. Skimming simply doesn’t work. The detail she conjures is so specific and intricate that unless you take in every word, you have no idea what’s going on. I wanted to run through Dillard’s world, and she wouldn’t let me. Her sentences held onto the back of my shirt and whispered in my ear, Slow down, Lauren, slow down. Watch with me. You’ll see.

“It was sunny one evening last summer at Tinker Creek; the sun was low in the sky, upstream. I was sitting on the sycamore log bridge with the sunset at my back, watching the shiners the size of minnows who were feeding over the muddy sand in skittery schools. Again and again, one fish, then another, turned for a split second across the current and flash! The sun shot out from its silver side. I couldn’t watch for it. It was always just happening somewhere else, and it drew my vision just as it disappeared: flash, like a sudden dazzle of the thinnest blade, a sparking over a dun and olive ground at chance intervals from every direction. Then I noticed white specks, some sort of pale petals, small, floating from under my feet on the creek’s surface, very slow and steady. So I blurred my eyes and gazed towards the brim of my hat and saw a new world. I saw the pale white circles roll up, roll up, like the world’s tuning, mute and perfect, and I saw the linear flashes, gleaming silver, like stars being born at random down a rolling scroll of time. Something broke and something opened. I filled up like a new wineskin. I breathed an air like light; I saw a light like water. I was the lip of a fountain the creek filled forever; I was ether, the leaf in the zephyr; I was flesh-flake, feather, bone.”

Beyond testing my patience, Tinker Creek induced some envy. How was it possible to be so present, to see the natural world—in all its varied wonder—and recall it so vividly? My partner and I walked around the Padua Botanical Gardens one blistering afternoon during the second half of our Italy trip; with Dillard’s words ringing in my ears, I was prepared to be awed. Instead, I breezed past the 20 species of cacti and daydreamed about a shaded nap on the entrance bench.

I thought about abandoning Tinker Creek several times. I was on holiday, after all. Life is too short to finish a book you’re not enjoying. Except, I wasn’t not enjoying it. Annie was getting under my skin.

The first stop on our Northern Italy tour was Treviso. It’s a small, medieval city that charms its visitors with well-preserved canals, faded frescos, and proximity to Venice and the Prosecco hills.

After a few days of mooching around the stone-paved streets and drinking too many midday spritzes, we decided to venture out of the city. Our walking route was the Restera, a scenic path that follows the left bank of the Sile River as it flows out of Treviso, downstream, to an even sleepier town called Casier.

The morning sun was blazing, and we were sweating. To our right, the milky jade Sile waters were teasing relief, but we took the absence of bathers as a sign to stay on our feet.

Things got interesting one kilometre outside Casier. We passed what looked like an abandoned power station on the other side of the river and couldn’t quite decide if it was eerie. Then we turned into the next bend and entered another world.

In the late 1970s, for reasons I have yet to uncover, many of the wooden barges used to transport goods between Venice and Treviso were abandoned along the banks of this particular Sile river bend. Left to rot, the barges began sinking into the marshy water, from which dozens now protrude like gigantic fish skeletons in their own aquatic cemetery, the Cimitero dei Burcei.

Nature hadn’t wasted any time here. Colonising the barges were a profusion of plants, riverbirds, fish, and amphibians. Dragonflies were everywhere, darting over the water. I even spotted a family of ten turtles sunbathing on one of the barge planks. Natural abundance had emerged from man-made decay, and it was a beautiful sight.

Beauty is a central preoccupation in Tinker Creek. With every excursion out into the wild, Dillard is trying to answer why beauty exists and who exactly it’s for.

“The question is not what the bird is singing, but rather, why is the singing beautiful? …If the lyric is simply “mine mine mine”, then why the extravagance of the score?... Beauty itself is the language to which we have no key; it is the mute cipher, the cryptogram, the uncracked, unbroken code.”

Dillard takes it as a given that beauty is not a subjective projection in the human mind but rather an objective property of the natural world. Consequently, failure to notice the beauty around oneself is a failure of both attention and humility—of not “trying to be there.”

I’m bad at paying attention to what’s around me. At least, that’s what I tell myself when worrying about my increasingly poor midterm memory and orientation skills. Yet when it comes to my media diet, I’m obsessed with paying attention. I tell myself that the choices about what we notice are, in fact, choices about who we want to be.

What kind of person does this make me, exactly?

In New York, one thing I did notice was just how many commuters walk with their phones in their faces. Right up close, either staring at or talking straight into the screen.

I also noticed just how many homeless people were on the streets and how many of them seemed to be living with serious mental and/or physical challenges to degrees I have not witnessed before.

In recent years, the number of people experiencing homelessness in New York City has reached its highest level since the Great Depression. The Coalition for the Homeless estimates 350,000 people were without homes in May 2025. That’s 4.2% of New Yorkers.

On my third day in the city, I watched a homeless man stand in front of the office building next to ours, with all his worldly possessions stacked on a trolley, and take a shower. Soap suds were spewing down his stained clothes as he poured a large bottle of water over himself with one hand and scrubbed with the other. Bent double, head shaking like a wet dog. Commuters walked on.

Wherever I walked in Manhattan, the smell of either piss, faeces, trash, weed, drains, or a concoction of the above was wafting in the thick, humid July air. I walked home from work one evening past a pile of human shit; my partner saw a man defecate in broad daylight on the sidewalk opposite our hotel, then light up a spliff. Police officers were further down the road and seemed unbothered.

A few days before the shower scene, I was standing in line for a morning coffee in Midtown when another homeless man stole all the tips from the counter. Tall, dirty, and hunched, he snatched so fast he was out of the door by the time the empty jar hit the ground. The barista turned to her colleague and said she’d given up trying to stop him. She didn’t get paid enough for that shit.

Unless we call attention to what passes before our eyes, we simply won’t see it. Reading these words from Annie alongside what I was witnessing in New York felt oddly resonant. It was now clear: New Yorkers walk with their phones in front of their faces to shield themselves from the deprivation around them. Not calling attention to the city’s horrors is an act of self-preservation, a privileged one at that, but an understandable one all the same.

Tinker Creek was filled with horrors, too. In documenting nature, Annie couldn’t avoid it, and that was precisely the point: to explore how the same natural world can produce moments of transcendent beauty and casual brutality without any apparent explanation or coherence.

“Nature will try anything once. This is what the sign of the insects says. No form is too gruesome, no behavior too grotesque. If you’re dealing with organic compounds, then let them combine. If it works, if it quickens, set it clacking in the grass; there’s always room for one more; you ain’t so handsome yourself. This is a spendthrift economy; though nothing is lost, all is spent.”

The most harrowing moment for me in Tinker Creek is about a moth. It’s a memory Annie has from school. One day, a fellow pupil brings a Polyphemus moth cocoon to class, and the teacher puts it in a jar so they can all observe it. Impatient, the children take the cocoon out of the jar and pass it around. Eventually, it starts to vibrate, activated by the warmth of their hands. The teacher throws the cocoon back into the jar, and it hatches. Most newly hatched moths and butterflies must spread their wings immediately after emerging from the cocoon so the wing resin can harden to enable flight. But in this jar, this Polyphemus moth cannot do that. So its wings are lacquered shut. The teacher releases the moth on the sidewalk next to the school playground, and young Annie watches it walk away. Damned to the ground, forever. Cruelty is a mystery and a waste of pain, adult Annie writes, closing the segment. And I’m wracked to the point of tears.

Was cruelty such a mystery in this case? Unintended, yes, but not mysterious. Whenever I think about the hunched man in the coffee shop, I see a giant, heaving Polyphemus.

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My last full afternoon in New York was spent with two old friends, a couple whom I first met several years ago in Stockholm. They now live in Brooklyn, in a converted brownstone townhouse, on a street with a mixture of front courtyards and stoops. This street turned out to be a very special place.

My friends and I spent a few unhurried hours on the west side of Prospect Park with their dog and another two of their friends. The humidity had finally lifted a little, and the sky couldn’t decide if it wanted to rain. Hunger eventually kicked in and sent us all back towards my friends’ apartment. The plan was to drop off the dog and go in search of an early dinner.

As we walked up the street, my friends spotted their neighbours in the front courtyard and started greeting them in Spanish. These neighbours, also a couple, were originally from Cuba and had moved to this part of New York in the 60s during the Cuban Revolution. They’d lived in this same ground-floor Brooklyn apartment for over forty years, two-thirds of their married life. The husband was in his nineties, the wife in her eighties.

I got to learn these details because the neighbours invited me and the two other friends to join them in their courtyard. One of these friends also happened to be Cuban and translated whenever the other friend and I got stuck, which was often. She asked the couple about their early life in New York, and the wife immediately called back a famous social club where they would go and practice their favourite kind of Cuban dance, young in love. When she blanked on the details a couple of times, her husband filled in the gaps—he is older, but her memory is not as good.

Our friends returned ten minutes later without their dog, ready to lead us to dinner. The wife told us how lovely it was to meet us three women, not least since young people barely ever spoke to them. After we each gave her and her husband a kiss goodbye on the cheek, the wife turned to our friends on the other side of the courtyard gate and said in English,

“See, we’ve had flowers in our garden.”

Tinker Creek has taught me the value of seeing. Not just beauty, but also ugliness. Both are unfolding around us constantly, on scales big and small, whether we sense them or not, and something started changing in me when I tried to be there for all of it—even the moments that were painful. Annie took this intention with her out into nature, and there were no humans in sight. The nature I observed was different. The casual brutality I witnessed on the streets of New York seemed coherent in its injustice, and according to my colleagues, mild compared to what they had seen. There is no praise to choir here, but plenty of questions to wail.

The cultural critic included Tinker Creek in The Anti-Tech Canon, his counter to the ‘vague tech canon’ meme from 2024, where famous tech founders like Patrick Collison attempted to list the most influential books on the Silicon Valley psyche, revealing in the process a stark but unsurprising dearth of fiction (beyond sci-fi) and writing by women.

Gioia describes Tinker Creek as an education in developing an embodied, empathetic relationship with the real world. Embodied and empathetic are key words here. I think this is what Annie is getting to when she talks about needing to verbalise what she has seen in order to actually see it.

When I first sat down to write this piece up high in my New York hotel room, I thought it would be easy. All I had to do was describe what I had been seeing, and I had seen plenty. Like Annie, I also had journal entries to help me. But it wasn’t that straightforward. To turn my observations into words, I had to pull my memories of these fleeting summer moments—of wonder and disgust alike—deeper into myself. Only then could I truly see them. Once they were alive in my body.

It doesn’t always take writing for me to feel alive to the world. I have also been building this muscle in real-time without recognising it.

In April, I flew to London to attend a funeral. The mother of my first and oldest childhood friend had passed away after long-standing health struggles. The wake was taking place at their family house, next door to the one I had lived in for the first eighteen years of my life, which I had not visited since my family and I moved away in 2009.

My neighbours’ house held many mixed memories. Once, when I was about four or five, I asked my mum if I could go around and play with my friend. She told me to call and ask, and so I did. My friend’s mother accepted my request and cooked us dinner after playtime, at which point she told me that it was rude to invite oneself over to another person’s house. I stared down at my plate in shame. Years later, when we were teenagers and my friend was in the throes of a ferocious eating disorder, I would sometimes see my friend staring down at her plate, howling in disgust. We lived in semi-detached houses and could see straight through each other’s kitchen windows.

At the wake, I spotted a familiar framed picture outside the door to that same kitchen. It was a photograph of me, my friend, her older brother, and another boy and girl who lived one door further down. We were standing outside my kitchen back door in the dark. Everyone was dressed in their outdoor attire except me. The youngest of all five children, I was wearing a red long-sleeved dress with big black flowers and thick white tights. No shoes. All grin. It was December, and my friend’s father, who loves music, suggested we go carol-singing around the neighbourhood. He had gathered the other children and walked them over to my house to fetch me, where he wanted to take a picture before we set off. That’s why I wasn’t wearing any shoes: I was so excited about having our photo taken, I ran straight outside onto the cold stone patio to say cheeeese. That Christmas, my friend’s father gave all three households a framed copy of the photograph. Beneath each picture read “The Haslemere Wassailers” in gold calligraphy.

My friend came to her mother’s funeral with her husband and two young daughters. Her older brother was also with his son and daughter. It was a surprisingly warm, sunny day for early April, so the wake guests were spilling out from the living room into the back garden. After coffee and cake had done the rounds, the three of us found ourselves on the big red sofa with the children—the next generation of Wassailers. I asked if someone would take a picture. Everyone squeezed in tight, and that’s when I felt it: a soft but acute awareness of what was going on—in this very moment, and how right it all was—spreading inside my chest. It stayed with me long after I left, as I rode the tube back into central London, and it’s with me now, as I try to turn the memory into words.

This is the longest piece I’ve ever shared here, and I suspect many won’t have made it this far. That’s okay. The words were still worth it.

I had other plans for today’s piece until I spent my Saturday trying to rescue a cat stuck in a tree. This was as hilarious and heartwarming as it sounds, which is why I’m writing about it.

The drama began when my partner and I were woken at 7 a.m. by loud, persistent meows. As parents to two punctual rescue cats, we’re trained to treat that kind of noise as a breakfast request. But the tone was different this time—sharper, more urgent, and coming from outside our window.

The cries belonged to a small, dark-haired tortoiseshell perched three metres up the largest tree in our communal garden. These shared spaces tucked between apartment blocks are typical of the area. Dangling over a large, lower branch was a harness and leash. This little one had broken free.

A cat-stuck-in-tree moment is one of those stock tragicomedies you hear about but almost never witness firsthand. So when it does happen, the few people present are often well-intentioned but amusingly ill-equipped. We were two such people.

The same could not be said for our community. Within five minutes of posting in a local Facebook group, a woman two streets down replied saying she’d be over with her extra-large ladder. Friends had gifted it to her after her own cat got stuck in trees so often they decided she ought to be self-sufficient.

Meanwhile, a woman in a neighbouring town offered to send her arborist husband to the scene as others chimed in with expert contacts. We were told to call ‘Ninjatay’—a professional rope climber and volunteer cat rescuer—and to post in a group called Vi som hjälper katter i träd (We Who Help Cats in Trees). Both operated in the wider Stockholm area.

When the XL ladder failed to yield results, we called in the experts. No answer from Ninjatay but a young, sleepy-sounding Arnold from Vi som hjälper picked up and said he’d come as soon as he could, despite living 1.5 hours away by train. He’d bring his microchip reader. Ninjatay called back a while later and was pleased to hear Arnold was on his way. The two were friends, of course.

We never got to meet Arnold in the end. Shortly before he was due to board his train, the owner appeared and climbed the XL ladder to her cat’s rescue. She lived in the opposite apartment building and came down in hope as soon as she noticed our small group gathered beneath the tree.

You see what I mean about hilarious and heartwarming. And I skipped plenty of other charming details. Like neighbours leaning out of windows to brainstorm tactics in between cooking crepes for their kids, or the young woman pausing her 10-week old puppy’s walk to climb the ladder and try to coax the cat down. My partner and I spoke to more locals in those four frantic hours than we had in the past four years. Our little Wes Anderson-esque tale revealed a side of Stockholm that we didn’t know existed—one that’s unguarded, communal, and quietly full of heart.

And you know what, I’m here for it. No one in this story was too cool or too busy to try to help. No one paused to assess whether this was the most effective use of their time. (I genuinely wonder what William MacAskill and other effective altruists would have done in this situation.) Everyone just sprang into action.

It might sound trite to say we need to hear more stories like this. But given how few of them seem to make their way to me these days, I’m saying it anyway.

We need to give ourselves permission to participate in and share these stories. To become, as has so beautifully put it, “people of place.”

Most of us are not people of place, we are people of a market. Many move away from our hometowns, we follow opportunity to college or for a job to maximize our economic/career opportunities. Most people do not use their place-based identity as the prism they bend all decisions through, and most people do not integrate into the places they inhabit.

Becoming a person of place means drawing closer to things we’ve been estranged from so we can begin a process of reconnection.

I’ve never integrated into the places I’ve inhabited as an adult. But last Saturday gave me a taste of what it might feel like to do so and I found myself wanting more. On Sunday afternoon, I went back down to the garden and lay under the tree. The sun was warm. I felt more grounded than I had in weeks. I let the feeling expand, then opened my laptop and started to write.

Thanks so much for reading,
Lauren

It’s been exactly two weeks since Sana AI Summit, the conference my company runs once a year inside a converted church in central Stockholm. The premise is simple: create an immersive experience for 500 humans to reflect on the impact of artificial intelligence across disciplines, ignoring all enterprise conference tropes in the process. (This is how I got to meet . I invited her to speak at last year’s Summit.)

As the Summit’s MC, my job—across four hours and nine sessions—is to tell our guests a story. Why are they gathered to hear from speakers ranging from the physicist David Deutsch and chess Grandmaster Garry Kasparov to founders like and artists like ? What is the point?

This year’s Summit began with a 10-minute prelude video montage of iconic individuals reflecting on the impact of technology. David Bowie, Jane Goodall, Steve Jobs, Jeanette Winterson…and right at the end, a clip of Patti Smith from 1978, where she says the following:

Everybody says it's finished.

Oh, art's finished.

Rock n roll is dead, and you know God is dead.

Fuck that.

This is my chance on the world.

I didn't live back there in Mesopotamia.

I wasn't there in the Garden of Eden.

No, I wasn't there with Emperor Han.

I'm here right now, and I want right now to be the greatest time.

This is my golden age.

This is our golden age.

I'm not there in the past.

I'm not there in the future.

I'm right here, and this is the time to make it great.

And if each generation would realize that the time to be great is right now when they're alive.

You see what I mean.

The the time to flower is now.

This is the essence of it, really—call us sentimental! But I can’t hear or read these words from Patti without feeling something stirring inside of me. Especially when I think about humans and AI and this unknown future unfolding before us. We can’t be great in silos. We need each other.

Opening speech

Closing reflections

Excuse the loud video thumbnails. The curse of bending to the YouTube algorithm!

I’ll be back with more written words soon. The Summit has given me a lot to think (and feel) about.

Thanks so much for reading,
Lauren

PS Watch Claire L. Evans’ and Sari Azout’s keynotes. They were exceptional.

When I was five, I named my pet cat after the most intelligent girl in my class. Let’s call this girl Polly.

Polly was small and blonde and gifted. She was born extremely premature to quintessentially British parents, and she was on the shy side. As a 5-year-old, I did not have a nuanced understanding of intelligence. But I knew Polly had it in spades and I admired it. I liked sitting next to Polly at school for this reason, watching her blue-inked Berol sweep across the page in response to every exercise on any subject—basking in her genius.

The only subject Polly did not excel at was sports. Swimming, in particular, was a struggle because she was afraid of the water and relied on armbands for much longer than the rest of us. I liked swimming and was quite good at it, but this did not factor into my young, Polly-aspiring self. Time passed, but she always had more of what I wanted. In our final year of junior school—the last months we would ever spend together before I moved to a different secondary—Polly became Head Girl, and I her Deputy.

My idolisation of Polly is the earliest memory I have of my internal drive for and preoccupation with intellect.

This post is an attempt to explore how preconceived notions of intelligence shape our sense of self-worth and potential, the gendered nature of those notions, and whether the rise of artificial intelligence can offer a new lens.

Late last year, Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI company Anthropic, published ‘Machines of Loving Grace’—an extensive essay on the state of AI advancements. As early as 2026, he said, virtually anyone could have access to an AI model smarter than a Nobel Prize winner “in terms of pure intelligence” across most fields.

What exactly is pure intelligence? Amodei acknowledges its complex nature but uses the term himself to refer to “a general problem-solving capability that can be applied across diverse domains. This includes abilities like reasoning, learning, planning, and creativity.”

The first time I read ‘Machines of Loving Grace’, I took the following note:

Will we finally stop being afraid to look stupid because all humans, relative to AI, will be stupid? Could this actually be freeing?

It’s taken me decades to reach a point where, in certain contexts, I am unafraid to look stupid. In these cases, it’s because I actually feel safe enough to prioritise my desire for genuine understanding over my desire to be seen as smart.

Being unafraid to look stupid doesn’t come easy to women. A 2023 study of Swedish adolescents reported girls having a higher level of anxiety than boys over the fear of failing, echoing a famous study series from the 80s that showed bright 5th-grade girls were more likely to give up on a new challenging task than their bright male counterparts because the girls believed their abilities were innate and unchangeable, while the boys believed they could develop ability through effort and practice.

The most likely root cause of this difference is in how adults give feedback to young boys and girls. Girls are often praised for their “goodness” because they can better follow instructions as a function of developing self-control earlier. Boys, on the other hand, are less obedient and consequently receive more effort-oriented feedback as a form of motivation (e.g., “If you could just try a bit harder, you would get this right.”)

This conditioning plays out in current AI usage. Women are already 25% less likely on average to adopt AI in the workplace than men because they are afraid of being judged as not having enough expertise if they do. When your mental model of intelligence is that it is innate, using AI is tantamount to cheating. This could have major ramifications if it plays out at scale. Given AI’s predicted productivity gains, women who aren’t AI-fluent could fall behind their male colleagues and struggle to advance their careers, resulting in a widening gender pay gap.

I had always prized innate intelligence over effort. Polly was a genius; I was just a hard worker with aptitude. Thus, my deputy position was justified. This narrative persisted as I encountered other Pollys in secondary and higher education, quietly gnawing away at my self-confidence over time. But something has started to shift in the last couple of years, and I think it comes down to the compounding effects of two parallel experiences: working at a startup and writing this newsletter.

The writing experience always comes with the confrontation of a blank page. You overcome the fear not by being gifted but by showing up consistently and proving to yourself repeatedly that you can turn nothing into something.

The same is true of startups. It’s another kind of blank page: you’re trying to create a company, product, and brand from scratch, all at the same time, under a high degree of change and uncertainty. All the playbooks are yours to build.

In my experience, 90% of the outcomes achieved in a startup come from the combination of:

1. Caring an unreasonable amount

2. Asking yourself, ‘How hard can it be?’

3. Making shit happen

I never had a problem with 1 or 3, but embracing 2 took a while. Funny that.

Based on the school studies mentioned earlier, we could say that writing and startup life have finally taught me to value effort over innate intellect. But that wouldn’t quite do justice to the lesson: I already knew how to work hard and exert myself from a young age. The difference in this case is in the nature of the effort. Rather than trying hard for the sake of it—to be perceived as “good” or “clever"—I’ve begun to internalise the value of acting in line with a specific and desired intention. In other words, I’ve learned the value of my own agency.

One of my favourite pieces on agency is from the lawyer-turned-poker-player-turned-startup founder, Cate Hall. She argues that agency is not an inherent trait but a skill that can be learned and acts as an “all-purpose life intensifier.” I love this description and it rings true with my personal experience. The more you allow yourself to try, and the more you allow yourself to care about the things you are trying, the more vivid and energizing life gets.

Writing this newsletter feels exactly like that. On one level, there’s a deep intrinsic satisfaction in attempting to translate amorphous, abstract ideas into words. On another level, there’s an extrinsic motivation in writing so that others may dare to start writing themselves. When I published my last piece in February, numerous women replied saying they felt inspired to do exactly that. I couldn’t have asked for a better outcome.

This is the important distinction between effort and agency. Effort is just exertion. Agency = exertion + determination + care.

Agency is a hot topic in AI right now. Every artificial intelligence company, mine included, is currently in a race to build agentic AI—AI that goes beyond finding information and answering questions to taking actions on tasks (semi) autonomously.

Does agentic AI diminish the need for human agency? After all, if the technology can accomplish an ever-growing range of tasks at lightning speed, we could just sit back and let it shoulder as much of the load as possible.

Take writing. Everything from writing a work email to drafting a school essay is now essentially a choice because AI can generate it for you. As Paul Graham says, this is not an unprecedented situation. Once upon a time, the nature of human work (physical labour) made most people strong. Then we invented machines that could do a lot of the heavy lifting for us, and suddenly, being physically strong became a choice. (Enter: gyms.)

The same is now true for writing. Today, if you want to be a good writer, it’s because you care about the benefits it can bring you. Graham argues that not caring about being good at writing is a serious problem because writing is thinking:

“It will be a world of thinks and think-nots. I know which half I want to be in, and I bet you do too. There will still be smart people, but only those who choose to be.”

I agree with Graham—there is no better way to think than to write.

But writing isn’t only thinking. It is also feeling.

Writing is feeling and thinking because it’s a process by which humans can attempt to translate our raw emotions and experiences into words. Joan Didion summed it up well:

“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. What I want and what I fear.”

By Graham’s logic, then, a world in which few people can write well is also a world in which few people can feel well.

Why is this a problem? Because it hampers agency. If humans lack the ability to translate into words our raw emotions and experiences, we lose the opportunity to understand what they mean for ourselves and potentially those around us. If we cannot name our own realities, how can we expect to change them?

The writer and activist Audré Lorde knew this better than anyone:

“The white fathers told us: I think, therefore I am. The Black mother within each of us — the poet — whispers in our dreams: I feel, therefore I can be free.”

From Plato's elevation of reason over emotion to Descartes' “I think, therefore I am,” Western philosophy has a longstanding tradition of valuing cognitive processes over emotional awareness—and this dichotomy has always been gendered. Aristotle linked reason (logos) with men and emotion (pathos) with women and declared there was no room for pathos in the polis.

For Lorde, the thinking over feeling hierarchy is a tool of suppression because it prevents people from accessing the emotions they need to bring about change. This is what Lorde means when she refers to poetry: it’s the process by which we go from experience to language to idea and finally to action. When we commit to it fully, we free ourselves.

Lorde believes that to experience this depth of feeling is to experience the actual (non-sexualised) meaning of the erotic:

“The erotic is a measure between the feelings of our sense of self and the chaos of our strongest feelings. It is an internal sense of satisfaction to which, once we have experienced it, we know we can aspire. For having experienced the fullness of this depth of feeling and recognising its power, in honor and self-respect we can require no less of ourselves.

It is never easy to demand the most from ourselves, from our lives, from our work. To encourage excellence is to go beyond the encouraged mediocrity of our society. [...]

Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence, forcing us to evaluate those aspects honestly in terms of their relative meaning within their lives. And this is a grave responsibility, projected from within each of us, not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”

Through the erotic, Lorde's perspective invites us to expand our definition of intelligence beyond cognitive processes to include embodied knowledge—the wisdom that comes from lived experience and emotional awareness. This broader conception doesn't reject analytical thinking but rather situates it within a more holistic understanding of human capability.

It might also just be the most beautiful definition of human agency I have ever read.

When I think about my best writing and working days, they feel just as Lorde describes them: challenging, fulfilling, and invigorating—dare I say, loving? The very word erotic comes from the Greek word eros, the personification of love.

Perhaps this is the ultimate liberation AI offers us. Not freedom from thinking or fear of failure, but freedom to reclaim the power of feeling as a source and marker of our own intelligence. For in a world increasingly mediated by AI, our human ability to access, trust, and act upon our deepest emotions may be what saves us from becoming passive observers of algorithmic output. Active participation in our own existence depends on staying intentional about the skills we hone vs. the ones we relinquish. It would be an ironic and beautiful thing if agentic AI became a catalyst for human agency, so long as that agency is constructively channelled.

But let’s not give AI all the credit. It wasn’t involved in my decision to start writing four and a half years ago. And while I work for an AI startup, the technology itself did not create or sustain a ‘how hard can it be?’, high-care culture. Humans did. Without AI’s rapid advances, however, I might not have paused to reflect on the impact of these two experiences and realise how my notion of intelligence was already evolving.

And thank God it is evolving. When I look back on my younger self now, I see a different story emerging. Instead of an inferior deputy to a prodigy Polly, I see a determined little girl who always raised her hand, who cared about everything she was trying to learn, and who never, ever stopped demanding more from herself.

She was a girl who thought and felt deeply. In this respect, she was already free.

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Six weeks ago, I announced I was winding down Pass It On without a clear idea of what was coming next. I knew I wanted to write fewer, better pieces on a wider range of topics. But since I wasn’t sure how to get there, I decided to take some time out and collect my thoughts.

TL;DR: this experiment yielded poor results. It turns out that publishing deadlines are excellent forcing functions. Who knew?

So here I am. Happy 2025 to you all!

Full disclosure: I still don’t know what this ‘new’ Substack is supposed to be about. What I do know is that the purpose of the work will only reveal itself by my doing the work. As someone who likes being in control, this is uncomfortable territory. But since I have lost count of the writers who describe their creative process this way, I am trying to trust in the wisdom. My dad told me it took David Bowie over twenty years of making music to realise that his life’s work—his creative mission—was to change the vocabulary of rock and roll. His music revealed its ultimate purpose over time.1

I have always hated labels. ‘Writer,’ ‘marketer,’ ‘creator,’ ‘strategist,’ ‘storyteller’—something about the assertiveness of the self-classification just makes me cringe. I prefer the “forget the noun, do the verb” philosophy: focus on the action rather than the identity associated with the action.2 Still, labels are a useful shorthand for attracting an audience. If Pass It On is no longer a space designed for Tech and Non-profits, what is it?

Counter to conventional business wisdom, I don’t think the answer lies in better understanding my audience. I think it lies in being more in tune with myself. On this topic, I stumbled on some good advice from Henrik Karlsson:

“What would have made me jump off my chair if I had read it six months ago. […] If you have figured out something that made you ecstatic, this is what you should write.”3

Inspired by Henrik’s prompt, I resolved to relaunch Pass It On with a new “jump-off-my-chair” style essay. I started brainstorming new newsletter names, even potential logos. But as the weeks passed and nothing seemed to click, I got disheartened.

Until, as if by magic, Jeanette Winterson came to my rescue:

Jeanette Winterson: Mind Over Matter

I GUESS IT'S TIME TO COME BACK

I had thought I was done with Substack - not because it isn’t a great platform. It is…

Read more

2 years ago · 1431 likes · 122 comments · jeanette winterson

Two days after Trump’s inauguration, after a two plus years Substack hiatus, Jeanette returned to the platform. And she did so with a vengeance:

“So for me, when I look at the mean angry faces of the Trump Lumps, I see the thing I fear most. Failure of imagination.

[…]

So, I am back because I want to talk about what I believe in. And sure,I believe in social justice and fair opportunity. We have to work for practical change wherever we can. There’s more though, and it matters.

If we can’t keep our imagination alive we will die.”

Jeanette is an important figure to me. Some back story:

I work for an AI company, and as a non-technical person with a humanities background, I’ve struggled to make sense of AI’s rapid advancements. Turns out, Jeanette felt the same way already in 2021, and the result was a beautiful collection of essays about AI’s potential impact on humanity.4 In early 2024, this essay collection became my guidebook. Finally, I had found someone who could explain AI in my language. When it came to choosing speakers for our company’s annual AI Summit in May, there was no doubt in my mind: Jeanette had to speak, and she needed to have the closing keynote.

To my delight, Jeanette accepted. And to my even greater delight, she absolutely brought the house down. 5

After the conference, we gathered for a celebratory dinner at my company’s office. I asked Jeanette why she had stopped writing on Substack, and she explained she’d grown tired of the expectation to keep producing fresh content. We talked about the tech industry’s echo chambers, how it needs to embrace more diverse perspectives. She told me to keep writing for that reason alone.

So here I am, nine months on. Finally acting on Jeanette’s words. It’s a broad framing for this newsletter, but it’s one I believe in. Alongside a few others:

Write to be a producer of meaning rather than solely a consumer of meaning.6

Write to give space to the awe and enthusiasm you feel for the world around you.

Write to try and prove yourself wrong rather than prove yourself right.7

Write to uphold the feminist thinking that is under threat.

Write to make sense of the many things you don’t understand.

Write to remain a person who can write.8

Write to bring yourself into being.

Write to bear witness.

Write to feel alive.

Write to hope.

Write to rage.9

Write to change.

If this isn’t what you signed up to Pass It On for, that’s fine—feel free to unsubscribe! No hard feelings. But if you’re up for sticking around, I’ll do my best to stay true to these principles in the hope it takes us somewhere interesting.

With that, I’ll leave you with an excerpt from ‘The Writer on, and at, Her Work’ by American author Ursula K. Le Guin.10 Her words say more on this topic than I could ever hope to express.

Her work, I really think her work

isn’t fighting, isn’t winning,

isn’t being the Earth, isn’t being the Moon,

Her work, I really think her work

is finding what her real work is

and doing it,

her work, her own work,

her being human,

her being in the world.

So, if I am

a writer, my work

is words. Unwritten letters.

Words are my way of being

human, woman, me.

Word is the whorl that spins me,

the shuttle thrown through the warp of years

to weave a life, the hand

that shapes to use, to grace.

Word is my tooth,

my wing.

Word is my wisdom.

I am a bundle of letters

in a secret drawer

in an old desk.

What is in the letters?

What do they say?

Let’s find out.

See you in a month,

Lauren

This is the 100th post I’ve published for Pass It On, and it will also be the last in the newsletter’s current form.

Some of you have been subscribed to Pass It On since 2020, which is wild. Back then, I could never have predicted four years of publishing. There was no grand plan, just a loose but persistent itch to give back to the non-profit sector during a global crisis and a desire to build a consistent writing habit. I started sharing things I thought would be useful and inviting others to do the same, and slowly but surely, more of you came on board. I am extremely grateful for all the friends and learnings that emerged along the way.

There is no momentous reason behind my decision to wind down this newsletter. I just sensed that it was time. And like Joe MacLeod explained last week, it’s good to allow for endings. I started Pass It On in a different version of the world and as a different version of myself. I’m happy that my priorities are evolving.

My most important learning from these 100 posts is that the writing and the thinking—or more specifically, the writing to think—is in fact the whole point. We live in a loud, impatient, increasingly online world that demands as it destroys our attention. When you’re constantly distracted, it’s not easy to think at all, let alone to think well.

This is what makes a creative act like writing so radical: you sit in front of a blank page and submit yourself to the brilliant, excruciating process that is going from nothing to something. You enter the gap between—a liminal space where you attempt to find your thoughts and give them form. When you come back, you’re a slightly different person. Creativity, as my dad once said, is the ultimate act of faith, which is probably why it feels so glorious.

I haven’t decided what the next evolution of Pass It On will be. All I know is I want to follow my intuition and write fewer, better pieces on overlooked topics that don’t have straightforward answers. I’ll either leave this Substack as an archive and create an entirely new one from scratch or build upon what’s here. Updates to come in January, once I’ve had more time to think.

Thanks so much for being on this journey. It means more than you know.

With love and gratitude,
Lauren

I think it’s fair to say that humans suck at endings. From products and services to relationships, even life itself, we’re often in denial about the end of an experience—assuming it’s supposed to feel worse than the start.

Not Joe MacLeod.

Joe is the founder of the world’s first customer-ending business. He’s on a mission to help individuals and organisations design better endings through writing, speaking, training, and consulting. Along the way, his work has been featured by the likes of Wired, TEDx, and Fast Company.

I first heard Joe speak about endings at a Gothenburg Creative Mornings lecture in 2017. The irony of starting my day by thinking about the end wasn’t lost on me, and a seed got planted. Fast forward to this June year and I found myself writing about endings after attending a beautiful goodbye celebration for an organisation I cared about. I reached out to Joe, and here we are. December seemed like the right time to publish, for obvious reasons.

Why are you so interested in endings?

They are so overlooked in product creation. As one of my cohort participants said, "Endings are the biggest issue hiding in plain sight." Endings have an enormous influence on society and have sociological implications, so they are a fascinating area to study.

People often think we overlook endings because of some sort of hard-nosed business logic. As I also did years ago. My first book Ends. reframes the problem with endings as a sociological issue from centuries ago. Changes in finance, fasting, and careers from the Protestant Uprising laid the foundations for the Industrial Revolution and the following marketing boom to distance endings as part of the consumption experience. Creating an enormous hole in meaning at the end. We now need to adjust that.

Endings are critical to reimagining our approach to product consumption and creation. The thesis of Endineering focuses on the consumer experience. Many initiatives to improve consumerism focus on materials. Although important, consumerism is driven by emotions, not materials, so it is important we engage around experiences at the end.

What does Martin Luther have to do with our modern understanding of endings?

I start the story of endings in many of my keynotes with death and the emergence of changes in Europe before the Industrial Revolution. Particularly after the plague and the rise of the Protestants, with Martin Luther as a central figure.

Within this rise came new ways of thinking about jobs, fasting, and debt. Not to mention a different relationship with death and afterlife. These changes influenced society thereafter, and laid the foundations for the industrial revolution, not in a material or mechanistic way, but in a consumer psychological way.

For example, historically we would be far more comfortable with witnessing and being around death. People would be invited in to hear the person's thoughts on life before they died. A testament. It was an important experience to witness and to have as a dying person. All sorts of people were welcomed into the room—neighbours, children. Over centuries we have mechanised and distanced this. Service personnel manage the experience who have no relationship to the dying person. People have pain managed, and often die comfortably but alone, without sharing their testament. We now talk about the Will part: “What money did they leave?” We look at material over meaning at the end. I expand on this in much more detail in Ends.

How can a good ending become a competitive advantage?

In many ways!

First, good endings can avoid business risk. Businesses gather extensive customer data during onboarding and usage, tracking desire and product engagement. But at the end? Hardly any data is captured, leaving businesses in the dark. Ignoring this stage is a business risk—endings are part of your business.

Second, businesses that engage at the end also boost consumer satisfaction. Netflix exemplifies this with its flexible, easy-to-cancel contracts, unlike US cable companies, which impose year-long contracts with penalties. Netflix’s consumer satisfaction is in the mid-80s and rising, while US cable companies are in the mid-60s and have been declining for 11 years. The difference is the end. Some businesses design for it and make it appear clear and comfortable. Others avoid it.

Think of Gyms. We will all start signing up again in the new year with good intentions, and many of us will be faced with contracts and their punitive clauses for early leaving. Some of us will break free. Then we will all do the same thing the following year. Happy for a few months, then sad trying to leave. Gyms have been offering this service for a long time. The most innovative gym will look at the data and say to themselves, "People don’t like going to gyms. They leave gyms. Let's make the best leaving experience of all the gyms." That gym will then be the most successful.

Third, sales. People often say, "With every good end, starts a beginning." This misses the point. Businesses excel at beginnings but overlook how endings impact sales. As Daniel Pink notes, customers feel reassured by a clear exit. Kia Cars' 7-year warranty provided an ending to the product. Customers loved it so much that it doubled global sales.

Fourth, brand equity. Brands lose a lot when a customer leaves—not just the revenue of a loyal customer but, arguably more importantly, the brand equity. The gargantuan effort, resources, and money at the beginning are lost at the end. Any consumer who has found it difficult to leave a service will say to themselves, "Never again." Businesses need to protect their brand and the memories of a good experience at the end.

You also believe that good endings can contribute towards circularity and sustainability. Can you explain how?

Many proposed solutions to overconsumption focus on technical or efficiency improvements, often requiring new purchases of “more sustainable” products or putting a certification symbol where a consumer experience should be.

Today, publicly listed companies spend $220,000 to $480,000 annually on ratings (Reuters), often leading to certificates and marketing symbols. Consumers struggle to understand the many environmental labels. There are 200 labels in the EU and over 450 worldwide.

These actions miss the point. Consumerism is driven by desire and emotion, not rationality. Yet so few conversations are happening about this in Circularity. A product's offboarding needs to be a consumer experience, not just a passive circular material. We should design consumer offboarding experiences that bond provider and consumer together in mutual purpose to neutralise the negative consequences of consumption.

Patagonia's Worn Wear initiative is a good example of this: being really active at the end of the product lifecycle, getting involved in a material and tangible way, and building an experience around it. Rapanui's recycling program is another example within the fashion industry.

You’re arguing that consumer endings require good experience design. What are the characteristics of a good ending? How can organisations get better at designing them?

A good consumer off-boarding experience should be…

connected consciously to the rest of the experience through emotional triggers that are measurable and actionable by the user.

It should identify and bond the consumer and provider together in mutual responsibility. Its aim should be to neutralise the negative consequences of consumption. It should be concluded in a timely manner and avoid assets falling outside the consumer lifecycle.

Each of these statements can be focused on to build part of a wider experience.

Good endings don't stop at consumer experiences. Employees and organisations deserve good endings, too. I love how Wind Down has applied the essence of Endineering to non-profit closures. The Decelerator has similar ambitions, supporting civil society organisations grappling with an imminent ending. On top of , they even have a free coaching hotline.

Which three books or other media have impacted you most and why?

Banker to the Poor by Muhammad Yunus is an amazing book about Microcredit lending and its impact on people's lives.

The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff is an eye-opening guide to the techniques and applications of Big Tech that also makes a pretty good contemporary history book.

The Act of Creation by Arthur Koestler is a wonderful book about creative acts of all sorts and why we do them.

Want to learn more about Endings? Become an Endineer! Joe is offering Pass It On readers 25% off his online 4-week Endineering training course. Use the discount code 25offendscohort at checkout. You can also use the code NCKEV for 25% off the Ends and Endineering ebooks.

Big thanks to Joe. And to you as always for reading. I’ll be back in a few days with a final post before the end of the year.

Lauren

Hello!

Thanks so much to those who replied to the New Suns post. It felt like the beginning of something important and I’m grateful for the words of support.

Continuing the conversation this week is our Q&A guest, .

Monika is a German-Chinese writer and facilitator dedicated to building community through the shared experience of loneliness. Her Substack, , captured my attention many months back for its deep explorations into an overlooked yet urgent topic.

Loneliness is a silent epidemic. In 2023, The World Health Organization declared it a global health threat, with the US surgeon general saying the mortality efforts of loneliness are equivalent to smoking 15 cigarettes per day. Loneliness also transcends borders and demographics, affecting young and old in regions across the world, with particularly extreme effects on men.

It’s no secret that Trump and his MAGA machine have been weaponizing loneliness. As Monika points out in her latest post, it’s a well-recognized tactic for extremist movements—offering belonging and escape from isolation.

So what do we do about it? For Monika, the answer doesn’t lie in trying to eradicate loneliness altogether. Instead, she invites us to wonder: what if loneliness is our path back to each other?

Let’s start at the root. What is loneliness?

Loneliness is often understood as a lack of emotional or social connections, but I believe this definition is too narrow. Loneliness can arise not only from disconnection with others but also from a disconnect within ourselves or from something greater—existentially, spiritually, and even viscerally.

I believe that loneliness, while often viewed negatively, can be a vital teacher. It’s a profound aspect of our human experience that holds a soft power, reminding us of our deepest longings to connect and reconnect with ourselves, each other, and the world around us. In this way, loneliness can prompt profound personal and communal growth if we open ourselves up to its lessons.

What sparked your interest in loneliness as a phenomenon?

In my role as the community manager at the House of Beautiful Business, I observed a palpable sense of disconnect among people, which fueled their desire for community and connection on a deeper level that we offered in our gatherings and programs. This made me curious about the underlying factors driving this shared longing. I noticed societal polarization in recent years and began exploring the connections between loneliness, totalitarianism, and how our urban designs and work-centric cultures prioritize individualism over community care. It became clear to me that our focus on separation and independence/self-sufficiency undermines the relationships that should be at the heart of our lives.

Why do we find it so hard to talk about loneliness?

There is a deep-rooted stigma and shame surrounding loneliness, which discourages people from opening up and seeking connection. This silence exacerbates the isolation we feel, which can have tragic consequences on our health and quality of life. For example, South Korea is facing a crisis of “lonely deaths,” with over 3,600 recorded last year. The problem has become so pressing that Seoul has committed over £250 million in the next five years to create ‘a city where no one is lonely.’

Modern loneliness is tied closely to a competitive, achievement-oriented culture that emphasizes relational orientation, where individuals feel defined by their contributions to society. For those who feel they’re not achieving enough or making a meaningful impact, the isolation can be profound. Unfortunately, many people cope through escapism—turning to video games, social media, and even AI companions to numb their pain. But these solutions often provide temporary relief, not true connection.

What’s needed is a shift in how we address loneliness—a cultural and social approach that prioritizes support systems where we’re encouraged to express our vulnerabilities without shame. Rather than escaping or compensating for our loneliness, we should foster communities that emphasize mutual care, compassion, and a genuine sense of belonging. Only then can we begin to dismantle the cycles of isolation that many currently endure in silence.

Your Substack explores the journey from loneliness to oneliness. What is the difference? Why is oneliness a superior option?

Oneliness isn’t about being superior to loneliness; it's not about winning or being right. Historically, the concept of loneliness emerged only in the 1800s; before that, the focus was on 'oneliness,' or the idea of wholeness and interconnectedness. With industrialization and urbanization, individualism and loneliness took root. My exploration of loneliness aims to understand how we can shift back toward a state of oneliness, fostering a capacity for care that allows us to reconnect with ourselves and each other in meaningful ways.

You wrote a piece for Fast Company that revealed one question that prompts rewarding connections. What is it?

In the interview, I discussed the importance of returning to a place of understanding and listening. Inspired by Marshall Rosenberg’s work and Thich Nhat Hanh's teachings on presence, I emphasized the need to pause and listen deeply instead of reacting obsessively to opinions. This approach encourages us to cultivate connections through genuine engagement. One question I propose is: 'What do you need right now?' This invites vulnerability and opens pathways to meaningful dialogue, moving us away from reactive interactions to a space of mutual understanding.

What else can we do to relate better to others and the world? What do we need to unlearn?

To improve our relationships, we need to unlearn the belief that we are a burden to others and must fix ourselves in isolation. There’s nothing inherently broken; rather, we have things to understand and relate to. Our motivation to reconnect should stem from compassion and empathy, not from guilt or shame. We must learn to practice vulnerability in small, meaningful ways—like sharing a smile or engaging in deeper conversations—creating environments where we can explore tension and conflict with openness. By prioritizing care and compassion, we can gradually reclaim our essential humanity in a society overly focused on productivity and efficiency.

Now for the questions I ask every guest. How can the tech and non-profit sectors come closer together?

I wish for a bridge between the tech sector, particularly Silicon Valley, which often prioritizes quantification and rationalization, and the non-profit sector, which grapples with fundraising and operating within capitalist structures. The tech industry can neglect the humanity and moral obligations that our societies need, while non-profits can sometimes become overly focused on survival rather than impact. A collaborative approach that values the insights from both sectors could create more effective and empathetic solutions to address the complex social issues we face today.

Which three books or other media have impacted you most and why?

Marshall Rosenberg’s Nonviolent Communication provides a framework for connecting compassionately with others, helping us learn to navigate conflict and communicate our needs without judgment or blame. 

Thich Nhat Hanh’s Interbeing reminds us of our interconnectedness, or as I would say, oneliness—not only with each other but with nature and all of life. His teachings on mindfulness and “interbeing” encourage a profound awareness of the ways in which we are all part of a larger whole. 

Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass blends Indigenous wisdom with scientific knowledge, reminding us of the reciprocal relationships we have with the Earth. Her work speaks to the kind of regenerative mindset that values care, gratitude, and respect, which I believe are essential values for any journey toward reconnecting and healing from isolation.

More questions for Monika? Email hello@monikajiang.org and subscribe to her Substack .

Thanks so much for reading,

Lauren

Do I have the right to feel angry about last week’s US Election?

This question has swirled around my head since last Wednesday. I’ve been in several conversations where the default answer has been: don’t get swept up in something outside your control. It’s a comforting response, but it hasn’t sat right.

The state of American democracy affects all of us, no matter what country we live in. Last week’s result will surely embolden populist movements across other continents. Sweden, where I live, shifted to a centre-right government in 2022, with the far-right Sweden Democrats becoming the second-largest party. At no point during this US presidential campaign did I see it in my interest to take any action. Looking at my track record, this is not surprising. Give or take a few uncomfortable conversations, the most I’ve done to advance a political position in my home country (the UK) is vote. How much license should that give me to complain when things don’t go my way?

The documentary filmmaker Adam Curtis has described the modern Liberal condition as ‘Oh Dearism.’ For Curtis, Oh Dearists are the left-leaning folks living in a time of relatively extraordinary privilege, eager to profess their discontent at the state of the world before carrying on with their day. In other words, they say they want change but don’t do anything to bring it about. As uncomfortable as it is to admit, I recognise myself in this definition. I’d like to move beyond it.

It’s amazing how many signals the universe can send once the mind decides to pay attention to something.

Last month, I visited two politically engaged friends in New York. Both had been volunteering for a nonpartisan telephone campaign that aims to encourage non-voting environmentalists to go out and vote. (An estimated 8 million environmentalists didn’t vote in the 2020 election.) I felt proud of these friends for giving their time and inspired by the specificity with which they’d chosen to act. As environmentalists themselves, they were able to leverage common ground in conversations that might lead to change.

After returning from New York I had an inexplicable urge to listen to the On Being podcast for the first time in years. The latest interview was with the writer and activist adrienne maree brown, author of multiple books including Emergent Strategy and the newly published Loving Corrections.

brown’s work revolves around the principle of radical imagination, of daring to imagine other worlds beyond the constructs we have accepted:

“…we’re living inside of imaginations that other people told us were true and told us, this is how the world is. […] I think about it often; that we live in this abundant world, and we’ve been told it’s scarce. And then we’re given all these stories of scarcity. And because of that scarcity, we have to fight each other constantly. We live in a world where there’s actually no superiority based on what we’re born into, whether it be skin, sexuality, gender, any of that, but someone has imagined superiority, and someone has imagined it into a structure that we now all [accept].” — in conversation with Krista Tippett

brown chooses her words carefully. When she talks about radical imagination, she’s not implying violent change. She’s talking about radical in the way the activist Angela Davis used it, as originally defined from the Latin:

"vital to life," from Latin radicalis "of or having roots," from Latin radix (genitive radicis) "root"

From this perspective, radical change is both natural and thorough, aiming to surpass superficial solutions by getting to the root cause.

Grasping things at the root requires patience—an acceptance of nuance and complexity. Rarely do we find ourselves in that state of mind after an election. It’s much easier to be pissed off, pass judgement, and see things as black and white, which is exactly how we ended up with this election result in the first place.

Last Friday, the writer posted a tribute to the late Dorothy Allison. Dorothy was an American lesbian author and activist. She passed away on election day aged 75. I’d never heard of Dorothy or read any of her work, but I followed Kaitlyn’s nudge to read Dorothy’s 1994 essay ‘A Question of Class’ and was flawed by its ending:

“The horror of class stratification, racism, and prejudice is that some people begin to believe that the security of their families and communities depends on the oppression of others, that for some to have good lives there must be others whose lives are truncated and brutal. It is a belief that dominates this culture. It is what makes the poor whites of the South so determinedly racist and the middle class so contemptuous of the poor. It is a myth that allows some to imagine that they build their lives on the ruin of others, a secret core of shame for the middle class, a goad and a spur to the marginal working class, and cause enough for the homeless and poor to feel no constraints on hatred or violence. The power of the myth is made even more apparent when we examine how, within the lesbian and feminist communities where we have addressed considerable attention to the politics of marginalization, there is still so much exclusion and fear, so many of us who do not feel safe.

I grew up poor, hated, the victim of physical, emotional, and sexual violence, and I know that suffering does not ennoble. It destroys. To resist destruction, self-hatred, or lifelong hopelessness, we have to throw off the conditioning of being despised, the fear of becoming the they that is talked about so dismissively, to refuse lying myths and easy moralities, to see ourselves as human, flawed, and extraordinary. All of us—extraordinary.”

The horror which Alisson describes is frighteningly close to the imagined world we live in today, now affirmed by the 75 million humans who cast their vote for Trump.

Whether you identify as a Curtis Oh Dearist or not, you might have found yourself thinking: there’s no getting past this.

That’s understandable.

What if, instead of shutting off with that thought, we remembered that this world is all the result of someone else’s imagination?

What if, instead of trying to repair a broken world, we allowed ourselves to imagine new ones instead?

Where would we end up?

Octavia E. Butler was an American science fiction writer, one of the few Black women authors to venture into the genre in the 1970s. In the 1990s, she published her acclaimed Parable novel series centred on the protagonist Lauren Olamina, a young visionary in a dystopian America ravaged by social and environmental collapse. Convinced by humanity’s potential for growth, Lauren creates a new faith called Earthseed with the guiding philosophy that God is Change.

The third and final Parable, which Butler struggled to write and ultimately left unfinished, includes the epigram “There’s nothing new/under the sun,/but there are new suns.” It captures our collective tension between optimism and pessimism but also the possibility of breaking through an impasse into something new.

I’ve never been much of a science fiction reader, and Butler’s work was largely unfamiliar until brown quoted this beautiful epigram in her On Being interview. But this is the power of noticing, of slowing down and following your nose. You can end up somewhere new.

Instead of turning inward, I want to venture outward.

I want to find new suns.

Thanks so much for reading,

Lauren

P.S. Is it a coincidence that nearly all the trails I’ve followed these past few weeks have been laid by women? I think not.

Hello!

We’re back to scheduled programming. (No other excuse other than busy times. It’s good to be back.)

This week’s Q&A guest is Dr Amelia Peterson, a social scientist with a background in education policy. Her research focuses on how education systems adapt to societal and economic change.

I’ve known Amelia since our undergraduate days and have referenced her work in Pass It On a number of times. One of the things I admire most about Amelia is her ability to reason and act through first principles. In 2020, after teaching Social Policy at the London School of Economics, Amelia became one of the founding faculty members of The London Interdisciplinary School (LIS)—a brand-new university on a mission to challenge the traditional paradigm of higher education. Instead of studying discrete subjects (like Classics or Biology), LIS students study complex problems from a range of interdisciplinary perspectives—building knowledge across the arts, science, and humanities. The argument being that students are better equipped to solve the world’s most important problems.

I asked Amelia to share the LIS founding story and her views on the role of education in an AI-augmented world. Her answers do not disappoint.

What problem is the London Interdisciplinary School (LIS) trying to solve? How does it differ from traditional higher education?

LIS was created to bridge several kinds of gaps in higher education: between 'academia' and industry, between the arts and sciences, and between those who are set on a trajectory towards university and those who aren't. We are a hybrid institution that embodies parts of all those different cultures: those who come to visit could find a ground floor that feels like a typical messy start-up, then a philosophy seminar going on upstairs, a data science class above that, and an art studio in the basement, with the student common room sandwiched between, where the wall is covered in a big map of where all the students come from. It's a pretty special community right now. 

What made you realise that higher education needed to change?

I think many academics feel torn between the demands of research and teaching. The incentives in higher education are still very much loaded towards research, which means that even when individual academics are trying to innovate their teaching, it's hard to do anything on a collective level that would reform the overall student experience. I remember vividly being in a faculty meeting at one of my previous institutions where one faculty member was trying to do something different in their class that would require them to extend sessions by 30 minutes, and others were complaining that it would create a new expectation and students would start demanding more time from all of them. And they had a point—for many, higher education is now just a commodity where students measure and compare their experience in the number of taught hours. We need much more focus on what they're actually learning, the quality of the learning experience, and above all, the quality of the curriculum: what care has gone into choosing what they spend time doing and why. 

In 2021, you took the concept of education back to first principles with your book Thrive: The Purpose of Schools in a Changing World. One year later, ChatGPT arrived. Has the technology increased your conviction in your thesis?

My co-author Valerie Hannon and I wrote Thrive because we realized that too many policy conversations about education centred on the how and what instead of the why. There was a lot of discussion about “21st-century skills” and how to use technology to improve student outcomes, but very little was being said about why we should focus on certain outcomes instead of others. To counter this trend, Thrive outlined a set of purposes for education that are grounded in an analysis of what we as individuals, communities, and a planet need to live flourishing lives. 

These questions about purpose have only become more pressing with developments in AI. We had been saying for a long time that the problem with standardised testing is that computers will become better at the tests than we are, and that's exactly what has happened. Yet it seems the primary use of AI in education is to help students pass those same tests. I can understand that—that's the orientation of our education system at the moment—but I would be interested to hear from any tech companies focused on changing that orientation. I’m also interested in how we might use technologies to support different purposes of education. There's some interesting work going on in the assessment space, but still a huge amount to be done there. 

When it comes to AI, what are the greatest risks and opportunities institutions like LIS are grappling with right now?

There's clearly a huge opportunity for students to enhance their powers of analysis and creation by using AI tools. As a relatively new institution, it's been relatively easy to fold these tools into the curriculum and give students practice with them. But there is a considerable risk in students becoming reliant on tools that predominantly now require a monthly payment, that will never be 100% accurate or verifiable, that may suddenly disappear due to legal or technical challenges, and the use of which is ethically questionable given the way they use prior human work and huge amounts of energy.

I go back and forth on where the greatest risk lies—promoting their use too much or not enough—but increasingly, I think there is a saturation point where the role of education is to preserve a space separate from AI: I want to ensure that students learn to use their own minds, hearts, and hands independently of these tools. I would still encourage any young person to understand them, however, and I'm glad all our students learn about how LLMs work and study the ethics of AI as compulsory parts of the programme. 

Does AI increase the importance of interdisciplinary thinking? Why?

AI increases the importance of any kind of thinking, particularly—obviously—critical thinking, since we all have to become better at spotting when output has errors. This is where interdisciplinary (ID) thinking becomes even more important: it heightens your awareness of how knowledge is created across different fields, which makes you more equipped to identify different kinds of errors— not just factual but logical, aesthetic, and ethical. AI also may increase the value of an interdisciplinary education because it can extend and enhance skills, so someone with foundational training across photography, statistics, and design, for example, can use AI tools to produce higher-quality work in all those fields.

When we were at university, interdisciplinary studies were looked down upon, seen as less than. Why was that?

Anything interdisciplinary runs the risk of just being a watered-down version of disciplinary learning. It's easy to take insights or models from one field and apply them in another in a way that seems novel just because it's unfamiliar to the other field. At LIS, we say that interdisciplinary learning has to be problem- or purpose-driven because that's what 'disciplines' it: there has to be a driving reason for working out what subjects are relevant and how they have to come together, so then you can stand back and evaluate whether the integration has served its purpose.  

What's been the most challenging thing about building a university from scratch? Has anything surprised you?

The most challenging thing about doing this in England is that the higher education sector lacks a financially sustainable model. LIS has prioritized teaching UK students, and our fees are set at the same level as most of the sector, in line with the student loan system, where the loan rate has not kept up with inflation. This is challenging for us but even more so for our students, who have to make ends meet living in London on their maintenance loans and topping that up with work while also studying. As a student, I worked during the holidays but not during term time, and that's not the reality for most students now. In that financial context, the ideal is for students to get meaningful work experience while supplementing their income: we've seen some of our students continue their paid summer internships into longer-term part-time jobs alongside their studies. I hope that's a model that might grow.  

How will higher education in Britain look in 10 years from now?

It may continue to look different in Scotland from England and Wales due to the different funding models and devolved policy. In England and Wales, at least, we should expect greater diversity in the higher education system as more novel institutions start up. I hope the biggest change will be in the assessment system and how marks get aggregated into percentages and degree classifications. It's already widely acknowledged that firsts, seconds, etc., have become relatively meaningless with the differences across institutions, and there is a huge opportunity to increase the value of what higher education does by improving how we communicate what students have learned and what they can do. Higher education should be at the forefront of creating a genuine skills system with a real market for knowledge and skills, not just credentials. But that would take serious collective investment in assessment innovation and recognition that high-quality assessment is a public good. I would love to see some apprenticeship levy funding diverted towards that. But that's another project… 

Which three books or other media have impacted you most and why?

Currently, Nate Hagen's podcast The Great Simplification is keeping me thinking. It's extremely earnest, sometimes more than I can take, but I appreciate that call to take things seriously; Brits find it all too easy not to. 

Going further back, Richard Rorty's Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity shaped how I see the world. His work, alongside many others in the American pragmatist tradition of philosophy, made me less interested in abstract questions of what's true and more interested in what it means for us and what we do. 

Related to that, Nel Noddings' book Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education probably had a lasting impact on what I value and see as true. Up to that point, I had had a very logic, analysis, and argument-based education, particularly in relation to philosophy. Noddings' book helped me unpick that and think about what else matters. I still think all those things matter, but it chipped open the space for other things to enter.

More questions for Amelia? Find her on LinkedIn or email amelia.peterson@lis.ac.uk. Bear in mind, she’s on maternity leave until January 2025!

Thanks so much for reading,

Lauren

I recently shared a list of wonderful women doing wonderful things with words. This week, we’re meeting one of them.

Chiara Quadranti, the creator of .

Chiara and I are basically professional twins. We first met at Oxford some 13 years ago, where we were studying the same foreign languages degree and volunteering for the student advertising society. Our mutual interest in communication led us to similar graduate roles at the creative agency AKQA before our shared desire for more hands-on work took us into marketing leadership positions at young, fast-growing tech companies. Along the way, we also moved our lives abroad—Chiara to France, me to Sweden—and started Substacks. We haven’t seen each other in person for about 9 years. It’s strange, lovely, life-affirming stuff.

One year ago, Chiara decided to turn off course. She left her established senior marketing role for a voluntary career break, during which she explored everything from charity work and freelancing to podcasting and running an art exhibition. The experience was transformative. And in true Chiara style, she’s willing to share what she’s learned generously and honestly with others.

Tell us about Donald Super and why he’s not so super.

Donald Super was a ‘vocational counsellor’, essentially the OG career coach. This is what he thought a typical career should look like:

A few things caught my eye when I first saw this model. One: life starts with birth and ends with disengagement. Two: curiosities, fantasies and interests die before you’re aged 11. Three: the model is perfectly linear. You explore, focus, optimise, consolidate and decelerate. A beautiful arc. Highly efficient. And boring.

I’ve got nothing against Donald. His model is based on a different value system where success is more closely mapped to financial stability. I would argue that success today also hinges on fulfilment and richness throughout your life, whether it’s “work” or “play”—and for that curiosity is the key, whatever your age.

According to Donald’s model, I’m at the age where I should be stabilising, going into consolidating. This pretty much perfectly describes the opposite of what I’m doing. I proudly made it to the stabilising bit but then decided it was more exciting to go back to the beginning.

What prompted you to go back to the beginning?

The real catalyst was when a career coach asked me if I ever felt like I was being pushed, and I was surprised that my answer was no.

I’d earned myself a senior position, I was well-regarded by my colleagues, I felt useful—I automatically assumed I’d succeeded in hitting my objective. But was I being pushed? When my coach asked me this question, I realised that I was stagnating: I wasn’t being exposed to new things and was often recycling the same knowledge and skills.

Cue the “Exploration phase”. I quit my job and decided to throw myself at things a bit more. My number one goal was diversity. Since then I’ve learnt so much about different types of businesses—from debugging software to Deep Tech climate companies turning CO2 into sustainable fuel. I’ve also tried to see what’s going on outside the startup bubble. I volunteered for a mountaineering charity, supported a local cultural organisation, created art, organised an exhibition, dabbled with podcasting and am now experimenting with writing on Substack. 

This year has been about reclaiming that curiosity and staying humble—when you leave your bubble there is so much to learn. 

What have you learned so far?

I used to be a chronic overthinker. I found it easy to journal but hard to throw myself into things. Since I’ve got better at working out this muscle, I’ve been able to test things for real and note how they make me feel. I’ll give two examples. 

1. I knew I was drawn to doing something around community so I volunteered for a charity called 82-4000 who help those in financial and social difficulty experience the mountains. We spent 4 days at the magical Hospice du St Bernard and instantly, I felt myself energised—alive and inspired. Later, I helped the same charity raise money for a fundraising event in Paris. Though the impact was arguably higher it just wasn’t the same—I was back at the desk again whilst what I really liked was being on the ground, interacting with people and seeing impact first-hand. 

2. I thought it would be cool to make a living as an artist. So I started trying to get commissions and organised an art exhibition. I soon realised that what I liked—again— was the community aspect but being a professional artist wasn’t really for me. It had sounded romantic but in reality, it took away everything I liked about the process: the joy of experimenting, solving the problem and moving on to the next challenge (rather than repeating a proven formula to churn out commissions). 

It worked in the inverse too. There were several things that I ended up doing, unsure if I’d like them, and being proven completely wrong!

You thought you would be judged for not seeking out a linear path towards becoming a Chief Marketing Officer. Is judgment the only reason you kept at it? What other incentives were at play? 

No, it wasn’t. A big part of what kept me going was ambition and expectation. I’ve always had a strong drive to prove myself, perhaps linked to being a second-generation immigrant. I wanted to be successful and climbing the career ladder seemed the logical way. All the people around me in my little London bubble were working in well-paid, prestigious jobs in the City—the only way was up. 

I should also say I was lucky to work a long time for a company, Onfido, where my dedication and hard work were recognised and rewarded. I felt valued and that’s a nice feeling. So I stayed.

If you could go back and have a chat with your 2018-2020 self, what would you say to her?

It’s tempting to say I’d do things differently. Temping to tell her to be bolder and follow her gut. But I think we all do things for the right reason at the time; the universe has a way of making things work. What I did back then isn’t right for me now but I don’t have any regrets. I’ve learnt a lot from all the things I’ve done—and didn’t do—and I’m glad for where I am now. 

If there would be one piece of advice though, it would be to take note of your feelings and talk about them with the people that matter to you. Don’t ignore your instinct when it tells you something’s not quite right (even if now is not quite the right time to change things). 

What advice would you give someone torn between linear progression and an abstract yearning for something different?

Well, I guess there’s no free lunch. Are you willing to face the trade-offs? Seeking ‘something different’ often means exploration, uncertainty, lots of time spent, and less money coming in. Is the reward great enough? 

If the answer is yes, then go explore! You’ll unlikely wake up one day with an epiphany about your Perfect Job (at least that hasn’t happened to me). It will come to you piece by piece and every exploration will lead you down new avenues. It’s neither about the destination nor the journey; it’s about the process and you have to enjoy the process. 

A simple practical exercise: map out all the different things that excite you. For me, it was Community, Outdoors, Creativity and Climate. Pick the one you feel the strongest about and find something you can do quickly and easily to test it.

Now for the questions I ask every guest: how can the tech and non-profit sectors come closer together?

“Can capitalism be non-extractive? Can a consumer goods company end overconsumption? While the challenges we face are daunting, they also provide an incredible opportunity to be part of the solution, stand with Earth, and help provide an example for business that can reshape systems, cultures and our relationship with this world for the better.”  — Patagonia, The Next 50 Years

Patagonia are perhaps an obvious example, but truly inspiring in the way they acknowledge the tension in the line they tread (mixing activism and capitalism) and go beyond words to do something about it. It’s less about being the shining example of integrity but taking action that has impact. 

What’s an unusual opinion or uncommon belief you hold?

I believe that humans are intrinsically connected to the landscapes that surround them and that different people are attracted to the energy of different geologies and terrains; that’s where you feel most at home. Mine is mossy, green and granitic. (Substack article on this coming soon…)

Which three books or other media have impacted you most and why?

• Climbing Iran (documentary) — about Iran’s only female professional rock climber Nasim Eshqi. Committed to “changing things little by little”, Nasim brings other young women to the rock walls outside Tehran, teaching them how to climb and gain independence. There was one sentence that stuck with me: “You can be useful your whole life, and that will never be enough.”

• In the Cairngorms (poetry) — Currently reading this scintillating, little-known collection of poems that captures life and landscapes. Sharp, vibrant and just.

• Isolation Journals by Suleika Jaouad (Substack) — The first Substack I subscribed to and which inspired me to write again. I am mesmerised by the pared-back elegance of Suleika’s words.

More questions for Chiara? Find her on LinkedIn and subscribe for free to .

Thanks so much for reading,

Lauren

Hello!

It’s been two months since I set out to find more interesting things to write about.

I’ve been foraging, collecting, following my nose—slowly filling new mental ‘buckets’ of creativity. It’s been a revealing process, affirming my hunch that Pass It On needs to evolve into something a bit more expansive.

While I contemplate what that means for future posts, here are July-September’s mental buckets. They are (hopefully) the source of some interesting pieces to come.

Dare to disagree

• How to Disagree, Paul Graham

• When to disagree and commit, Wes Kao

• “Consensus is the enemy of scale”, Hubspot co-founder Brian Halligan in conversation with Shane Parrish.

Understanding your scale

• Do Things that Don’t Scale, Paul Graham

• 1000 True Fans, Kevin Kelly

• Against Scale,

• Pursuits That Can’t Scale,

• A Surge of Wildly Human-Intensive Non-Scalable Experiences,

The allure of false binaries

• Are you a jerk or a liar?

• Are you a rememberer or a forgetter?

• Are you an asker or a guesser?

• Are you nice or kind?

The subtle art of giving a f*ck

• A unified theory of fucks, Mandy Brown

• Not caring about your job: freedom or misery?

• Soul-Making Productivity,

• Things you learn dating Cate Hall,

• How to Be More Agentic,

Women doing wonderful things with words

• — the British singer-songwriter, started to reflect on her journey in songwriting. Predictably, it is excellent.

• — a uni pal of mine, started to reflect on motherhood, PhD writing, fiction, and poetry. The first post I read was her beautiful close reading of Laura Marling’s songs.

• — my multidisciplinary ex-colleague, started 1 year after quitting her job in tech to explore her hypothesis that our work lives and life lives don’t have to exist in siloes.

• — the inimitable creator of , is running a 12-week course on inclusive and accessible communication. It’s “pay what you can” for charities and social enterprises, and Ettie’s offering a 30% discount for Pass It On subscribers working outside of the charity sector. Code: PASSITON1000.

What is joy?

• A manifesto for joy, Ettie Bailey-King

• The Writing Life, Annie Dillard

• If Your World Is Not Enchanted, You're Not Paying Attention,

• The answer according to thousands of Nick Cave fans, including this one:

If one or more of these links strikes a chord, let me know!

Lauren

Hello!

It’s good to be back. I decided to take an extended newsletter break during my Swedish summer vacation, and I’ll be writing about some of my uncoverings soon. Today, we’re going to hear from Ian Wharton.

I’ve known Ian for almost a decade. We both worked together at AKQA, where he was leading creative teams at an unprecedentedly young age, producing top-class work. The industry noticed. Ian’s work has been honoured by the Apple Design Award, the Royal Television Society Award, D&AD, BIMA, Webby’s, and the Art Director’s Club in New York.

Today, Ian is the founder and CEO of healthtech company Aide Health, the author of Spark for the Fire: How Youthful Thinking Unlocks Creativity, and the creator of an online course, Sell the Idea, which helps people effectively pitch and present their work. (Pass It On readers get a 30% course discount. You’ll find the voucher code at the bottom of the post.) Ian also spends a significant portion of his time in creative education. For the past six years, he has been on the advisory board of D&AD Shift, a free night school for underrepresented young creatives. He is also a Governor at Arts University Bournemouth.

Ian is one of the most intentional leaders and creators I know. His career proves that great ideas can emerge through consistent commitment to the craft and caring as much about the process through which ideas emerge as the ideas themselves. How wonderful to watch him pass on these hard-earned skills to others.

Let’s start with an easy one. What’s the most important problem in your field?

It’s any time someone hesitates to make the thing they desperately want to make because they succumb to the avoidable things that kill creativity. There is never enough money or time. You will never feel you have enough knowledge. There are no perfect market conditions. Ideas never (read: shouldn’t) come with a guarantee of success. Just make the thing. We need ideas made to move society forward by reflecting on their success or failure. Apparitions of creative acts don’t serve anyone.

Why Aide Health?

I was pretty unwell as a child, and the time in hospitals and time with doctors left a lifelong impression. Chances are, anyone reading this will either be living with a long-term condition or have someone in their immediate family who is. Most people don’t have the tools or knowledge to take control of these health challenges and will feel isolated, worried or have a reduced quality of life as a result.

Medical science, broadly speaking, knows what to do with long-term conditions. We have the medicines and the lifestyle interventions. What we haven’t solved is patient engagement — enabling people to take a more active role in their health and to more effectively self-manage. We see that as a digital product problem, not a clinical problem, and we’re taking a design-led approach to try and solve it.

What’s one valuable lesson from founding and running Aide that you would never have learned from working in a creative agency, and vice versa?

A startup like Aide will reveal how capable you are of getting kicked in the face. You will meet rejection constantly. Investors will say no or waste your time. Some will do both. Along the way, people ‘of influence’ will grace you with input like “I think this will be really hard” as if it’s the promulgation of divine wisdom. And you sit and smile because while you know that person is as helpful as they are inspiring, you’re still staring at abject uncertainty, and they’re not wrong. The lesson is that you find out what it’s like to properly care about something and whether or not what you’re doing matters. Otherwise, you’d yield. You also learn to hold on to the quieter moments that keep you from wavering, like when one patient says, “I haven’t had an asthma attack since using this app, and I’ll use it for the rest of my life.”

Top-tier agencies that nurture their talent are exceptional at one thing: teaching you how to communicate an idea effectively. Especially if you are serving high-standard, high-performing Fortune 500 clients. That is a path through fire you wouldn’t learn the same way in a startup.

Let’s talk about communicating ideas. You’ve previously said that “the first hurdle every idea faces is the moment when you sell it to other people.” Why do exceptional ideas fail at this hurdle? What should we be doing differently?

The first mistake creative and entrepreneurial people make is being too optimistic about the ability of their audience to retain the information they are given.

Anytime you are pitching or presenting work, you are competing with every other idea, piece of information and decision that is trying to occupy your audience's mind. They are constantly evaluating volume. The threat your idea faces, however brilliant it may be, is obscurity. To overcome it, you need to focus on the most important part of narrative structure, the inciting incident.

The inciting incident is the major opposing force standing in the way of your hero (the people who will benefit once your idea is realised). It’s a deliberate piece of design when articulating your idea to capture and hold attention. People don't remember facts, figures, methods, industry doublespeak, or your company's ‘proprietary process’. They remember conflict and the steps that can be taken to overcome it.

Helping others pitch ideas better is a big part of your work, yet you also believe that people should care less about the idea itself. Why is that?

Having a certain degree of indifference about your idea, your work and its potential outcome will serve you better than giving every ounce of yourself to it and assigning it all your hopes and dreams. Find a way to care a little bit less. This is the opposite of what we’re told, but humans are exceptional self-saboteurs when we want something too much.

You take the opposite view on care when it comes to end users, believing that designers, entrepreneurs and creatives all have a duty of care to the people who are the intended recipients of their work. What does executing in line with a duty of care look like?

It looks like all the obvious things that are easy to lose sight of:

1. Having a deep, real understanding of the world of your intended user or audience and empathising with them.

2. Being disciplined enough to consider the impact (positive and negative) that your design, creation or business will have on these people and those close to them.

3. Avoiding the temptation and ease of short-termism.

What has your journey at Aide taught you about the relationship between the tech and non-profit sectors?

We have built some great relationships with charities like the British Heart Foundation and Asthma + Lung UK. But, and rightly so, we’ve had to work hard to earn their trust and demonstrate that we stand on common ground.

The difference in speed is probably what causes reluctance or tension, or whatever you might refer to it as. Early-stage healthtech needs to build things quickly, prove or disprove them quickly, and become commercially active quickly if they are to live long enough to make an impact. I think it’s fair to say the same is not true of non-profits. If the reasons for that speed are miscommunicated or misunderstood, it’s easy for the non-profit sector to interpret it as being cavalier with patient safety or being in it for the wrong reasons. At least from the vantage of the community of early-stage healthtech companies Aide is in, that couldn’t be further from the truth.

Which three books or other media have impacted you most and why?

• Wallace & Gromit: A Grand Day Out — made me want to make animated films

• Back to the Future — made me learn how to play the guitar at age seven

• Total Recall (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s biography) — made me want to pursue a deliberately diverse career

More questions for Ian? Find him on LinkedIn and subscribe to his free Substack.

Pass It On readers get a 30% discount on Ian’s course, Sell the Idea. Voucher code: PASSITON.

Thanks so much for reading,

Lauren

I haven’t felt proud of my writing for a few months now.

This is probably an unwise assertion to make, especially in front of new subscribers. But there’s a positive lesson in it, I think. And I’m going to use this post to try and tease it out.

My early ambitions for Pass It On revolved around utility. I wanted to share practical, actionable knowledge for tech and non-profit readers. Over time, that ambition shifted. I became less concerned with writing useful posts and more motivated by writing interesting ones.

Like creator Mario Gabriele, I wasn’t prepared for my expectations to scale with my experience. I assumed that the more posts I published, the faster I would get as a function of refining my writing skills. Instead, the opposite happened: the more proficient I became, the more I began to demand of myself. 

Interesting is, for me at least, much more demanding than useful. The mind must be free yet focused. Receptive to signals. Capable of making unexpected connections. Useful and interesting aren’t mutually exclusive, of course. But I’ve found the artificial dichotomy helpful for describing an abstract goal I’m striving towards.

Interestingness is in itself interesting. I’ve become a bit obsessed with trying to understand it. What are its essential properties? How do I cultivate and nurture it over time?

It turns out I’m not alone. Last year, the brilliant strategist and former Q&A guest Russell Davies published Do Interesting: Notice. Collect. Share. It’s a delightful little book, full of practical tips.

One of my favourites was the Spark File. Russell borrowed it from Stephen Johnson, the popular science writer and author of Where Good Ideas Come From.

A Spark File is a doc you fill with snippets of Interestingness. Or hunches, as Johnson calls them. These hunches could be sentence fragments, questions, quotations—anything, really. The point is to gather all of them in one central place, without caring how they’re organised, and then read the entire doc from top to bottom every few months.

According to Johnson, the re-reading part is where the magic happens. You rediscover old thoughts from years ago that made no sense at the time, and that suddenly take on new significance because something in you or the world changed. Johnson says it’s like “brainstorming with past versions of yourself.” He’s uncovered multiple book ideas ideas this way.

I’ve found the ultimate home for my Spark File in Sublime, the brainchild of another former Pass It On guest, Sari Azout.

It’s hard to sum up Sublime in a single sentence. I’d describe it as a soulful, communal digital second brain. Sari has called it the place for “everything that makes you go ‘whoa’.” Which is not only the nearest-to-perfect definition of Interestingness I’ve found but also my new criterion for anything worth collecting. I no longer worry about how or where I’m categorising my spontaneous thoughts and references. If I sense a little ‘whoa’, in it goes. Then every week or so, Sublime sends me a ‘moment to remember’ email featuring one of my hunches to rekindle my own curiosity.

Gathering Interestingness is one thing. Making Interestingness is another. The nurturing process takes more patience than I’m comfortable with. Still, I’m trying to enjoy the journey.

Have you ever tuned into a specific idea or concept for the first time, only to start spotting it everywhere? Chances are, you’re onto something interesting:

“As I read, as I do my work, as I go about my days, the word ekphrasis continues to come up. I read it everywhere: in edits on a piece I’ve written about an artist’s documentaries, in Instagram captions, on podcasts. I’ve certainly encountered it before, probably in college, but I haven’t encountered it since—this says something, maybe, about food writing—and so it seems like my research is telling me something, like I’m onto something, like these threads I’m grasping about the everyday in the endless work of a writing life (of an artist’s life) are leading to something.”

— Alicia Kennedy, On Research

(Yes, this quote was in my Spark File.)

What Alicia’s talking about here is pattern recognition. It opens you up to the world in unexpected ways.

Here’s an example.

A couple of years ago, the co-founder of Paynter Jacket Co. Becky Okell noticed this beautiful manhole while walking down London’s Brick Lane:

She’d walked down the street tons of times and never noticed it. But once she did, she started spotting manholes everywhere. And began taking photographs of them from all around the world:

After two years of collecting, Becky came up with the idea to make a manhole-inspired button for Paynter’s latest jacket release:

She then shared this story in an email to Paynter’s newsletter subscribers, which is how I heard about it:

Notice. Collect. Share.

Now, I’m off on summer holiday. In search of some new Interestingness of my own.

See you in a few weeks,

Lauren

Nothing makes me happier than one Q&A leading to another. In this week’s case, we have the wonderful Loyce Witherspoon to thank—an early Pass It On interviewee turned friend who pointed me in the direction of today’s special guest, Jasmine Anouna.

Jasmine is the founder of The Bloom, the world’s go-to platform for social impact careers. In just three years, The Bloom’s newsletter, learning platform, and events have amassed a community of 40,000+ impact leaders in search of connection and knowledge sharing. Alongside her work at The Bloom, Jasmine is a member of the Sustainable Development Goals Goalkeepers community, an initiative led by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to help changemakers accelerate progress towards the 17 development goals in their respective communities. There are also two books in the works, and a secret project you’ll hear about at the end of the Q&A. Impressive stuff.

One of the things I admire most about Jasmine is her openness. Building an organisation from scratch is hard, and she doesn’t glorify any of it. Instead, Jasmine strives to share what she knows, learn from her mistakes, and stay true to herself along the way.

Trigger warning: the first answer contains a reference to suicide in the second paragraph.

You describe yourself as an Italian-Egyptian-American feminist and social entrepreneur. How have your ethnic roots shaped your approach to feminism and social entrepreneurship?

First, I want to thank you for asking this question. I rarely get asked about my roots, and they’ve profoundly impacted how I see and show up in the world.

I grew up in Italy as the daughter of Egyptian refugees and immigrants. Back then, violence against women in Italy was rife. Tragic stories were spread across the news as consistently as the weekly weather forecast, and I could relate to these stories because I was living the headlines myself at home. Eventually, the abuse escalated to such a degree that, at the age of 14, I tried to take my own life.

In the years that followed, I realised my personal experience was part of a larger system that had set up certain marginalised populations to fail. I decided to become a lawyer so that I could fight for international gender equality, but my dream career wasn’t what it made out to be. By 2018, I was working from the global headquarters of the United Nations Office of Human Rights. I’d spent years conducting research at the intersection of law and gender-based violence, and I was on the verge of burning out. I was frustrated by the endless bureaucracy. I was lonely and struggling with a lack of motivation. Instead of receiving support from my employer, I was told I was close to getting fired. It was on that day I resolved to dedicate my career to ensuring that no changemaker would ever feel this hopeless, isolated, and unsupported. That was the beginning of The Bloom.

Today, The Bloom is a hugely successful platform supporting over 40,000 changemakers around the world. What’s the change you’re fighting for?

I’m fighting for connection. I think it’s the greatest problem of our time, especially in social impact. Power and oppression thrive on fragmentation. The more siloed we are, the more submissive we are. My goal with The Bloom is to create a central space of belonging for systems-change leaders. A space where these leaders can connect, share knowledge, collaborate—and ultimately, unite in their power.

I’m also trying to dismantle network privilege. The path to social change is much easier if you grow up with a strong, well-connected network that can open doors to grants, funding, mentorship, and partnerships. But millions of changemakers around the world aren’t born into those networks. At The Bloom, we’re fighting to create a world where everyone, regardless of their background or resources, has access to the connections and opportunities they need to make a positive difference.

Founding a social impact organisation is no small challenge. What’s one piece of advice you wish you’d received when you first started The Bloom?

I’ll give three ;)

First, lean into your unique quirks and leadership style rather than conforming to others' expectations. When I first started The Bloom, I felt the pressure to play to other people’s conversational and leadership styles. Now, I realise that my way of leading is what makes the difference. I can get the work done, go into the rooms of power, make the sales, do the damn deals—all without compromising who I am. I wish I’d known that was possible from the outset.

Second, own your financial empowerment. You can’t do change-making work without being adequately compensated. And you should be able to do what you love without feeling guilty for being paid properly to do so. So get out there and ask for the funds, but figure out how to ask for money in a way that’s aligned with your values.

Third, understand the difference between leadership and management. I think lots of founders are great at leading but terrible at managing. They have the vision and the passion to achieve the vision, but they aren’t necessarily the best people to execute the vision and grow individual team members. At the end of the day, none of the work matters if you’re building the “wrong team” or have a shitty work culture. So if you’re a founder leading a small team, invest the time to become a better manager. Analyse your mistakes carefully; they’ll teach you how to care for teams beyond just leading an organisation.

I’d like to expand on this last point about analysing mistakes. Would you be willing to share a personal example?

Absolutely. In early 2023, I began to involve friends and long-term allies in The Bloom as freelancers. And I made two major mistakes. One, I wasn’t clear on the terms of involvement. Two, I didn’t share candid feedback out of “compassion” and fear of hurting my friends’ feelings. In reality, not sharing feedback is the least compassionate thing you can do as a manager.

Eighteen months on, I’m more committed than ever to clear communication and candid feedback. One tangible proof point here is our 1:1 feedback sessions. I now hold them weekly to demonstrate that radical candour is an expected part of working life at The Bloom. It’s a joy to see team members speaking openly and proudly about our culture because of these changes.

This experience has taught me that building a sustainable, purpose-driven culture takes more than the passion and excitement of leadership. If you want a safe, kind, creative work environment, you need the structure and introspection of management, too.

What’s one thing that’s helped you take better care of your team?

Learning to become more self-aware. Mindfulness and meditation are two of my main tools here. They help me learn how to listen to myself so that I can, in turn, listen better to my team, my business, and the problem I’m trying to solve. The founder lifestyle can be at odds with self-reflection and self-care: you’re so focused on pushing through, on building, building, building. That’s why I find morning meditations so powerful. Every day, I ask myself, What do I truly need in this moment? What is my relationship to the outside world? Questions like this help me build a sustainable entrepreneurial journey for myself.

Which books have impacted you most as a leader and why?

Let My People Go Surfing by the founder of Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard. This book is full of leadership lessons, but one that really stuck with me was the principle of only hiring people who deeply experience the problem you’re trying to solve. Chouinard argues he would never have been able to scale Patagonia as successfully as he has without this principle. And it makes perfect sense to me. Especially when you think about it from the perspective of trying to tell an authentic story. What else is a company but a story? You found an organisation because you’ve identified an untold yet urgent story that the world needs to hear. That’s how I see The Bloom. It’s a beautiful story, and my team are my co-authors—just as excited to write it as I am.

Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants by the Indigenous ethnobotanist Robin Wall Kimmerer. So many of us go through life without awareness of our surroundings. Kimmerer shows why sensitivity to your surroundings is a vital act of reciprocity, community, and liberation. One way to pay attention to nature is to think about names. Do you know the names of the plants you pass when walking down the street? Since reading this book, I have made an effort to find out. It’s been a beautiful, humbling process. Naming is an act of care.

What’s one question you wished I had asked you?

“How can the people who are reading this Q&A support you?”

I think every interview should end with this question, especially in the field of social change. Our work is tough, and we can’t reach our goals alone.

The Bloom is looking for support in two key ways:

1. Partnership. We’re looking for companies that want to collaborate with us by sharing their resources in our newsletter and learning platform. We partner with social impact/ CSR / DEI teams of corporates ready to scale social impact internally in their company. We also partner with universities looking for a thoughtful platform to support their students and provide their Alumni with access to career resources on social and environmental impact careers. We’re currently partnered with the University of Oxford Business School, Yale School of Global Affairs, University of Cape Town, Antwerp Management School, and many others.

2. Visibility. Even as a world-leading social impact platform, we appreciate thoughtful exposure through large media platforms or equivalent. You can also book me to speak on topics like building an engaged digital community, social impact careers, and mental health. I’ve previously given talks at Impact Festival, Impact Hub, Skoll Centre for Entrepreneurship, Cambridge University, Women’s Funding Network, and LinkedIn. 

3. Top-secret way to support. Since you’ve made it to the end of my interview ;) I have a trademarked card game coming out in September 2024. Think of it like “UNO for meaningful connection”, with over seven ways to play. Slide into my LinkedIn DMs if you’re curious to learn more.

If anyone reading this would like to help, please get in touch!

On a broader note, creating the space for people to ask for support is a powerful antidote to our collective struggles. There’s a lot to be concerned and alarmed about right now. One of the best ways to fight that anxiety is by forming genuine connections and existing in reciprocity with others.

I’m fortunate to experience that daily through my work at The Bloom. Even the smallest moments can be transformative. So look for them. A great way to start is by focusing on the people around you. When was the last time you asked someone in your life:

What help do you need?
How could I help you feel more seen in this period of your life?

Challenge yourself to lean into the needs of others. You won’t regret it.

More questions for Jasmine? Find her on LinkedIn or email jasmine@readtobloom.com.

Thanks so much for reading,

Lauren