My friends who code were rapidly accelerating their work with AI, accomplishing in days what previously would have taken months. The promise was an exciting new technology that might uplift every part of our lives. So, of course, I began wondering how I might experiment with using AI to help with writing and editing, an activity that took up much of my time and often felt tedious, though rewarding. Given how useful it seemed elsewhere, this felt like a natural question to ask.

What was less obvious were the creative, personal and philosophical implications. I’ve been writing all my life in one way or another, from weird stories as a child to college essays, but ChatGPT came out the year after I graduated. I was no stranger to the labour by which you assemble words into some collage of meaning, but I did not yet understand what outsourcing parts of that labour might do to my thinking or my relationship with my own voice.

Still, one of my hotter current takes is that the discourse around AI and writing is often reductive and unimaginative. Yes, there are real reasons to be cautious, many of which people have helpfully pointed out. I suspect there are also effects we simply do not yet have the language to see.

I understand why people are alarmed, because the risks are real and hard to see. I have sometimes felt AI make me lazier. There have been unsettling moments when I realised I was blindly accepting a sentence. I am also sure it is changing parts of our thinking in ways we cannot yet see clearly. Still, the position ‘do not use AI to write’ feels like too simple a conclusion to me, because different interactions with a language model affect the mind in very different ways. I wish we were more curious about the differences, asking questions like where in the process does AI weaken your thinking? Where can it extend it? What abilities are you practising, and which ones are you giving away?

I certainly do not know all the answers yet, which seems more interesting to me than pretending the only choices are never use it or let it do everything. What follows is an attempt to grapple honestly with how I have used AI in my own writing, what I think it gave me, and what I may have unknowingly given away in return. I will also break down the different stages of the writing process, because I have come to believe that the risks and acceptability of using AI vary dramatically depending on where it enters.

how I previously used AI

To understand why I remain resistant to simple prohibitions, it may help to explain what I was actually doing with AI in the first place. Previously, in my younger and more technologically promiscuous days, I had a fairly laissez-faire approach to using AI for writing. I knew that everything I wrote came from experiences and ideas with which I had personally grappled. If AI suggested a different expression or arrangement of sentences, I reasoned that this was not so different from an editor proposing an alternative phrase. The ideas were mine, AI was simply helping make them more legible.

I would ask questions such as does this structure make sense? Have I repeated myself? Is there another word for what I am trying to describe? I saw AI as a fairly mediocre but endlessly available editor. As an independent writer, I did unfortunately not have the resources to employ an experienced human editor, whose work is often expensive precisely because it requires time and skill. I relied on my partner and friends, but they only had so much time and energy to answer my endless questions.

At its best, I used AI by requesting several possibilities and then exercising my own judgement among them. Once, I asked for words that might describe a particular experience. It suggested ‘capricious,’ which I immediately knew was wrong. Another suggestion, ‘indifferent,’ was closer. Seeing the incorrect word helped me recognise the distinction I was trying to make; the machine had usefully presented a surface against which I could clarify my own idea, much as hearing someone offer a completely wrong interpretation can suddenly reveal what you actually think.

There was another reason the tool felt natural to me - conversation is one of the primary ways I think, and is an extremely generative creative process. One of the themes I return to in my writing is how relationships and conversation reveal us to ourselves (as in this essay, this one, this one). We learn through the space between people. On one level, AI can help create this kind of space. I can bring it an idea and ask it to argue against me, then it can surface similar concepts or expose assumptions I have not noticed. My thinking can become stronger as though I were arguing with a particularly opinionated, sometimes annoying and unnervingly well-read friend.

The danger is much higher when you use AI at a stage where the thinking is still alive and unformed. If you begin with ‘write me an essay about love,’ you are likely to receive a set of generic observations that nevertheless carry the possible false appearance of insight. Without a strong point of view of your own, it is easy to accept the machine’s framing before you have worked out whether you believe it. Getting AI to articulate your ideas can slowly become AI coming up with the ideas entirely.

For a while, these distinctions allowed me to feel reasonably confident in my own practice. I was still generating the ideas and making the final decisions. But over time, I began to wonder whether that account was too neat. A tool can remain formally subordinate while still changing the person using it.

the slippery slope

I still maintain that some use of AI as an editor or thought-pressure-tester can be acceptable. The problem is that it can easily become a slippery slope. It is like using an assisting machine to lift a weight and then forgetting to remove the machine because lifting with it feels easier. You continue performing the movement, but the muscle is no longer doing the same work.

With the benefit of hindsight, I now think I leaned too hard on accepting prose that was more readable or technically polished. I still felt I was grappling with the ideas because they came from my experiences, conversations and reading. But I think I could have pushed further! I could have sharpened my mind by insisting on the very best word and the most precise articulation I was capable of finding. I now think there is immense value in that selection process, in the shuffling and fumbling through the mind for the exact conceptual locator. I wish to say exactly what I mean, and the labour of getting there is part of the work.

One day, while thinking about this topic, I began writing in my Notes app. I later reread the passage and, with some horror, discovered that it sounded like AI to me. There were certain LLM-like tics in the rhythm of the sentences. I put it into an AI detector, and it came back as 100 per cent AI-generated despite the fact that I had just written it myself.

I then had to reckon with this. Anything we talk to enough can become part of a co-evolutionary loop. Was writing with AI shaping my own prose into a flatter form? Was its statistical rhythm entering mine? Marshall McLuhan famously observed that we shape our tools and thereafter our tools shape us. The fish cannot easily see the water around it. Perhaps AI was doing something to my language just outside the edges of my awareness.

At the same time, parts of my natural style overlap with the kind of prose language models tend to produce. This is slightly embarrassing to admit, but it is partly a relic of my upbringing through academic essays and corporate consulting, both of which prize legibility and clarity over artistic style. AI was trained on vast quantities of this prose, so of course it gravitates towards similar patterns. I am also prone to lofty abstractions, overly neat conclusions and the occasional cliché, as all young writers are. Sometimes, unfortunately, I simply write badly because I do not yet entirely know what I am doing, and an AI detector cannot, at least for now, distinguish between these possibilities.

The experience forced me to ask a question I had previously avoided, namely what exactly was the labour I had been outsourcing, and was its inconvenience perhaps part of its value? If language were merely a container used to transport ideas from one mind to another, perhaps it would not matter whether some of the phrasing originated elsewhere. My reaction suggested that I believed writing was doing something more.

the words are part of the thought

I think much of the confusion about AI and creativity comes from a deeper confusion about what writing is for and how it interacts with our minds. If writing is purely functional, a vehicle for conveying information from point A to point B, then there may be little wrong with asking a machine to make the information clearer and more concise. I imagine this is why people generally feel less disturbed by AI being used for business documents or administrative emails.

But if an essay is also a personal creative act, the specific articulation matters. Their selection is part of the thinking, and their arrangement becomes evidence of a particular human consciousness. Words are the currency of my imagination. The precise expression is proof that this experience passed through this person, with their fractal of experiences and ways of seeing.

Anaïs Nin wrote that ‘writing implies manual labor, a strain on one’s conscience and an exercise of the mind.’ Elsewhere, she said it was persistence and love of the craft that finally made her a craftsman and a writer: ‘The only reason I finally was able to say exactly what I felt was because, like a pianist practicing, I wrote every day.’

There is a wrapping together here of writing and labour. Any writer who has sat in front of a laptop rearranging words, searching for the precise expression of an experience, knows the toil involved. There is the fumbling through the mind’s library for the exact word, the sharpening of the knife of the sentence, the attempt to locate the heart of what you mean. I used to think the idea mattered most and its precise expression somewhat less. I now think that the labour of finding the exact expression is often where the idea becomes fully understood.

The French phrase mot juste refers to the exactly right word or the perfect expression. The search itself sharpens the thought. The limits of my language may indeed be the limits of my world, because every new distinction I learn to express becomes something I can more clearly perceive.

To me, this is perhaps clearest in poetry. As an occasional writer of poems, I personally do not see much of a place for AI in poetry except as part of some experimental artwork commenting on our relationship with technology. The function of a poem is inseparable from its language. Its meaning is bound up with the exactness of its sound and form. Essays are more ambiguous because they live somewhere between communication, thought and art, but the particular expression still matters.

If finding the exact language is part of discovering the thought itself, then the difficulty of writing begins to look different. Rather than an unfortunate barrier between the writer and the finished work, the friction itself is the process through which the work, and the writer’s understanding, come into being.

is there value in the toil?

Even when we understand that some difficulty is valuable, it is still natural to want relief from it. Writing is hard, often frustratingly so, which helps explain why people turn to AI in the first place. The struggle can be deeply uncomfortable, and it is natural to want to escape it. But not all toil is created equal. Which toil is a Herculean effort we can happily outsource, and which toil is worth grappling with? What happens to us when we outsource the connective tissue of our thinking?

In some ways, I am grateful that AI makes essay writing more accessible. Anyone can dump a stream of consciousness or a collection of fragmented thoughts into a model and receive guidance on how they might be organised. Someone who previously felt unable to write may see for the first time that their scattered observations contain the beginnings of an argument. This can be truly empowering and interesting.

The issue is when the thinking stops there. If a machine performs the work of connecting every fragment, the writer may receive a polished result without having understood why those fragments belong together. They gain the appearance of coherence without necessarily passing through the experience of creating it.

This matters because there is a difference between removing unnecessary friction and removing the experience through which a capacity develops. Indeed, confusion can often be a necessary state in which a person learns how to think, rather than evidence of failure. One of the most important lessons a writer can learn is that the first attempt will probably always be bad and that this does not mean they are bad!

These questions become more urgent when AI enters education, where the difficulty being removed is often the very capacity the exercise was designed to develop. I thought about this often while teaching college students this past semester. When I graded assignments, some carried the faint but unmistakable sniff of AI usage. A few students may simply have run out of time or wanted to avoid the work, but I do not think most were knowingly committing some great intellectual crime. I suspect they had not considered what using AI at that stage might do to their own learning and development. They had been given access to an extraordinarily powerful tool, but no map for distinguishing the forms of struggle that were disposable from those that were the substance of the education itself.

Perhaps naively, I believe the outcome would have been different for at least some of them if they had understood the trade-off more clearly. If someone had explained that the awkwardness of forming an argument and discovering why one thought follows another was part of the capacity the assignment was intended to develop, they might have made another choice. Instead, we have largely handed students the technology first and left them to infer its consequences alone.

This is why I am less interested in treating every use of AI as evidence of laziness or moral failure than in helping people understand what they may be giving away. The polished essay arrives immediately, while the loss of judgement or independent thought may only become visible much later. Alarmingly, this harm accumulates silently through the repeated removal of precisely the difficulty that was helping a person grow.

Nor does this problem disappear once formal education ends. It simply becomes entangled with professional incentives. People have already been talking about this in the context of coding. My friends who code tell me they can feel parts of their knowledge atrophying, but that they are now working so quickly they cannot stop. If they return to writing everything manually, they fear they will fall behind. Perhaps that is a rational trade-off for some kinds of work. But it is still worth pausing to ask what is lost when parts of a process are outsourced, particularly when the process shapes the mind of the person doing it.

Writing is an especially unusual and fragile case because it is both a product and a method of perception. When you outsource an administrative email, you may lose very little. When you outsource the articulation of your own emotional life, you may gradually weaken your ability to know what you feel.

language as connection

So far, I have mostly described writing as something that forms the person doing it. But writing also moves outward. Beyond an extremely powerful technology of thought (writing is thinking!), it is one of the primary ways we make ourselves present to other people.

Writing about Wittgenstein and AI, Alexander Stern argues that language, especially for the young, does not merely act as a set of signs for objective things. It is a vehicle through which we connect with other people. Often, communication is as much an act of relation as it is an act of description. When we speak to someone we love, we may sometimes be trying to accomplish something practical, but the deeper purpose is simply to be together.

This is part of why AI-written personal language can feel disturbing. In the film Her, the protagonist writes intimate greeting cards on behalf of strangers. The recipients experience language that sounds personal and loving, but the person whose name appears at the bottom did not actually produce it. The words still convey something, perhaps even something beautiful, but the connection has become detached. What appears to be an expression of one person’s attention is actually the work of another.

In the end, we write to lure, enchant and console others. We write to serenade our lovers. We write, as Nin said, to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospection. When the words are meant to be evidence of presence, it matters who or what produced them. Rather than merely to transmit the correct sentiment, the effort itself can be part of the gift. This is why a generated meeting summary and a generated love letter contain different implications, even if both contain perfectly serviceable prose. In one case, language is primarily carrying information. In the other, the effort of finding the words is part of what the words are meant to communicate.

a map of the writing process

Once we recognise that writing performs several different cognitive, creative and relational functions, the question ‘Should we use AI to write?’ begins to look almost comically underspecified. The more useful question is where in the process AI enters, and what human capacity that particular stage is meant to exercise.

I’ve created the diagram below to offer my own humble view, which you may take or leave. Perhaps hilariously, and somewhat ironically, I used AI to generate the diagram itself. It was very useful for that purpose, though the ideas and judgements within it are entirely my own.

These stages often overlap in practice, but separating them helps reveal that each asks something different of the writer. In brief, my position on each of the stages of the writing process:

• Using it to generate the central insight, emotional revelation or thesis of a personal essay carries the highest risk. This is where the writer needs to sit with uncertainty, search their own experience and develop a point of view. Outsourcing this stage can produce a false sense of insight and weaken the capacity to know what you actually think.

• Using AI to surface references or related ideas for further research can also be creatively generative, provided its answers are verified. It can function as an associative engine, pointing towards concepts the writer may not have encountered. But there remains a risk that its suggestions narrow the inquiry towards what is already most statistically available.

• Using AI to pressure-test an argument or present the strongest opposing case can be useful. This asks the machine to create friction rather than remove it. The writer still has to decide what they believe, and integrate the challenge, which often strengthens the work.

• Using AI to restructure material is more ambiguous. It can help identify repetition or possible sequences, particularly when the writer has already produced the substance. But structure is also meaning! Shuffling an essay can change the argument and emphasis, so the writer must continue making the final decisions.

• Using AI to draft the language of a personal or creative piece is also risky. Even when the underlying ideas are yours, the act of articulation can reveal further meaning. Allowing the machine to perform that act may make the work smoother while removing the ripples of the mind that produced it.

• I think using AI for editing is more defensible, although still not neutral. Asking whether a passage is clear or incoherent can resemble the work of an editor. Yet if every awkward sentence is immediately handed over, the writer may never develop the judgement required to diagnose and repair their own prose.

The clearest principle I have arrived at is that AI is most useful when it increases the amount of discernment I must exercise rather than reducing it. The more decisions I continue to make, the less likely I am to surrender the capacities I value. When it offers possibilities that I assess and transform, it can extend my thinking. When it offers answers that I passively accept, it begins to replace it.

I remain interested in uses of AI that make writing more effortful rather than less. It can be instructive to generate many variations of a sentence and see the same idea refracted through different forms, because you can say the same thing a thousand different ways. Seeing those refractions can make the source thought clearer, provided you already possess the source thought and continue to make the final decisions yourself.

The trouble is that our public conversation rarely has the patience to make these distinctions. Instead, the many stages and possible uses of AI are often compressed into a single moral question: did you use it or not?

shame is not a map

Unfortunately but understandably, the public discourse around AI and writing still tends to collapse these distinctions into a single moral category. Part of me has hesitated even to write this piece. The conversation is loud and full of rage, and admitting that I have used AI in any part of my process can feel a little like confessing to a crime. I believe I have maintained a sense of creative integrity, but that is ultimately mine to reckon with, not the peanut gallery’s (with all respect to the peanut gallery). Nor do I wish to become the protagonist of the AI-writing discourse, valiantly throwing myself in front of the mob to defend the machines. I am on the artist’s side, don’t you see, I have sometimes wanted to say to people who seemed to disregard me the moment I admitted to experimenting with it.

I am, in fact, deeply sympathetic to the ‘no AI in writing at all’ sensibility and respect the sanctity with which its adherents uphold the creative process. If I have any allegiance on some ‘yay AI versus no AI’ spectrum, it is probably somewhat closer to these people, who I understand to value and seek to protect humanity above all ends. I ultimately wish to protect our humanity too, so I think we share the same core animating motivation.

Especially for artists who have spent the last several decades watching technology companies devalue their work, the fear of AI makes complete sense. Many people are afraid because parts of the technology industry have spent years trying to underpay or otherwise diminish the value of creative labour. When you realise how much has already been taken from creative industries, it is an understandable human reaction to ask whether AI will make this worse and remove the human being from the act of creation entirely.

I understand the resistance, then. But I wish for us to become far more literate about the consequences and possible uses of AI. Here we have a technology with associative abilities at a scale never previously seen, capable of surfacing ideas that are remarkably relevant to the exact context of a question. From a creative point of view, this is extraordinary. It seems unfortunate to me that our curiosity about this possibility should begin and end with reprimanding anyone who touches it.

For the record, I think many uses of AI in personal and creative writing are bad for the process, the reader and the writer alike. But I also think the ‘no AI in writing’ position often misses part of the picture. There are many stages involved in producing a piece of written work, including noticing, ideation, research, conversation, drafting, structuring, editing, refining sentences and selecting the exact words. Using AI at each of these stages has radically different implications. Collapsing them into one moral category makes it harder to understand what is actually happening.

We are clearly in the messy middle, where new norms have not yet settled and our language for navigating the technology remains underdeveloped. Something new arrives, people experiment, others react and get angry, and eventually some of that reaction is integrated. Ideally, we arrive at a more synthesised position, one that is more nuanced than either total acceptance or total refusal. In the meantime, people are making choices that may be harmful without fully understanding why.

Unfortunately, the tools we currently use to police these boundaries are often even blunter than the discourse itself. Substack recently introduced AI detection, allowing readers to scan an essay and receive a judgement about how much of it was supposedly generated by AI. Ignoring the technical uncertainty of these tools for a moment, I find it revealing that a ‘100% AI-generated’ badge functions as an immediate indictment. Rather than being given a nuanced description of how AI may have been used, you are simply branded as machine.

I am nevertheless grateful that Substack has introduced the tool. Even in its current imperfect form, it is useful for making these questions more visible and moving the conversation forward. My concern is less with the existence of AI detection than with the certainty its results can appear to carry, particularly when the technology cannot yet clearly distinguish between AI-generated and AI-assisted work.

Some of my own essays have registered as 100 per cent AI-generated. Indeed, and somewhat amusingly, parts of this essay are registering as AI-generated too. I do not think that is a fair representation of the paragraphs being highlighted, though I would happily accept the label ‘AI-assisted,’ since I have used it for organising and refining in the ways described above. But alas, some sentence structures seem to trigger the detector almost automatically with a questionable level of certainty.

What are we to make of this? I have used AI in the past to help with prose, and perhaps the slippery slope was indeed too slippery. I regret not thinking more carefully about that at the time. But ‘entirely AI-generated’ still carries very different implications from ‘AI-assisted,’ and current detection technology is not capable of reliably recognising or communicating that essential distinction (you can read more about here in this excellent essay by an AI researcher, Ethan).

The reaction has occasionally felt dehumanising, which of course makes a certain kind of sense. The fear is precisely that AI has removed the human being from the work. Once the badge appears, the writer’s account of their own process can become less credible than the software’s judgement. Years of lived experience and thought may be erased by a percentage delivered with more certainty than the underlying technology deserves.

What disappointed me most in some of these interactions was the immediate assumption of bad faith. People with whom I had previously had thoughtful conversations jumped directly to the worst possible interpretation of my intentions, rather than allowing for ignorance, experimentation or the possibility that the software itself was mistaken. I began to see this as a useful barometer of the current discourse and how little nuance it presently has the capacity to hold. There is an immediate knee-jerk reaction, followed by categorisation and contempt. At times, I found myself grateful to have read Arthur Miller’s The Crucible in high school; the atmosphere of accusation, purity-testing and presumed guilt felt uncomfortably familiar.

I do not say this merely to tone-police people who are understandably angry. I mean it as a practical question about how we actually help people understand what happens when they outsource writing and encourage them to change their behaviour. For people with strong creative sensibilities, it may be immediately obvious why using AI to write can harm the writer and the work itself. But I do not think this is obvious to everyone.

Perhaps this reveals my own ignorance, but even as someone who had written in various forms for years, it took me time to understand what certain uses of AI were doing to my thinking. I did not yet possess a clear model of what I was giving up. The technology arrived incredibly quickly and was presented as a helpful, largely neutral tool. People were naturally curious about what it might make possible.

My students returned to mind here. Many people are not knowingly choosing cognitive atrophy over intellectual development; they are using a tool placed directly in front of them without having been taught how to understand the trade. As I saw in the classroom, they have been given the technology, but not the map.

Shame and suspicion can make people defensive before they have had a chance to understand the actual problem. The wider atmosphere can begin to resemble a witch hunt, where anything that ‘smells like AI’ becomes grounds for contempt and many different behaviours and intentions are collapsed into the same moral category.

It is possible that we differ in our theory of change. A strong social stigma may be necessary to establish a norm, and there has been some use in the reprimanding. I probably only realised the gravity of what was happening because a few people reacted so strongly. While shame is helpful for telling someone that they have crossed a boundary, it usually does not explain what the boundary is protecting. Thus, it may effectively stop a behaviour while leaving the person no more capable of understanding why that behaviour was harmful.

I think we need better shared explanations of what people lose when they outsource writing, especially the thinking and struggle that happen through the work itself. We need a language capable of distinguishing between using AI to test a belief and asking it to supply one, between mechanical correction and the outsourcing of personal expression, between augmentation and abdication. I believe this approach will bring more people along than simply telling them they are lazy or that we no longer respect them.

A detector may be able to produce a percentage, and a crowd may be able to issue a verdict. Neither can reliably tell us what happened inside the writer while the piece was being made. That leaves the writer with a more difficult responsibility of deciding which forms of assistance remain compatible with the capacities and values they wish to preserve.

how I write now

After reckoning with all of this over the last few months, I arrived at an embarrassingly obvious realisation that writing is work I enjoy. It turns out I love the grappling with words! It is tedious and inconvenient, and that is precisely part of the point.

Writing an essay is very different from writing an administrative email or a piece of functional copy. The resistance is a healthy tightening of the muscles and mind. I want to remain receptive enough to hear the exact word when it eventually arrives.

I will continue to use AI to help me write tedious emails so I have more time for the kind of writing I love. I will probably continue using it to present counterarguments and pressure-test beliefs. AI can help me clarify what I believe when I arrive with a real idea and remain responsible for the conclusions.

I have far more hesitation now about using it to shape the actual prose of personal essays. Although I still believe editing and thought pressure-testing are different from one-shotting an essay, the way these tools are currently designed makes it easy to move from one use into another without noticing. I also worry about the effects on my natural writing ability and the development of my voice. I want to preserve the muscles involved in finding my own language.

There is also, more prosaically, a practical reason. Current AI-detection tools are not capable of conveying the nuance of how AI has been used, and the association created by an ‘AI-generated’ judgement is no longer worth the minor convenience or readability improvements I might gain.

Should writers disclose every use of AI in editing? I am still unsure. Writers do not usually list every intervention made by a human editor, despite the fact that editors can dramatically reshape a thesis, even rewrite whole paragraphs or replace specific words. At the same time, AI is different from a human editor and carries distinct cultural and cognitive implications.

Perhaps disclosure will become a healthy norm in due time. I appreciate that Substack now gives writers the option to add a note about how they have used AI, and I have added one to my blog.

what happened to the writer?

There is some irony in the fact that AI has forced everyone to articulate why writing matters. The threat of automation has made us look again at the parts of the process that appeared inconvenient or obsolete and ask whether they were secretly the point. Through this reckoning, I have come to understand more clearly why I do this gestures vaguely at all.

At a meta level, I also formed much of my position through the act of writing this essay. It emerged from reading widely, observing the discourse unfold and speaking with friends and other writers about how they were thinking about AI. I also had several interesting conversations with people who had publicly criticised my own use of it. In trying to understand their differing views, I arrived at a more accurate map of my own. Writing this essay was an essential part of how I reached my conclusions.

At the end of the day, no detector or public norm can entirely replace the personal knowledge of how you made something. You must decide whether the output and advice AI gives you are right, and whether the process remains compatible with the kind of writer, and person, you wish to become. This is where discernment and self-respect enter.

One of the best takes I have heard on this came from , who said on the ’s Dialectic podcast that you know whether you have upheld your integrity. This reminds me of Joan Didion’s writing on self-respect. Self-respect is the knowledge that you can live with the choices you made when nobody else was there to observe them.

I always slept fine at night using AI in my writing process because the ideas and core essence felt mine. The subjects I write about are animated in my heart and come from my experiences. But integrity requires continuing attention to whether your stated principles remain true in practice. I can acknowledge that my intentions were sincere while also recognising that I sometimes relied on the tool more than I now think was wise.

Writing, to me, is a second life, a way of living in a more heightened way. I write to understand what I have lived and to reach beyond the borders of my existing mind. Perhaps AI can indeed sometimes help with that. Perhaps it can surface a connection I would not have found alone, or present the wrong sentence that teaches me what the right one must do. But it can also offer the relief of apparent understanding before understanding has occurred.

The question, then, is more than merely whether AI produced some of the words. The more important question, I think, is what happened to the writer while the words were being made. Did the tool widen the mind or allow it to retreat? Did it sharpen discernment or replace it? Did it help the writer move more deeply into the experience, or provide a polished route around it?

I remain less interested in declaring AI either pure or corrupt than in learning to perceive these differences. We should tread lightly because creativity is sacred, and because the consequences of our tools often emerge only after they have begun changing us. Still, I believe we need better maps, more honest experiments and a language capable of distinguishing augmentation from abdication.

The labour is sometimes the love. The struggle to find the words is sometimes how we discover what we have to say.

I’m curious to hear how you think about the use of AI in writing. If you’re a writer, do you use it in your own process? Why or why not?

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When someone publicly conducts an analysis of a seemingly innocuous matter, there is a common cultural refrain: ‘it’s not that deep.’ Sometimes this is accompanied by a ‘chill bro,’ a general shaking of the head, and the suggestion that they simply stop thinking so much. If only the person could relax and see how simple everything is, they might finally be released from their exhausting overthinking tendencies. Their words convey a sense of: Silly thinker, such things are neither serious nor deep. You concern yourself with the wrong things.

To be sure, thinking can be exhausting and bothersome. Sometimes it truly is neither the time nor place for a long analysis. Indeed, some intellectual types would probably benefit from thinking less about certain matters and chilling out. Overthinking is not a virtue in itself, and life is simple in many ways that we eagerly complicate. Still, here I wish to make the case for careful consideration, enquiry, and looking deeply at something until it begins to reveal what it actually is. Because, in most cases, it really is that deep. In fact, it is usually far deeper than we have the capacity to perceive at first sight.

There are invisible oceans beneath every breadcrumb, passing glance, chair, headline, lyric, meme, and apparently meaningless event. In fact, things are rarely as simple as they first appear. Illusions fade through careful attention, and more slowly comes into view.

Those who cultivate their attention begin to see the infinite depth in things. Once you internalise this, life has the possibility to appear richer, and more alive. Everything brims with implication. The world no longer resembles a flat plane of isolated facts, but rather becomes a dense, moving fabric.

But, importantly, this seeing is not a simple or automatic capacity. We must be helped to learn to see. It must be cultivated, then practised and taught, generously transmitted between one another. Sharing this cultivated attention can help reality become more available to others. They say: look here. Listen to this. Do you see what is happening?

As John Berger wrote, ‘Reality is not a given; it has to be continually sought out, held, salvaged.’ So, it may be that ‘it’s not that deep’ is often less a description of reality than an admission that someone has stopped looking or somehow failed to perceive.

Here, I want to illustrate this point through a few examples across emotions, lyrics, celebrity culture, language, and ordinary objects. These may appear to be unrelated subjects, but each reveals the same underlying principle: almost anything becomes more expansive when met with sustained attention. Look closely enough and the apparently trivial begins to disclose entire worlds.

some emotions arrive in disguise

Firstly, personal experience will show that emotions are rarely just what they initially announce themselves to be. As written in an earlier essay, emotions often arrive in disguise. What we thought was joy turns out to be hope. What felt like heartbreak might have contained relief. The lighting shifts and the sun turns. Years pass, then shadows fall differently and the shape of the story warps, just enough that we have to tell it all over again.

A friend and I once talked about how the past changes the further we get from it. The colours we experience in the moment, vivid and chaotic, overexposed, inevitably fade or mutate. Sometimes they soften into warm sepia. Other times they dissolve into murky grey. Faces blur, perhaps characters trade places, then details smudge like wet ink. The version of the past we hold is no longer precisely the one we lived, but the one we have reassembled1.

It is almost a magic trick, the way time can sweeten what once stung or obscure what once felt certain. Of course, I couldn’t see the gravity of the moment at the time. That’s the way these things happen.

It would appear memory is alive and mutable, constantly revised. We are always reassembling our stories of what happened with new context and the renewal of distance. The brain remakes the scene whenever we revisit it, carefully subconsciously editing for narrative coherence. What we remember is shaped by what happened, but also by who we are when we remember it and everything that has unfolded in the spacetime since.

Sometimes it feels like time is sending letters in invisible ink. I shake the paper and squint, then eventually, some truth begins to appear. The image is still developing, I turn it over like a stone in my palm. I move the frames, trying to draw meaning from the blur. Maybe one day we will all be looking at the same image. For now, each of us is still stepping forward and backward as the pixels unfold.

music and lyrics as portals to experience

Now, let us speak of songs, and more specifically, lyrics. A friend, P, once told me that I had influenced him to start listening to lyrics more closely. This made me overjoyed, as though he had suddenly gained access to a hidden layer of reality.

I once assumed everyone listened to lyrics the way I did, as if they were coded transmissions from the emotional underworld. I’ve since learned there are three kinds of people: sound people, lyrics people, and, occasionally, people who are both. I was initially shocked to discover that some people let music wash over them without analysing the words. No thoughts, head empty, just riding the rhythm.

Meanwhile, I am pausing at 2:42 to look up a cryptic line on Genius, attempting to reverse-engineer the precise cocktail of emotion that made those particular words feel necessary to write. Lyrics have always felt like a shortcut to understanding, time capsules of someone else’s interiority distilled into minutes of melody, a cheat code to wisdom worn by another soul. Listening closely can feel like being handed the key to someone else’s diary or a secret portal into thousands of lives I will never get to live, a brief and beautiful peering in.

This is because songs are written by artists (commonly unusually sensitive people) at often emotional boiling point, sharing stories you usually say only to a close friend, if you can say them at all. Take Selfless by The Strokes. I will likely never be a middle-aged man experiencing divorce to a long love, but for a few minutes I am given some glimmer of what that might feel like:

Other songs help me see other people more clearly. Tame Impala and Mac DeMarco, for instance, have helped me make some sense of a specific archetype of man. Songs allow me to understand versions of people I could not quite grasp at the time, filling in blanks I did not know were missing. Sometimes I hear a lyric and wonder whether that is what someone felt, even if they never had the language to tell me.

the symbolic life of celebrity, as seen through the kendrick and drake rap battle

Now zooming out beyond the personal, what is the use of celebrity culture, its happenings, and apparently meaningless headlines? These things are often written off as silly passing distractions, signs of a vacant mind. Yet, in some sense, they are also emergences of the moment, symbols of larger swirls and dominant energies moving through the world.

A celebrity is someone about whom we possess an unusual amount of information despite never having met them. We may know where they grew up, what their childhood was like, who they date, what they wear, which artists they admire, and what they have said across years of interviews. We develop an impression of them that is, of course, entirely distinct from knowing them personally, but still built from an asymmetric accumulation of detail. This is the bizarre parasocial condition of celebrity - this person does not know we exist, yet we are given enough fragments of their lives to construct a character.

That character may be distorted, or carefully manufactured. Still, if we pay attention to the information surrounding celebrities, we can arrive at a richer understanding of the culture that selected them for attention. The point is less to discover who a celebrity ‘really is’ than to ask what their public meaning reveals. Why does this person fascinate us now? What do they represent? What kinds of lives and values does their image make imaginable? A fandom can be understood as a swell of collective attention, a cluster of energy and identification revealing something about who people want to be, who they want to desire, and which forms of personhood currently feel compelling.

When large conflicts play out on this global stage, they quickly become about far more than the individuals involved. The characters become symbols, whether fairly or unfairly, of larger cultural modes. This is part of why the battle between Kendrick Lamar and Drake was so fascinating to watch.

Looking more closely, one might intuit that Drake represents a certain optimised ideal of the streaming era. One of his superpowers could be seen as easily becoming what the moment wants, and he has reaped the commercial rewards this skill enables. Drake is the master of commercial and platform fluency, a powerful algorithmic omnipresence. Yet, the shadow side of being able to become anything is that, at a certain point, people begin to wonder whether you are anchored in anything.

Kendrick, by contrast, can be perceived through his poetic raps as presenting more of an anchored intentionality, with homage to careful constraint, consequence, and a moral seriousness. His power comes from the sense that he is speaking from a specific understanding of who he is. Kendrick possesses the power of appearing to have a real centre.

Part of what made the battle so culturally charged was the larger question beneath it: which model of personhood still feels trustworthy? The battle became a referendum on charm as a sufficient defence. It turns out being famous is not the same as being respected.

Kendrick’s apparent victory suggested that many people want artists who can carry judgement and seem to have paid a price for their point of view. Perhaps, ‘Not Like Us’ became a cultural moment because it gave people language for the sense that there is still such a thing as being from somewhere, people who can adapt to every room but seem responsible to no particular world. One might opine that this extends beyond music, that it channelled a wider exhaustion with prevalent smoothness and optimisation. Perhaps parts of culture currently feel suspicious of things that are over-optimised and under-rooted, such as corporates that say everything while believing nothing or people who enter every scene while belonging to none. Within this frame, Kendrick’s victory could be interpreted as part of a wider correction, a reminder that charisma eventually has to answer to character. Culture is always choosing the worldview with the melody attached.

Looking elsewhere in the realm of celebrity, you might come to see that Phoebe Bridgers dating Bo Burnham makes complete sense. Timothée Chalamet enjoying Kid Cudi makes sense. Olivia Rodrigo being seen with Cameron Winter makes sense. These are meaningless celebrity headlines, except that they are also filled with meaning, mini clues and signals about the worlds we inhabit.

the invisible ocean beneath a chair

Now, let us consider a chair.

At first, it is simply a chair, an ordinary object so familiar that it almost disappears from perception. We see the category before we see the thing itself.

Now, look a little longer.

Someone designed its careful shape. Their cultivated idea of beauty, an impression of the human body entered its form. A tree grew somewhere for years before becoming its wood. Then someone cut it down.

The chair can be seen to contain forests of the past, tools, worn hands, the whirs of global commerce, some design history, bodily needs, and domestic rituals, amongst many other things. It also bears the traces of everyone who has sat there before us. Someone may have waited for devastating news in it, fallen in love beside it, eaten breakfast on it every morning for twenty years, or dragged it across a room during an argument.

The object appears still, while its history is moving through it.

cautious looking

Now comes the nuance. It is probably helpful to remain cautious about converting fragments of information into totalising accounts of another person. A pairing or preference does not reveal an entire interior life.

Still, it is alarming once you realise how much we inadvertently and subconsciously reveal ourselves to anyone paying close attention. The difference between being neurotic versus perceptive is sometimes simply how accurate your reads are.

When you are attuned, hidden truths can run below a conversation like subtitles. A person says they believe one thing (stated preferences), while their timing and acts ays another (revealed preferences). Perhaps their sudden irritation might guard a tenderness they do not yet know how to name.

Still, it’s worth treading with caution. Perception without humility quickly becomes projection. We see through the accumulated lens of our own experience, and sometimes the subtitles are ours rather than theirs. The practice is to look closely without believing ourselves omniscient, holding our interpretations lightly enough that reality can still correct us.

the infinite in everything. do you see?

Follow almost any thought for long enough and it eventually touches something that may have initially seemed faraway. What appears to be a collection of separate subjects slowly reveals itself as one continuous conversation. It seems there is often an underlying order to seemingly random events, or at least the possibility of one. It reminds me of the way trees communicate across long distances through underground fungal networks, invisible to us on the surface. Above ground, each tree appears separate. Beneath it, exchange is always taking place.

The comical meta-irony is that I have written an entire essay about the phrase ‘it’s not that deep.’ With attention, the phrase itself turns out to be infinitely deep, containing within it smuggled beliefs about seriousness and restraint, intelligence and attention, as well as which parts of life are worthy of examination. It implies that certain things are beneath thought. It imagines that simplicity is more mature than curiosity, that detachment is wiser than fascination, and that the person who notices too much should learn to notice less.

Indeed, as discussed, sometimes they probably should! There are forms of analysis that estrange us from experience, moments when we need to stop interpreting life and simply live it (as spoken in the case for no thoughts, head empty). It is possible to become so preoccupied with the significance of a moment that you miss the moment itself. But I worry more about the opposite tendency, the casual flattening of a world that is already difficult to see clearly and the dismissal of attention as overthinking. The reflex to call curiosity cringe, analysis pretentious, sincerity embarrassing, and depth something imagined by people who have failed to chill.

I do not wish to wrench a lesson out of every spilled drink or force every passing glance to bear the weight of fate. I want to remain open to the possibility that the world contains more than its first appearance. Berger, again, for good measure: reality is not a given. It has to be continually sought out, held, salvaged.

Yet, attention is how we do that. The world keeps offering itself to us, singing loudly in every moment, asking again and again:

do you see?

do you see?

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I recently made a new friend, Henry, who has a way of making my world feel larger. What I find most compelling is the interest he brings to almost anything. When I bring him a half-formed idea, he meets it with such curiosity that several new paths begin to open through it. The best word I have for talking to him is generative. I come away with more understanding than I arrived with, and usually with a new trail of questions and ideas to follow.

He also seems able to make associations effortlessly. I can bring Henry a subject, and he will often respond with a reference or question that changes how I see it. Talking to him can feel like having someone clear a path through the murky forest of whatever I am trying to understand.

Over time, I have started to wonder what makes someone like Henry such a rich conversationalist. What is the material from which a generative mind like his is made?

One way to understand this difference is through rhythm. Some conversations unfold with a recognisable cadence, where you can sense the shape of the next thought before it arrives. Others feel more like experimental jazz, moving unexpectedly between subjects and references. There is an alive, bouncy pulse to them, a sense that the conversation could turn somewhere surprising at any moment. If these associative patterns could be mapped, some might cluster around more familiar pathways, while others would travel further afield.

During one of our recent walks, Henry told me something that suggested how a mind might develop this kind of associative, free range - he regularly listens to multi-hour recordings of a Canadian philosophy radio broadcast from the 1980s.

The more I thought about it, the less incidental the detail seemed. The radio archive appeared to be one example of a broader habit, where Henry consistently draws from unusually varied places. Rather than encountering an idea only after it has been repackaged ad infinitum on the interwebs, he often goes hunting for its urtext, the original work from which later interpretations descend. The important thing is that none of this seems strategic. Henry listened to the five-hour philosophy broadcast because he wanted to know what was inside it. The associations came later, as a residue of having followed his curiosity that far.

The breadth of Henry’s associations seemed related to the breadth of the material he sought out. He simply had more distant points to connect. More broadly, perhaps thoughts begin to move in newer, jazzier directions when the material shaping them comes from less familiar places.

The inverse also seems true. When people only consume the same essays and cultural references, they become more likely to reach for the same language and make similar associations. Whether human or artificial, a system drawing from a narrow range of material has fewer distant points available to connect.

the familiar feed

Before asking how to find more varied sources, it is worth briefly considering why they have become so difficult to encounter in the first place. We may have access to an infinite library, yet the shelf presented to each of us remains remarkably narrow, shaped by the dominant design of our information environment. I do not wish to spend too much time here rehearsing how this happened, because many essays have traced the contributing forces in greater detail. For a fuller account, I recommend William’s essay, Algorithms of Mediocrity.

The abbreviated version is that much of the internet is organised by recommendation algorithms designed primarily to predict what will hold our attention and give us more of it. Spotify, YouTube, Netflix, even dear Substack, serve us new versions of what we have already enjoyed. Indeed, a recommendation algorithm may be how you found your way to this very essay.

These systems are often useful discovery engines, and I have found many interesting texts and blogs through them. Their central limitation, though, is that their predictions are based on who we have already been. Once an algorithm forms a picture of you, it becomes very good at reinforcing it. As Yancey Strickler asks, once the algorithm knows you, how do you break its picture of you? How do you encounter the inputs that might interest a future version of you, rather than endlessly reinforcing the preferences of your present self?

maps for the infinite library

One answer is to look beyond the algorithm’s picture of you towards text that was not made for your feed or people like you. Often, the most generative encounters can be the ones no recommendation system would have known to make.

But stepping beyond the narrow stream creates another problem. Suddenly, you are facing an infinite library, far more than anyone could read in a thousand lifetimes. Finding the rich and worthwhile material within it requires maps and a willingness to wander. Must that involve crawling through the internet’s deepest archives in search of Canadian philosophy broadcasts from the 1980s? Well, perhaps that is as good a place to start as any. Here are a few other methods I have found useful:

- make friends who send you niche PDFs

I think everyone could benefit from having a Henry in their life. Being close to someone deeply curious, with a vastly different information diet from your own, makes it more likely that you will encounter relevant ideas from unfamiliar places. Friends are among the best recommendation systems we have. Unlike an algorithm, a thoughtful friend understands the personal context of the question you are asking.

One of my love languages is receiving a DM along the lines of, ‘This obscure essay from 1967 is ostensibly about starfish, but I think it contains the idea you are reaching towards.’

- start a blog

But how do you find these people? In my experience, starting a blog is a remarkably effective method. In fact, a big reason I began this blog was Henrik Karlsson’s essay ‘A blog post is a very long and complex search query to find fascinating people and make them route interesting stuff to your inbox’. The idea is that writing publicly about your particular interests sends a small flare into the velvet noise. People who recognise something in it begin to find you, and can send back ideas you would never have known to search for yourself.

- use tools built for discovery, such as Sublime

Sublime is a communal library shaped by human curiosity rather than engagement optimisation. It gives you a place to collect the things that interest you and explore the libraries of people whose taste you trust.

As a text or image is saved into more collections and placed alongside more ideas, it accumulates new context and more pathways through which someone might encounter it later. When you are exploring a subject, Sublime can surface conceptually adjacent material that illuminates the question from an angle you would not have known to search for.

- find curators

There are also people and publications entirely devoted to making the discovery process easier. My friend created a blog aptly named Instead of Doomscrolling, where she regularly shares texts worth reading. It began as an alternative to opening a feed and allowing an algorithm to decide what entered her mind.

- trace the lineage

If I find someone’s work interesting, there is a good chance I will also find something interesting in the people they were inspired by. Whenever I encounter someone’s work I love, I want to know who influenced them. Which ideas shaped the way they see? Following these lineages lets me move one layer deeper, from the finished work towards the hidden creative world and references that produced it.

On Sublime, you can follow people to see some of the raw material behind their thinking. My friend , for example, has a public library there, including the collection of references behind her essay The Garden of the Self.

- follow the footnotes

Discovery often begins inside the text itself. When something captures my attention, I follow its links and footnotes, ending up with 10 new tabs. Wikipedia hyperlinks are especially good for this kind of wandering.

This is also why I constantly have hundreds of tabs open on my laptop.

- ask AI, carefully

I’ve also found AI useful for finding possible trails to follow. Rather than asking it to summarise a book for me, I tend to use it as a very well-read research assistant. The more specific the question, the better the results. ‘What should I read about love?’ usually returns the obvious suspects. ‘Are there any lectures from the 1970s about love as a form of accurate perception?’ is much more likely to turn up something interesting and useful.

stay curious

In the end, I don’t think Henry is interesting because he listens to multi-hour philosophy broadcasts. I think it has more to do with the way he follows his attention.

When I asked whether he had always been curious about everything, he said it began much more narrowly, with an interest in one person. He described the impulse to keep following things as intuition, or maybe faith. A trail can lead nowhere, and a five-hour radio broadcast can turn out to contain very little. But Henry does not seem preoccupied with making sure every curiosity pays off.

Perhaps that is what I am responding to when I leave our conversations feeling that my world has expanded. He has plenty of notes to draw from, but more importantly, he is willing to follow the first one without knowing where the melody will lead.

I‘m curious - what are the most interesting rabbit holes you’ve travelled down recently?

Leave a comment

In the spirit of following rabbit holes and hyperlinks, here is some more related reading if you’re curious:

Video visualising related ideas on Sublime

Check your Pulse

Check your Pulse #55

Hi, I’m Sari Azout and this is the the 55th edition of Check your Pulse, a tech and startups newsletter designed to make you feel human. I try to make this one of the best emails you get every two weeks(ish…

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6 years ago · 52 likes · 8 comments · Sari Azout

personal canon

research as leisure activity

A few years ago, I came across a particularly evocative description of the website Are.na. I’ll describe Are.na in the plainest possible fashion first: it’s a website where you can privately or collaboratively save images, text, PDFs, website links, and more into “channels.” It’s kind of like Pinterest for artists, researchers, and academics. This is a …

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2 years ago · 16413 likes · 207 comments · Celine Nguyen

That sounds somewhat dramatic, but many people speak about how beginning a writing practice changed their life in similarly grand terms. I wanted to understand more precisely what that change actually consists of, and what writing might be doing to the way we think, notice, and process experience. Partly, I wrote this essay to make sense of the change for myself. I also wrote it for anyone with even the slightest urge to begin writing, because following that urge may change your life, as it changed mine.

why I started writing essays

Prior to starting this blog in May last year, most of my writing took place in my Notes app, some examples of which are included below. These were mostly fragments, sentences, or paragraphs of stream-of-consciousness thoughts jotted down while in an Uber rushing between meetings, or on a plane to or from a client site.

At the time, my job was all-consuming, in terms of time, but even more so in terms of mental space. Evenings and weekends were mostly recovery periods, spent rebuilding enough energy to be ‘on’ again when the week began. I would often doomscroll through reels of cats to dissociate and approximate a sense of rest. There was very little capacity left to meaningfully engage my creative or intellectual faculties beyond work. My thoughts had a slippery quality to them, loose and light. They came and went without anywhere to land, rarely staying long enough to gather weight or take form.

As I became increasingly aware of this, I grew alarmed. I worried that the capacity for deep thought I had worked so diligently to develop throughout university had begun to atrophy during my three years in a full-time corporate job.

So, exactly one week after I quit, I tried my hand at writing essays, partly to reassure myself that I could still think deeply, and partly to better understand my own mind. For the first time in years, I had enough space to turn toward the thoughts that had been accumulating at the edges of my awareness.

I could sense that these loose, slippery thoughts were connected, that a worldview of some kind was beginning to gather shape beneath them. Every now and then, I would glimpse it in a conversation or a passing thought, only for it to disappear again, the connections dissolving back into the present before they had anywhere to land.

I had never turned my attention toward tracing those connections, so no larger pattern had the chance to emerge.1 It turns out that when you do not look for the connections between your experiences, there are no dots to connect. But once I directed the flame of my attention toward them, patterns that had always been there, previously out of sight, began to reveal themselves, each one illuminating the next. The next question was how to keep those passing thoughts from disappearing long enough to follow where they led. For me, it began by giving them somewhere to go.

giving thoughts somewhere to go

I often text myself sentences and fragments while walking around or after a conversation, some of which are shown in the screenshot below. Taken out of context, these text threads look like a very one-sided relationship. When E saw one of these threads, he remarked, ‘Wow, why are you texting this person? It looks like they never reply.’

The difference from when I used to do this is that I now have somewhere to store, collect, and connect these fragments. When I get to my laptop, I move them into a Notion folder, where I organise ideas and drafts by theme and stage of progress. When a thought opens up a new theme, it gets a page of its own. Some of these pages contain only a single messy note, but even then, the thought has a home I can return to later. Otherwise, it finds a place inside something I am already exploring.

Previously, my fragments accumulated without becoming anything. Now they have a home to live, somewhere they can meet other thoughts and gather weight, rather than remaining loose and slippery. It is the combination of the tool and the ritual of returning that allows these passing thoughts to become some line of inquiry.

what writing does to the brain

Giving thoughts somewhere to go seems to do more than keep them from disappearing. It changes the entire shape of my attention, making me more alert to what might connect, deepen, or become something else. Once written down, a thought begins to exert a kind of gravity, drawing other ideas, memories, and experiences toward it until it gradually takes on a larger form.

The best analogy I have come up with is that writing creates mental nets for catching thoughts as you move through your day. Previously, my mind felt more like a sieve. An interesting conversation with a friend or a provocative text would stir up ideas and memories, but they would soon wash through and disappear. Most of the time, I would forget the thought had ever occurred to me.

A writing practice has changed this for me. Active drafts create nets around ideas I have already begun exploring, giving conversations and passing moments something to catch onto. New thoughts no longer slip through quite so easily. They attach themselves to an existing line of inquiry and have somewhere to remain.

In some sense, what a draft really creates is an unfinished question. Once that question exists, some part of my mind continues looking for possible answers, even while my conscious attention is elsewhere. The world begins offering up material that might help me understand it. Over time, these questions occupy a sustained space in the mind and become structures through which the world is perceived.2 Everything begins to contain more potential energy, more possible ways of being transformed into something else.

For example, over lunch with E, he asked what I had been writing that morning. As I tried to explain this essay, I began testing out new ways of articulating what I meant. His clarifying questions brushed up against my initial instincts and helped the idea take on a more precise shape. That conversation then found its way back into the draft you are reading now, which looks very different from the fragments it began as. The first idea for this piece was simply the net analogy; everything else emerged from there. In this way, the essay took form in the shared space between us, through conversation.

This is how all conversation works, through association, as we connect our experiences and stories. Every conversation is, in itself, a deeply creative act. When people tell me they have no idea what they would write about, I often think that if they recorded a single conversation with a close friend, they would find endless essay ideas emerging from it. When you pay attention, these conversations reveal the recurring loops of interest you keep returning to. What do your friends ask you about? What can you not stop talking about? I often find that these are the richest grounds for essays. An essay is often simply me following one of those threads more deeply, turning my attention toward it to uncover and unravel what is already there. I wrote more about how conversations become essays in an earlier post the best conversations help you overhear yourself.

One of the most magical things about this practice is that it revealed how much richness can lie inside a passing thought. When I gave one enough time and attention, following the thread and patiently unravelling what lay beneath it, I often found far more there than I initially expected. The world began to feel almost infinitely abundant, as though ideas were lying latent behind everything I encountered, waiting to be discovered if only I stayed with them for long enough.

Conversation is one place where this abundance reveals itself, but the associative process extends far beyond it. Writing has made me more alert to connections across everything I encounter, sometimes giving me the embodied impression that absolutely everything is connected. Even as I wrote this essay, I began thinking of other essays tied to the same idea. By turning my attention toward those connections, I started drawing out patterns that had always been there but remained invisible.

But I don’t mean to entirely romanticise this process. There is also a darker side to walking through life with so many nets cast around you. In her Nobel Prize for Literature acceptance speech, Annie Ernaux wrote, ‘Maybe the true purpose of my life is for my body, my sensations and my thoughts to become writing. In other words, something intelligible and universal, causing my existence to merge into the lives and heads of other people.’ Elsewhere, in her unpublished journal entries, she remembers ‘living and walking through the streets exactly as if things were about to turn into words, sentences’. If not careful, this way of thinking can conjure the unsettling image of everything you experience becoming mere ingredients, pieces of material to feed an ever-hungry artistic practice, a machine that converts raw experience into meaning.

A recent conversation with a friend helped me see the cost of this more clearly. When I asked whether he considered himself a writer, he told me he approached writing with some caution, because the act itself can create distance from experience, alienating you slightly from your own life. Instead of simply living through something, part of you is already standing outside it, observing and shaping it into a story.

This is one of the difficulties of writing personal essays publicly, and part of why I am careful not to share everything that happens to me here. I think some experiences have to remain partly untouched, kept outside the machinery of interpretation and disclosure. At the same time, some degree of distance is inseparable from art. Writing asks one to step outside an experience long enough to examine it, understand it, and make it intelligible. I am not sure this tension can be neatly resolved. Perhaps the question is simply how to write from life without allowing the writerly gaze to entirely consume it.

writing toward a new life

The most immediate change writing made to my life was that fewer things simply passed through me. It gave thoughts somewhere to live, made connections easier to perceive, and turned experiences I might once have forgotten into questions I could continue following. Writing also significantly changed my relationships, career and entire life path, but that is a story for another essay.

Some people resist the idea of writing because they simply don’t think of themselves as a writer. But my primary identity is not that of a writer either. In his essay Developing creative identity, Michael Nielsen writes, ‘I’m not a writer. I’m an explorer and researcher who also writes.’ I relate to this - I experience life and go about my days, and writing is simply the mode through which I make sense of it.

Writing is an act of thinking. It is a way of attempting to understand my days and my life, connecting the dots between disparate experiences and memories. Words happen to be a particularly useful medium for this process because they are one of the primary means through which we interpret and organise reality. Writing can be a tool through which you become more fully yourself, a way of paying closer attention to your life, and sometimes even changing it.

I’m curious and would love to hear from you in the comments: do you have a writing practice, and what does it make more visible to you? If you do not write, have you found another way of making sense of experience?

If you find some value in my writing, you can buy me a coffee. Other ways to support are just as meaningful: subscribing or pledging to my Substack, leaving a comment, or sharing this with someone you think would enjoy it. Each small signal helps others find their way through the noise.

If you enjoyed this, here are more of my essays related to writing:

However, amidst the feelings of serenity and amazement, we also encountered many moments of extreme fear-inducing turbulence. Now, I have experienced my fair share of aerial turbulence in my life, but on this day I discovered there is something uniquely terrifying about being in a 4-person plane that makes every shake feel especially disastrous and final. Our small plane jerked impolitely around through the empty cloudless sky, bouncing up, down and to the left without any consideration for our own personal feelings about the matter. I slowly breathed in and out, reckoning with the fact that I had absolutely no control over our life in this moment. In a very real sense, there was nothing I could do.

The only person who had any semblance of control was our trusted friend and pilot Weilon, whose competencies I did have full faith in. My faith had been built when he earlier had recounted how he had spent many hours tirelessly studying how to make flying go as smoothly as possible. He described how only 20% of people who attempt to get their pilot’s license actually complete the full program, because of how much effort it takes. Unlike how alarmingly easy it is to get a drivers license, I was relieved to hear there were many inconvenient hoops one had to jump through to become a certified pilot. Weilon also exuded a responsible, trustworthy, serious presence that experienced software engineers often have. But even then, I was struck that there was still a real risk no amount of planning or skill could eliminate. Our future was ultimately in the hands of indifferent nature, or call it the Gods, or fate.

Weilon informed us after we landed that this level of turbulence was very unusual. Luckily, he had the consideration to only tell us this fact after we were safely on the ground, otherwise I probably would have been a lot more stressed in the air.

As I was acquainting myself with the feeling of walking on solid ground again, I found myself overcome with a somewhat cliché but sincere gratitude for life, a recognition of our finite existence, and a sudden awareness of everything I had been taking for granted. I thought about how I would highly recommend this experience to anyone who has lost touch with the inherent precariousness of being alive and is in need of some kind of existential wake-up call. I thought perhaps we should prescribe turbulent plane rides to people feeling generally numb to their own life.

As I thought about it more, I began to wonder whether there are other ways to access this awakened state. People who have near-death experiences often describe suddenly becoming awake to their own lives, realising they were on an entirely wrong trajectory, or had been taking everything for granted. Many describe either making drastic changes almost immediately, or arriving at a deeper state of gratitude for the life they already have. The same commonly happens after a terminal diagnosis, or the sudden death of a close family member or friend. The thread running through these experiences is that the possible end of everything is rudely and abruptly brought into view. This reminder seems to have a clarifying effect, illuminating what we had been taking for granted and suddenly reordering our priorities. It can make us live with more presence and deliberation, forcing us to reckon with the ways in which we may have sleepwalked into a life we do not want to be living.

Yet, in some sense, we are always deeply fragile, this is just easily obscured to us in the daily undertakings and motions of our life. Sure, we may be especially fragile in a tiny plane due to the increased risk, but there is also very real risk in crossing the street, loving or trusting someone, going outside, doing almost anything at all.

I think often about how easy it is to forget this fragility, and with it, what actually matters. In my experience, this knowledge seems particularly slippery. I think this forgetting is also part of what produces most midlife crises. You can delay enquiry for many decades, it would appear, but it often persists as an underlying nausea, until one day it strikes you with a burning what am I doing that is impossible to ignore, leading to all the chaotic decisions one in a midlife crisis is known to make.

I began to wonder: how might we remain familiarly acquainted with this awareness, without tattooing it on the back of our hands or making it our phone screensaver (though, honestly, maybe not bad ideas). How how might we stay in touch with that acute realisation of life’s fragility and what actually matters to us in other, less frightening or traumatic ways? If we could access this state in every waking moment at will, how differently might our lives look? How might we learn to live in full lucidity, unobstructed by an accumulated blurriness?

One way to describe this state of being is remaining lucid. Lucid is one of my favourite words and a trait I would use to describe all of my favourite people. Lucidity is a way of seeing, an ability to see what lays beneath what may initially appear, glowing and cutting through an earthly fog. I admire lucid thinkers, dreamers, seers. I think to describe someone existing in a lucid way is a strong compliment. The word gives me imagery of cool, clear water - refreshing, clarifying, illuminating. What follows are a few of the reminders that have returned me to this state, including the people, works of art, and practices that have helped me stay awake to my own life.

people as lucid portals

One way that seems to help is meeting people who themselves are particularly lucid and clear-eyed, who have so clearly organised their life around what matters to them. You can see how their life has been animated by a fundamental quality of intent, a deep reconciliation and careful evaluation of what was expected from them, integrated with their own essence. Being in their orbit can feel instantly clarifying, like I become more awake by osmosis, just from witnessing how they exist in the world. These people are self-possessed in such a remarkable and palpable way in which I can’t help but wonder ‘how did you come to be this way?’. They instantly remind me that a fuller life is possible, simply by embodying an energetic, life-loving, fully alive, vivid presence. If I go long enough without encountering someone like this, it can be easy to forget this way of existing is even possible. I wrote about a few specific people in my life who evoke this within me and their traits more in an essay last year misery is contagious, but so is joy).

But just as people can inspire you in their way of being, reminding you of what is possible and raising your ambitions for yourself, I think it is equally useful to meet people helping you understand the life you do not wish for. When I worked at a previous job, I would ask sometimes senior leaders how they arrived at their position, eagerly awaiting impassioned stories. Yet, more times than not, the response was something along the lines of, you know, I guess I don’t really know. I kind of just fell into it. One thing after another happened, and 10 years later, here I am.

Hearing these experiences struck the core of my soul with a deep fear. Often, their life was indeed very satisfying and fulfilling, but I immediately knew that I did not personally want that as my path. I wondered to myself, what is it about this particular life path that scares me? And how might I try my very best to avoid a similar fate for myself? If I don’t actively consider this, it appeared frighteningly easy for life to unfold in such a way.

art as lucid portals

Sometimes works of art can awaken us to this fact too. One time when my friend was in a mediocre relationship, I sent her the poem ‘Do Not Love Half Lovers’ by Khalil Gibran (quoted at the end of this essay) and she decided to break up with him the next day. The poem seemed to reach somewhere all my explanations and advice had not, giving form to a truth she already knew but had not yet been able to admit.

Another classic quote that grounds me is Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot. In 1990, as Voyager 1 was leaving the solar system, it turned back to take one final photograph of Earth from around 3.7 billion miles away. In the image, our whole planet is less than a pixel, a small point of light suspended in darkness. Sagan later wrote about the photograph in a way that, to me, captures exactly this feeling of being violently returned to perspective:

writing as lucid portals

Self-reflection and writing can have a similar effect of forcing oneself into lucidity. While you can quite easily lie to yourself while journalling, it is at least a little bit harder than just thinking about it, as you must confront your slippery beliefs in the attempt of pinning a thought’s fickle, slippery fleeting state into unmovable words. A thought kept inside the mind can keep changing shape to protect itself. On the page, it becomes a little less evasive.

Writing exposes my inner contradictions, the places where I am saying one thing and living another, where I am pretending not to want something I clearly want, or pretending to want something I do not actually want at all. In this sense, writing can be a kind of self-interrogation. It asks me to provide evidence for my own life, to notice why an experience moved me, bothered me, or made me feel the need to defend something so strongly. Of course, this is not a foolproof method. I also often write myself into further confusion, mistaking the elegance of an explanation for the truth of it. But even then, writing gives the confusion at least a shape, something to see and press up against.

Writing also creates a record for my future forgetful self. I sometimes write in a rare moment of clarity that I know I will later need to be reminded of. Indeed, this is part of the reason why I started this blog in the first place, and why my bio is writing toward aliveness.

stay lucid

Maybe all I mean by lucidity is anything that briefly interrupts the blur of everyday living. Each interruption has the potential to return me, however temporarily, to the impossible fact of being alive. Eventually, of course, I forget, and the ground becomes ordinary again for the thousandth time. Still, some part of me remembers exactly how thin the membrane is. I wonder if this is the best we can do, not live forever in revelation, but leave ourselves enough reminders that we can keep finding our way back.

A question I’m curious about: how do you stay lucid to your own life? What practices or disciplines help you remember our predicament?

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For a long time, I thought conversation was mostly a way of reporting on life, not participating in it.

I understood that it could be pleasant and funny, even often useful, but I did not yet understand that it could be generative. So much of it seemed to be people passing static facts back and forth, reporting the surface of their lives without anything really happening between them. I dreaded certain kinds of talking because they felt hollow to me, as if we were all politely taking turns placing objects on a table and then walking away unchanged.

This is close to what Ursula K. Le Guin critiques in her 2004 essay ‘Telling Is Listening’ as the mechanical model of communication: one mind transmitting information to another, as if language were a tube connecting two sealed boxes.

I discovered this difference through Vivi, my college roommate who would become one of my closest friends. She expanded my understanding of what a conversation could be. The best way I can describe it is that talking to her often felt like playing jazz. I am far from a musician, so I mean this less as a technical comparison than a felt one in the improvisation, the aliveness, the way each person has to stay awake to what the other is doing in order to enter. She had a way of making a room feel more alert. You never quite knew where the conversation would go, only that if you followed the thread honestly, something alive would happen.

She listened in a way that made my own thoughts more interesting to me. She asked questions that opened secret doors inside of myself, questions that pulled me out of my familiar scripts and into some more vivid relation with myself. Through talking to her, I learned more about who I was. I became clearer to myself through the force of her witnessing and reflecting. She had a way of drawing out the hidden interesting thing underneath what you said, pulling on the almost-thought until it became visible. With Vivi, conversation started feeling like an act of co-creation.

I think this is the difference between conversation that drains me and conversation that wakes me up. In one, language stays flat, passing the expected object back and forth. In the other, something is in motion. Someone asks a question and you feel yourself searching for what in you might meet it. You retrieve memories, connect distant ideas, sew threads between unrelated experiences, revise in real time.

At its best, conversation helps make something newly available. Under the pressure of being listened to properly, people often discover that they know more than they thought they knew. A generous question, paired with a generous listener, can reach beneath the managed self and help pull something truer into language, bringing something from fog into form.

This is why conversation feels like a portal to me. It opens onto things that were impossible to reach alone, including something in the self, something in the other person, and something that only appears between you.

the self needs a prompt

Why does conversation have the power to change our access to ourselves? I think the first reason is that the self often needs a prompt. Another way of saying this: you do not know what you think until something asks you. At least, not fully.

There are thoughts that exist in us before language, but only as a vague leaning or barely visible arrangement of taste and intuition. They sit somewhere subterranean, patiently waiting for the right conditions to become speakable. Then someone asks, What do you think? or says a sentence that irritates us, or notices something we skipped past too quickly. A thought rises through the dark water of the mind and breaks the surface. You hear yourself answer and think, oh, I suppose I believe that. Actually, now that you ask, I suppose that has been in me for some time. In my experience, this can feel quite physical in the body, this rising up of thought from somewhere deep inside you. The other person has has helped make its emergence possible.

I know this from how often I discover my own opinions only after I’ve started speaking. I do not think of myself as a particularly opinionated person. I have beliefs, of course, but many of them are not sitting neatly at the front of my mind, labelled and ready to be retrieved.

But as soon as a friend asks, Do you think people can really change? or What makes a friendship feel alive to you? or Would you ever move back to a city you outgrew?, I feel something in me begin to assemble. I start with a half-formed instinct, then add a caveat, then make a distinction, then hear myself reaching and attempting to sharpen the blurriness. By the end of the answer, I realise I do in fact believe something about the matter. The thought was already in me, maybe, but only as a pattern of memory, longing and aversion. The question gave it a precise shape I could not have found alone, so I could finally see it more clearly.

the listener who makes you audible to yourself

Still, a question alone is only part of the miracle. The deeper magic is what happens when the question comes from someone who knows how to listen.

In human conversation, what is said is shaped by response, actual or anticipated. You are never speaking into a void. You are speaking into a particular face, a silence, a tilt of the head, a quickening of attention. The listener is playing an active role in this process, helping determine what kind of thought can arrive.

A good listener creates a space in which you can hear yourself more accurately. They ask the question underneath the answer you keep giving. They hold up a piece and say, Wait, say more about that. And then, somehow, you are saying more about that. As Ursula K. Le Guin writes: talking and listening are ultimately the same thing…The living response enables the voice to speak.

There is an ancient name for this: maieutics, from the Greek maieutikos, meaning ‘of midwifery’. In Plato’s Theaetetus, Socrates, whose mother was said to be a midwife, uses the metaphor to describe his own method of questioning. He imagines questions helping them bring forth thoughts already latent within them, then testing whether those offspring are true or false. In this way, a good question is a kind of intellectual birth assistance. It assumes there is something in the other person worth bringing into form.

every essay idea i have comes from conversation

There is a moment in good conversation when authorship starts to blur. It came through the speaker, yes, but also through the question, the listener, the room, the trust, the timing. Something was born from the encounter itself. Le Guin calls this a common interchange between two consciousnesses.

Ideas become essays this way too. Someone asked me recently where I get the ideas for my essays, and the honest answer is: conversation. Almost all of my ideas have arrived through talking, far from clean theses lowered into my mind, but as something I notice myself exploring with a friend. An essay begins as a disturbance in my attention. I bring the thing to someone else before I fully understand it myself. I say it badly. They misunderstand it productively. They offer an example I had not thought of, push on the weak part, ask the question underneath the idea. Slowly, the thing gathers gravity and a clearer centre of force.

Conversations like this are a tug-of-war with a living thing, everyone pulling the idea into sharper shape through the back and forth. One person throws something out, another catches it at an angle, a third person notices the live wire, and then the idea has more weight than it did when it belonged to any one person.

This is why most of my writing club time is actually spent talking rather than writing. I used to think this meant I was failing to do the work, until I realised the conversation was most of the work. If I remember to take notes afterwards, I often find that the essay has already begun to assemble itself in the back-and-forth, through the disagreement, the tangent, the sentence someone repeats back to me, the moment my whole inner system responds, yes, no, almost, not quite, this, but different.

I think an interesting word to understand these people is as interlocutors. The word comes from the Latin interloqui, to speak between. An interlocutor speaks into the space between you and the work, helping you understand what the project (work or the self as project) are trying to become.

the presence that makes an answer possible

It would appear talking is far more than just how we document life. Talking is one of the ways life happens. It is where experience becomes real to us, where feeling finds form, where thought discovers its own shape in the presence of another person.

Someone asks the right question and waits. The silence has enough room in it, so something in you loosens, as a thought finds a door. You hear yourself say a sentence you did not know you had, and suddenly you can move more freely inside yourself. Maybe this is what we are searching for as much as answers: the kind of people with presence that makes the best answers possible.

If you find some value in my writing, you can buy me a coffee. Other ways to support are just as meaningful: subscribing or pledging to my Substack, leaving a comment, or sharing this with someone you think would enjoy it. Each small signal helps others find their way through the noise.

Further reading on this topic:

Ursula de Guin ‘Telling is Listening’ (2004)

The Marginalian: Telling Is Listening: Ursula K. Le Guin on the Magic of Real Human Conversation

Simone Weil ‘Attention and Will’ (1952)

Daniel Kahnemann, Attention and Effort (1973)

Brenda Ueland, The Art of Listening (1992)

Kumi Kato Listening: Research as an act of mindfulness (2015)

My are.na channel on attention and listening

In his book on friendship, John O’Donahue asks: “When was the last time you had a great conversation? A conversation that wasn’t just two intersecting monologues, but when you overheard yourself saying things you never knew you knew, that you heard yourself receiving from somebody words that found places within you that you thought you had lost, and the sense of an “eventive” conversation that brought the two of you into a different plane and then forthly, a conversation that continued to sing afterwards for weeks in your mind? Conversations like that are food and drink for the soul.

“Great conversation is cognitively enlivening, as a form of mutual weirdness, an intellectual tango where neither partner quite knows what the next step will be…. We allow each other to unfold, to be dynamically in motion” from:

help is closer than we think

I keep thinking about how often the right help arrives through an almost-random conversation. You mention a problem over dinner and a friend says, oh, you should talk to my friend. You describe what you are stuck on and someone tells you, I went through this exact thing. You tell someone what you are trying to create and they say, wait, I think I know the person you need. Suddenly someone has enough context to see the door you were standing beside.

But what if you never had that conversation? What if you never happened to mention the problem? What if the person who could have helped was someone you forgot to update, because you did not realise they were relevant to this chapter of your life?

This is one of the inefficiencies of social life. The help we need is often much closer than we think, but it stays dormant until our lives become legible enough for other people to know where their care, intelligence, or context might be helpful.

This matters because becoming more fully yourself is rarely a solo act of will. My sense is that we contain much more potential than we are able to access alone. We may feel the dim outline of another life, but the path toward it is often obscured by small barriers: not knowing who to ask, what to ask, nor that someone near us has already crossed the terrain where we feel most lost.

Which leads to the question underneath this whole essay: how do we make this kind of help less accidental?

the problem of staying visible

Over a lifetime, we meet people who care about us. These are friends, professors, mentors, managers, collaborators, acquaintances, former colleagues, internet mutuals, people we met once at a dinner and had one unusually alive conversation with, people who saw something in us before we could see it ourselves. But staying meaningfully in touch with all these people is surprisingly difficult (as I explored in the art of staying in touch).

This is because even when people care, there is still a friction. This friction, to be clear, is usually just a few sentences typed into a glowing rectangle. But distance can accumulate its own social gravity. Time between conversations can make people feel further away than they are. The longer it has been since you spoke, the more a message can start to feel like an Event.

Social media somewhat solves this, but only in a flattened way. People can see that you moved cities, posted an essay, went to a dinner, got a new job, or became briefly obsessed with making ceramics. But the inner thread of your life is harder to transmit. Social media shows artefacts and signals, but it rarely shows the actual shape of your becoming.

That kind of context usually only emerges in real conversation. We give people fragments of the update in passing: over coffee, on long walks, in voice notes, at parties, in the compressed three-sentence version of our lives we offer when someone asks what we have been up to.

Conversation is wonderful, but it has natural limits. There are only so many people you can keep meaningfully updated in real time, and only so many times you can compress the same chapter of your life into a different conversation without losing your mind, though of course I will keep trying.

If help is often obscured behind the absence of a question, and staying in touch is too bottlenecked to happen only through catch-ups, then maybe what could help is a lightweight form for making our lives legible to the people who care.

a life update

I started wondering whether more of us could benefit from a small ritual for this: a recurring note to the people who care, somewhere between a letter, a field report, and a gentle ask.

Startups do something like this with investor updates. I think the useful part is the shape of the ritual, which involves reflecting regularly, keeping people close to the journey, and making it easier for help to know where to land.

What would a softer, more human version of this look like for a life?

Maybe a semi-regular note for mentors, friends, old professors, former managers, interesting acquaintances, and people who care. It could include something like: here is what I am working on, here is what I am learning, here is where I could use a lantern.

I am interested in the power of an intentional 1:many version. I think the best version of this is a way of remaining in relationship with the people who have helped shape you, and letting them know enough of the story that they can participate if they want to. There is generosity in context. It lets people care for you with more accuracy. It gives them enough of the thread to know how they might be able to help.

The medium matters because it lowers the bar. A catch-up is beautiful, but it requires scheduling gymnastics. A group chat is intimate, but it can create weird reply-all dynamics. Social media is easy, but it often flattens the signal. Email might actually be the best container because it allows one shared update and many private replies. Everyone receives the same note, but anyone can respond personally, which creates a lightweight bridge between broadcasting and intimacy.

When I tweeted about this idea, I learned that lots of people apparently already do versions of it, which delighted me. One friend told me that since moving overseas, he makes graphic zines over iMessage to update his friends on his life.

Another person said she has done something like this since college, and that her list includes old bosses, internet friends, airport strangers, and baristas in Europe.

Of course, email is only one version of this. The deeper pattern is creating small, recurring containers for reflection, accountability, companionship, and help.

I already do this in more intimate forms. A few friends and I have quarterly life strategy sessions, complete with presentations, memos, and a section for questions we want help thinking through. During my sabbatical, another group of friends and I did a daily morning standup, where we shared what happened yesterday and what we were planning to do that day. I also have a weekly call with a friend where we go through a shared note, tracking the habits we are trying to maintain and talking through what is working.

A life update comes from the same instinct, a small ritual for letting other people stay close to the thread of your life.

But the moment you try to write one, you may find the tender part underneath the ritual. It is easy enough to tell people what happened. It is harder to name what remains unresolved, where you feel uncertain, and what kind of help would actually help.

the vulnerability of asking

The first difficulty is recognition. Asking for help requires you to notice the gap between where you are and where you are trying to go, which sounds obvious, but often is not. Sometimes I can feel the chasm, but I cannot yet name it. I know I am stuck, but not what kind of stuck. I know I am confused, but not what question would clarify me. There is a state before the ask where you are moving around inside fog, aware that something is not working, but unable to turn the feeling into a sentence another person could respond to.

The second difficulty is exposure. Even once you know what you need, asking for help requires admitting incompleteness. It punctures the fantasy of independence. It says, I cannot fully do this alone and I am not yet who I am trying to become. I trust you enough to let you see the unfinished part.

has a beautiful essay about what he calls being “kinded,” the state of receiving kindness from another person. He writes about how many people resist being kinded unless they are in dire need. We often know how to give care, but can be much worse at receiving it.

The odd thing is that the vulnerability is often much stronger on the receiving side than the giving side. What feels to you like neediness may feel to someone else like a welcome invitation to be useful.

This is worth remembering because I have learned many people often love helping each other, when the help is made legible. They love being invited into another person’s becoming. They love making the introduction, recommending the book, asking the clarifying question, saying the obvious thing you somehow could not see because you were standing too close to your own life.

I keep thinking about this after a conversation I had with my friend Franko, who changed my life with one suggestion. When I was trying to figure out my next career move, he told me to post publicly about my job search. It was obvious in retrospect, but it changed the surface area of my life. Once the need became visible, people I would never have thought to ask started sending roles, names, introductions, and pieces of context I could not have accessed alone. This is the power of making the ask legible: it gives other people somewhere to place their help.

the update is useful before anyone replies

There is another benefit to asking for help: it forces your confusion into language.

This is part of why mentorship is so powerful, though I think we sometimes misunderstand where the power sits. A good mentor gives advice, but they also create the conditions for articulation. Before someone can help you, you have to metabolise your vague sense of stuckness into language.

In this sense, you can almost have any mentor in the world before they even know you exist. You can imagine the conversation. What would I ask Paul Graham? What would I ask Virginia Woolf? What would I ask my wisest friend? What would I ask the person who has already lived the chapter I am trying to enter?

Even if you never send the question, something in you sharpens when you try to formulate it. You begin to notice what kind of help you are actually asking for. Do I need encouragement or tactical advice? Do I need an introduction or someone to tell me my standards are too low? Do I need someone to reality-check me or to remind me that I am allowed to want what I want?

Most of us are inside our own lives too continuously to see them clearly. We move from task to task, city to city, love to crisis to ambition to admin, and only occasionally pause long enough to ask what the plot actually is. A life update creates a small reflective checkpoint. It asks you to metabolise experience into narrative, and narrative into questions.

becoming easier to help

I think a full life has many kinds of witnesses. Some people know your childhood self. Some people know your professional self. Some people know the version of you that appears when you are most alive. None of them have the full map, but each of them may hold one useful angle.

We are shaped by the people who ask better questions than we do, by friends who notice patterns and mentors who widen the frame, by old bosses who say, actually, I think you are underrating yourself, and by the friend who remembers what you wanted before you became practical. Sometimes someone else can see the door before we can, because they are standing at a different angle.

This is what I mean when I say becoming yourself is a social project. Far from a solo act of will, a full life is shaped through many co-authors, editors, witnesses, catalysts, and mirrors. Most of us are surrounded by more care, intelligence, and help than we know how to access. Maybe part of reaching your potential is learning how to become easier to help.

One possible template could be a note with four parts shared every few months (or any cadence that feels right):

• Where I am: what happened, what changed, what I am working on, what feels alive.

• What I am learning: what worked, what did not, what patterns I am noticing, what I am slowly understanding.

• What I am wondering: the questions I keep returning to, the decisions I am circling, the places where I feel uncertain or unfinished.

• Where help would help: the advice, introductions, examples, encouragement, reality checks, or questions that would be useful right now.

Even if you never send it, you may learn something from the attempt, because to articulate your life is already to see it more clearly.

Related essays:

“Words are events, they do things, change things... ” – Ursula K. Le Guin

Note: this is a slightly different essay from me, at least on the surface. It is about company storytelling and technology, but underneath that, it belongs to the same set of obsessions I keep returning to: language, attention, legibility, and the power words have to make certain worlds possible.

Storytelling is having a moment. Even the job market has noticed. As the Wall Street Journal reported, the percentage of LinkedIn job descriptions containing the word “storyteller” doubled in 2025.

The rise of “storyteller” roles may signal that companies know language matters, but not always that they have agreed on what kind of storytelling work they need. In some job descriptions, “storyteller” seems to mean content creator, founder ghostwriter, comms lead, brand strategist, product marketer, or some hybrid of all of the above.

I find myself thinking of this ambiguity as the difference between the storyteller and the storyfinder. The storyteller expresses an existing story well, translating strategy into words, pages, posts, launch videos, and campaigns. The storyfinder works one step earlier, helping clarify the story before it is expressed: what the company believes, what it makes possible, and what language makes that future easier to understand.

Both kinds of work matter, but they require different proximity to the company’s core decisions. Expression works best when there is already a story clear enough to translate. When the company’s strategic thinking is still fuzzy, the person responsible for the story is forced to reverse-engineer its point of view from the outside.

The stakes become clearer once the story has to travel. As a company grows, its story moves across teams, customers, candidates, investors, decks, sales calls, product decisions, and everyday conversations. Anyone who has played a game of telephone knows what happens to a message as it moves. It mutates and absorbs the assumptions of whoever repeats it.

Rather than just a communications asset, the story is one of the ways a company keeps identity, action, and perception in alignment. What a company believes about itself shapes what it builds, sells, hires for, refuses, and celebrates. Those actions shape how the outside world understands the company. That perception then feeds back into who joins, what customers expect, what investors reward, and what future actions feel natural.

At its best, storytelling can both carry a company’s message into the world and help clarify the future the company is trying to make visible. The rest of this essay is about that second kind of work, or storyfinding: finding the language, metaphors, and questions that make a new world easier to see, desire, and join.

the right words make people yearn for the sea

The first task is making that world feel worth moving toward.

An ambitious company building something genuinely new asks people to do much more than understand a product. It asks them to believe in, work toward, and make decisions around a world that does not fully exist yet: investors suspending disbelief, employees leaving safer jobs, customers changing habits, journalists paying attention, early believers tolerating the period where the thing is still unfinished and easy to misunderstand.

People need language before they can take an unfamiliar idea seriously. They need a frame that makes the odd thing nameable, the risky thing meaningful, and the non-obvious thing easier to understand. Language gives people a way to hold the possible before it has become obvious.

From there, understanding has to become desire. A new world has to become visible before it can become desirable, and strategic storytelling helps people understand why the world on the other side might be worth moving toward. This is storyfinding: looking past the product description toward the world the product makes easier to enter.

As Antoine de Saint-Exupéry wrote: “If you want to build a ship, don’t drum up the men to gather wood, divide the work, and give orders. Instead, teach them to yearn for the vast and endless sea.” The best company storytelling works in this spirit: it makes people yearn for the sea.

Of course, because desire is involved, this is the point at which narrative work can start to sound suspicious. The cynical reading is that story is only distortion, a way to override reality, manufacture consent, or make something hollow sound deep. To be clear, that version exists. Language can inflate. It can make fake things sound real, fragile things sound certain, and exploitative things sound noble. There is no shortage of language that obscures more than it reveals.

But language can also make unfamiliar things graspable without making them false. This serious version of narrative stays in contact with reality while giving people a way to understand why a new reality might be worth moving toward.

The weaker story says: we build workflow automation for X. It describes the ship, polishes the deck, raises the flag, and forgets to ask why anyone would want the voyage. The stronger story might say: here is the world X makes possible, and here is what people can do, feel, or become because of it. In other words, every great company opens a sea.

For example, is Substack just newsletter software? Or does it open the sea of independent writers becoming publications, private sensibilities finding their people, and culture being shaped from the edges? Is Airbnb just spare-room booking? Or does it open the sea of belonging anywhere, making travel feel more intimate, local, and human?

But desire still needs an entry point. If storyfinding starts by asking what world the company opens, the next question is how people recognise the door.

the metaphor is the first interface

Metaphor is often where recognition begins. People hear a company as a phrase, a headline, a friend saying “it’s like X but for Y”. It gives people a way to hold the technical system in their minds: what kind of object they are looking at, what older idea it resembles, and what kind of future it implies.

This is easy to miss because we often think of metaphor as ornamental literary flourish, a thing a poet adds to make prose prettier. Yet, metaphor is how the unknown borrows credibility from the known.

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson wrote in Metaphors We Live By that our ordinary conceptual system is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. Their point was that metaphor structures perception and action. Their opening example is argument. We talk about arguments as if they are wars: we attack positions, defend claims, shoot down objections, win, lose, concede. If we conceive of argument this way, we may act as though we are at war when we disagree.

In the case of ambitious technology, language determines whether people experience it as a tool, a toy, a threat, a cult, a movement, a coordination mechanism, a once-in-a-generation opportunity, or another app asking for their email. Each one smuggles in a different theory of what the product is and how people should relate to it.

For example, if you call a product a “copilot,” you inherit the user as pilot, the machine as assistant, the human still in control, the tool as trusted companion rather than replacement. If you call something an “agent,” the feeling changes. Now it has initiative and it acts. It may know things before you ask. If you call a company a “factory,” you privilege repeatability, scale, production. If you call it a “studio,” you privilege taste, craft, authorship.

This is where storyfinding moves from external communication into strategy. Beyond helping outsiders understand the company, a strong narrative changes what the company itself can see. As Sindu points out, these can generate new questions as much as they describe what already exists. She cites Stripe’s mission to “increase the GDP of the internet” as creating a larger field of inquiry: what prevents more people from participating in the internet economy? What makes technological progress more likely? What infrastructure would make ambitious building easier? Through that frame, products and initiatives like Atlas, Climate, and Stripe Press feel like expressions of the same underlying worldview rather than random adjacent bets. A generative narrative produces better questions, and eventually, better decisions.

Still, narrative is far from magic. A founder cannot simply say “we are inevitable” and make it so. The story has to stay in contact with the substance: products that work, customers who care, and markets that eventually answer.

But what people notice, trust, fund, join, and build is deeply shaped by language. Words coordinate attention, and coordinated attention is one of the raw materials from which companies, cultures, and futures are built.

At its best, storyfinding is both philosophical and operational. It clarifies what a company believes, then helps that belief show up in product, positioning, hiring, launches, and decisions. It gives the company a lens: a way to sharpen what it is, what it refuses, and why it matters.

the age of infinite words

The AI moment sharpens all of this because it changes the scarcity. As is well discussed, the precise selection and careful arrangement of words becomes more important when competent language becomes cheap. AI can produce plausible paragraphs, taglines, summaries, and endless variations of “unlocking the future of X.” In that world, the valuable work shifts from producing more language to knowing which words carry reality.

So yes, hire the storytellers. But be precise about which kind of storytelling work you need. Sometimes the task is expression: consistent, thoughtful execution against a story that already exists. Sometimes the task is storyfinding: helping locate the story itself, especially when the company is early, pivoting, creating a category, scaling beyond founder osmosis, or building something the market does not yet have language for.

The danger is confusing one moment for the other. When the story already exists, it needs to be carried well. When the story is still forming, it needs to be found in close conversation with product, strategy, and founder conviction. Storyfinding helps clarify what future the company is making legible, who it is asking to believe in that future, and why that future is worth building.

Because the narratives we build also build us.

Before a new world can be created, someone has to find the sentence that makes people yearn for the sea.

If you’re thinking about the language layer between ambitious projects and the world, DM me on Substack or X.

Thank you to Ethan, Jae, Jihad and Maxim for conversations that shaped this piece.

Inspired by:

Narrative Cycle Entry by Michael Dempsey

Narrative Operating Systems by Sindhu

Why Founders Can’t Delegate Storytelling by Hiten Shah

The world doesn’t run on commands and events—it runs on messages and memories. — Serj Khazin

Words have resonances, halos, vibrations. Literary (my add: and all) work is strung on them — Susan Sontag

jobs are search problems

Recently, I’ve been teaching a class of final-year university students, many of whom are increasingly, and understandably, anxious about the shrinking graduate job market.

At the same time, I’ve started navigating the job market myself again. This has put me in the position of teaching something I am also actively trying to practice.

Early in my career, I understood jobs solely through the front door. A job was a thing that appeared on a job board. You sent your resume into the void and hoped someone on the other side noticed you.

But I do think many people, especially students, are taught the front door so thoroughly that they do not realise the building has other entrances. It can be easy to miss that careers are often houses you learn to enter through side gates, half-open windows, winding garden paths, basement doors, conversations at parties, public artifacts, warm introductions, cold emails, mutual fascination, visible proof of work, and one person willing to take a bet on another person.

In other words, the job market is a search problem. At first, everything is blurry noise. Thousands of applicants, companies, roles with titles like “associate,” “strategist,” “growth,” “operations,” “marketing,” “business development,” each one both specific and completely opaque. Everyone looks sort of qualified. Every job looks sort of plausible. Every application disappears into the same grey machine.

Then, sometimes, a signal begins to form.

A person notices your work, or you notice a company that seems to be solving a problem you genuinely care about. Someone has a need that is not yet a job description. Someone writes something that makes you think, I want to work with that mind. You send an email that is too earnest but specific enough to land. You make a thing in public and it travels to the exact person who needs it.

A career begins, sometimes, as signal in the (velvet!) noise.

what is a job?

Before talking about side doors, it helps to ask what a job actually is.

This sounds almost offensively basic, but I think the most useful insights often come from looking directly at words we have allowed to become too familiar. “Job” is one of those words. We say it so often it starts to feel like a natural object, like a tree or a rock or a chair, as if it were something that exists out there in the world, waiting to be found.

But a job is not really a thing. A job is a bundle of problems someone wants solved badly enough to pay another person to solve them.

Henrik Karlsson, in his essay “How to Walk Through Walls,” describes this beautifully. Growing up, he writes, he was told there were things called jobs, listed on job boards, with qualifications you acquired through education. This is not false, he says, but it is a superficial way of playing the game. A more precise way of seeing the economy is as billions of people trying to solve problems, with “getting a job” meaning finding someone with a problem and convincing them you can solve it.

This can be a much more interesting frame.

A company is not, at its deepest level, a logo, careers page, office, employer brand, or collection of role descriptions. A company is a group of people trying to make something happen in the world. They have problems and bottlenecks. They have things they know they need but have not scoped. They have things they do not yet know they need because no one has shown them. They have obvious jobs, which become job posts, and illegible jobs, which hover around the edges as unsolved tension.

Once you see this, the world gets bigger. Instead of asking only, “What jobs are available?” you can begin asking:

• Who is doing work I care about?

• What are they trying to make happen?

• Where are they stuck?

• What do I know how to do, or what could I learn to do, that would help?

• Who would be delighted, relieved, or intrigued if I showed up with something useful?

You are trying to notice reality more accurately (also known as hacker’s mindset). Behind every company are actual humans, tired and ambitious and distracted and overextended, trying to solve problems with limited time, limited attention, and limited imagination.

A job is one way they ask for help. A side door is another way of offering it.

the front door is crowded

One of the hard things about the current job market is that the front door has become incredibly crowded.

I know many talented people right now who are applying to roles online and hearing almost nothing back. These are thoughtful, capable, high-agency people with real skills and interesting backgrounds. They are often failing because the system is lossy, saturated, and weirdly bad at detecting human signal. A company posts a role and receives hundreds or thousands of applications, increasingly polished by AI, many of them using the same language from the job description.

From the company’s side, this is hard. You are trying to infer, from a resume and a few interviews, whether someone will be able to solve the actual messy problems inside your organisation. You are trying to find signal through noise. Credentials and experience help, but imperfectly.

This is part of why side doors work: they create different kinds of signal.

To be clear, this does not make the process fair or easy. Luck, privilege, networks, timing, and taste continue to very much be a part of the equation. But it does expand the set of possible moves.

entering side doors

I think of side doors as falling into two broad categories: outbound and inbound.

Outbound is when you go directly to the world. You might reach out to someone whose work you admire. You send a specific, thoughtful email to a founder. You ask an employee about the problems they are actually solving. You offer a perspective, artifact, teardown, prototype, memo, analysis, introduction, or idea that makes it easier for someone to imagine working with you. You do not wait for permission to notice where you might be useful.

Inbound is when you make your signal visible enough that the world can find you. You write in public (hello Substack!). Build or research in public. Make small tools, essays, analyses, datasets, prototypes, maps, guides, videos, experiments, events, communities. You create artifacts that let people see how you think. You become discoverable to the kinds of people who care about the same problems you do.

The best careers often seem to contain both. You go out into the world with specificity, and you also become someone the world can find.

The point is that the existing taxonomy of roles is far from the full territory of useful human contribution. There are more shapes than boxes.

audacity as a practical skill

A few weeks ago, I had a humbling realisation.

I kept saying I wanted a creative, unusual, narrative-strategy role at an aligned startup in San Francisco. I kept saying I cared about brand, storytelling, distribution, taste, company identity, founder voice, and the way ideas travel. I kept saying I took creativity seriously.

Then I looked at the way I was approaching my own job search and realised I was behaving with almost no creativity at all. I was still unconsciously waiting for the right job title to appear. I was still acting as though the world would eventually publish a perfectly scoped opening called “person who thinks about narrative and culture and growth and meaning and can also be useful in a startup context in San Francisco”. I was still hoping reality would become legible before I had to act.

This is, unfortunately, not how reality usually works. If you want an unusual thing, you often have to be willing to move unusually. This often means becoming more precise, more imaginative, more willing to ask: what are all the possible ways this could happen? Who are all the people who might understand this shape of work? What companies already behave as if they value this, even if they do not have a role posted? What artifact would make my usefulness obvious? What conversation would teach me how the problem looks from the inside? What would I do if I were not waiting to be chosen?

storytime: the unhinged email

To bring these ideas to life, let me share a few stories. When I was eighteen, I got my first growth consulting job by sending an extremely long, earnest, and probably objectively unhinged email to the CEO of Calm, the meditation app.

I loved the product. I had ideas. I had grown large Instagram pages and understood something about attention on the internet. I was very young and had no reason to believe this would work, except that I also had no sophisticated model of why it wouldn’t.

So I wrote to him. It was far from a perfectly calibrated professional message or clean little networking note. It was specific, personal, enthusiastic, full of thoughts. Too much, probably, but distinctly alive.

And somehow, it worked. He replied, asked me to create a pitch and we ended up working together.

I do not tell this story because I think everyone should send long, unhinged emails to CEOs. Please do not make me responsible for a generation of deranged inbox behaviour. I tell it because there was something in that email that I now think matters: it was specific, it contained proof, and it made my interest legible.

Rather than saying “I am passionate about wellness and would love to contribute”, I was trying to say: I see what you are building, I understand this corner of the internet, here are ideas, here is evidence I can do something, here is why I care.

Specificity is one of the highest forms of respect. It shows you have actually looked and that you are not spraying need into the world and hoping someone converts it into opportunity. It shows you have taken the time to understand the person, the company, the problem, the context. In a market full of generic AI applications, specificity itself becomes signal.

storytime: the internship that did not exist

Another time, when I was at university, I became obsessed with working at the Blackbird Foundation. More specifically, I wanted to work with someone called Joel, who has one of the coolest careers paths I have ever seen. He seemed to be doing work at the intersection of startups, creativity, young people, education, ambition, and possibility. I did not just want “startup experience.” I wanted to learn from that specific person, in that specific context, because something about the way he moved through the world expanded my sense of what a career could be.

There was one problem. They did not have internship applications open. Actually, as far as I knew, they had never had interns. So I sent a cold LinkedIn message.

Again, this is far from a sophisticated strategy. It is almost stupidly simple. But the important thing is that I was not asking a generic institution for a generic opportunity. I was reaching toward a live human being whose work I had paid attention to, with a clear reason for why I wanted to be there.

Joel kindly replied and a couple months later, I interned for them and it was incredibly awesome.

This is one of the odd things about side doors. From far away, they look like luck. From the inside, they often look like a small moment of unreasonable specificity, a person, a message, a moment, a door that did not officially exist until someone tried the handle.

storytime: the essay that became a job

There are also inbound versions of this. My friend Jae published a very sharp philosophical critique essay on taste discourse, sharing it on Substack and LinkedIn.

The CEO of Eucalyptus, Tim Doyle, saw it and commented. He appreciated the thinking. They got coffee. Eventually, Jae was hired.

I love this story because it reveals your real work can travel ahead of you. An essay can be a small ambassador for your mind. A project can make a case for you while you are sleeping. A public artifact can enter rooms you do not yet have access to showing that this person sees something.

This is also why “personal brand” is such an insufficient phrase for what is actually happening here. It makes the whole thing sound you are putting on a little outfit for the algorithm. But the deeper version is about making your thinking more findable. It is about leaving evidence of your aliveness in public. The point is to create proof that you are already in relationship with the problems you want to be hired to solve.

storytime: the guide to latent space

Another one of my all-time favourite stories: Back when image models were right at their early stages, Ethan was doing AI research in his college bedroom. He was sharing his learnings on Twitter and in underground hobbyist research Discords, trying to understand what was happening at the frontier.

One day, he published a guide on notion called “The Traveller’s Guide to Latent Space,” which helped other people navigate what he was learning.

Again, this was a findable proof of his very real obsession. The guide showed that he understood the field, because he had made something useful for others who were trying to understand it too.

Then he got a Discord message from a random account in Australia. That person asked him to become his technical cofounder of Leonardo.ai, which was later acquired by Canva.

This is the kind of story that sounds fake if you flatten it too much. “Post online and get acquired by Canva” is terrible advice. Please do not take that from this.

Perhaps the real lesson is: when you are close to a problem, your work can become a beacon for the small subset of people who know how to recognise it. Most people won’t, but the people tuned to the same frequency might. And occasionally, one of them is carrying a problem your particular obsession has already taught you how to solve.

storytime: julia at shopify

Another really cool example of this is Julia, who created a viral video of herself asking for an internship at Shopify. They had no internship opportunities open and yet...

ok, how to actually do this without being annoying

Side doors tend to work best when they are grounded in generosity, specificity, and proof.

The worst version is entitlement disguised as boldness. “I admire your company, can we chat?” sent to fifty people with the same dead-eyed phrasing, a vague request for mentorship from someone busy, or a cold email that is just asking the recipient to do the work of figuring out who you are, what you want, and why they should care.

The better version is usually much more attentive. You notice a person or company with specificity, study what they are doing and form a view on the problem they might be solving. You ask yourself where you could add value, then make the smallest useful proof that could demonstrate your thinking.

This could be a short memo on a growth opportunity or a teardown of their onboarding. A list of creators they should partner with or thoughtful response to a founder essay. Even a clear note explaining why their work matters to you and where you think you could help. Rather than overwhelm someone with your labour, the goal is to create a small, undeniable unit of signal.

good luck

Unfortunately, this approach will not make rejection painless nor eliminate uncertainty. Most doors will not open. Many people will not reply. Some bets will not land. Some signals will vanish into the noise.

But the process becomes less deadening when you are allowed to act, because you are no longer only refreshing job boards, watching your self-worth get converted into application statuses. You are learning the terrain, making things and talking to humans. You are discovering which parts of the world respond to your particular frequency. That is useful information even when it does not immediately become a job.

The job market can be brutal. It can make intelligent, sensitive, capable people feel like ghosts, sending pieces of themselves into portals and receiving only automated silence back. It can make you forget that the economy is not actually made of hiring portals. It is made of people. Confused people, busy people, kind people, distracted people, people with problems, people with budgets, who are sometimes willing to take a bet.

All it takes is one person. One person who sees the signal and who has the problem you can solve. One person who reads the essay, replies to the email, takes the call, forwards your name, invents the role, opens the side door, says, yes, come in, let’s see.

If someone takes a bet on you, honour it. Do the work. Become worthy of the luck. Make them glad they trusted their instinct. And when you are in a position to do so, pay it forward. Open doors for other people and reply to the overly earnest email when you can. Notice the student with the bright eyes and remember that almost every career contains, somewhere in its origin story, a person who did not have to help but did.

The world is dazzlingly big.

There is not one door. There are many. Some are obvious and crowded and fluorescent-lit. Some are hidden behind ivy. Some are opened by an email sent at midnight with your heart beating too fast.

Good luck. Good luck finding the person, the problem, the little crack of light. Good luck placing your hand on the handle. And good luck walking through.

I’m happy to share the workshop PDF I made for my students. If you, or anyone in your life, would find it useful, feel free to DM me.

I didn’t paywall this post because I want it to be accessible. If you did find any value from it, you can buy me a coffee.

Other ways to support are just as meaningful: subscribing or pledging to my Substack, leaving a comment, or sharing this with someone you think would enjoy it. Each small signal helps others find their way into the noise.

My next essay is in this series will be about how to learn what you actually want, which is a useful prerequisite to this process. Subscribe to receive it in your inbox.

Related:

Life arrives first as sensation: the animal brightness of desire, the hot bloom of joy, the electric recoil you do not yet know whether to call grief or fear. We encounter it bodily, overfull, contradictory. It does not yet know what kind of story it belongs to. It may not even belong to a story at all.

Then the narrator arrives.

She is useful. She makes meaning. She takes the pressure behind the ribs and tries to compress it into something another person can carry. The body becomes a sentence, the weather becomes a story. Something is clarified and something is left behind.

A story lets us place one strange thing beside another until they begin to look like a life. It turns raw experience into something communicable, sometimes even beautiful. Without narrative, the world might remain too fast and dazzlingly disordered to hold.

But stories are rarely innocent. They impose motion where there may only be churn. They create a narrator where there may only be a body trying to get through the day. They make the strange thing graspable, but they often also make it smaller.

I have been thinking about the compression of experience into story because I write online. Writing already changes the thing by turning it into language. Public writing changes it again by asking the language to survive other people: their attention, recognition, taste, impatience, generosity, misunderstanding. The experience is first compressed into a sentence, then asked to be a sentence that may travel.

Yet, this isn’t only a writer’s problem. Most of us live with some imagined audience sitting on the shoulder. We narrate ourselves constantly, in conversation and in thought, even when we never publish the narration. The internet intensifies the loop, only making the feedback faster and brighter.

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i. communication is compression

Every act of communication is a compression exercise. Conversation, confession, argument, explanation, even the ordinary attempt to tell someone how your day was, all require translating the overfull thing itself into a shape another person can hold. You cannot give someone the full system of your experience, and they could not receive it if you tried. You choose, cut, arrange, compress. You leave out the too-bright supermarket lights and trim the dead air. You turn the chaos into something portable enough to cross the distance between bodies.

Writing makes this lossiness more visible because the artifact remains. The sentence sits there, pretending to be the experience, when really it is only the pressed flower of it: flattened, preserved, beautiful maybe, but altered by the pressure that made it legible. Something always gets lost, but different forms teach you what to cut.

Online, once algorithms enter the frame, clarity often becomes the work of making language travel. The sentence must carry itself without too much context. The feeling must be recognisable before the reader leaves. The idea must be specific enough to feel earned, but general enough to belong to strangers.

This is where resonance can become suspect. A sentence can resonate because it is exact, because it has found the pressure point of reality. But it can also resonate because it is familiar, elegantly phrased, or emotionally convenient.

ii. the audience arrives early

All art has always lived in tension with its audience. The pop song wants to be loved. The film wants to be watched. The novel wants to be held open by another person. Art may begin in necessity, but it is never completely untouched by reception. Even the fantasy of making something only for yourself contains an imagined future reader, listener, witness, lover, judge.

Today, platforms intensify the old bargain by making anticipated reception part of the creative act itself. The song hears the TikTok snippet before it hears itself. The poem imagines the Instagram square. The essay feels for the highlight. The work begins to encounter its audience before it is finished being made.

A catchy hook is not necessarily a capitulation to the market, and a beautiful sentence is not guilty because someone wants to quote it. But the anticipated fragment changes the whole. A song written around the ten seconds that will circulate is different from a song whose ten seconds become beloved by accident. An essay written toward the highlight is different from an essay whose highlight emerges from the pressure of the whole.

iii. the content-shaped self

The problem with writing an essay against neatly ordered stories is that the critique of content becomes content. The suspicion of performance becomes its own performance of suspicion. Even here, I cannot separate the sentence from the forces acting on it: the imagined audience on my shoulder, the desire to be lucid, quotable, understood, the pressure to let the argument land without letting it become too clean.

A legible, public self is not automatically fake. It is made from real raw materials: real desires, real memories, real experience. But it is inevitably edited into a coherence the living self can never sustain. It has cleaner desires, clearer wounds, more stable themes. It knows what it means.

There may be no pure place outside audience, language, story, market, performance, selfhood. There may be no untouched self waiting underneath, no original fragment we can recover unchanged. I am describing the machine’s walls from the inside.

Still, some arrangements of experience may be more honest than others. Some stories make life feel simpler than it is, smoothing the contradiction until it can pass for wisdom. Others make life more available in its textured, dazzling complexity. They do not resolve the trouble so much as keep us in contact with it.

Living is not automatically pure, and stories are not automatically corrupt. But writing is powerful enough to reach backward and alter the thing it claims only to describe. It can make a life more visible to itself. It can also make a life obedient to its own description.

Some truths are still in the trees. There are leaves in my hair. Somewhere in my bag, unopened, is a small notebook full of sentences I am not yet ready to make beautiful.

Inspired by:

• Marlene’s note on writing publicly

• Joan Didion, The White Album: narrative as both survival mechanism and distortion

• Walter Benjamin, The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: how distribution changes the artwork itself

• Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle: directly lived experience moving into representation

• Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation: the map preceding the territory, the representation shaping the real

• Conversations with Ethan

i. the same scene

E and I were eating breakfast in a café, half-listening to the couple at the table next to us over the scrape of cutlery and the low morning murmur of the room. I said it sounded like a first date. Something about the topics they were circling, the careful questions, the polite little disclosures, the way each answer seemed to offer just enough and no more.

E agreed, but for different reasons. He hadn’t really heard the words. What he picked up on was the rhythm of the exchange, the pacing, the pauses, the way they were sitting: the distance between them, the angle of their bodies, the way their arms folded inward, not quite open yet.

We arrived at the same conclusion, but it didn’t feel like agreement. We had taken entirely different routes to get there.

I tried, afterwards, to replay the moment and see what he had seen. The rhythm and body language had been there the whole time, but they hadn’t registered as signals to me. Another version of the scene had been running alongside mine, apparently available, just not to me. And then, once he pointed it out, I could feel the room change. Nothing new had appeared, but the scene had become richer, denser. There were more signals in it than there had been a moment before.

ii. borrowed ways of seeing

It’s easy to think of perception as private, like something that happens inside you and is only later shared. But moments like this make that harder to believe. The more I pay attention, the more it seems that parts of my vision have been assembled slowly through the people I’ve known. What feels obvious, interesting, meaningful, or even available to notice, is rarely mine alone.

There is an obvious, literal version of this in childhood. Family are our first portals, pointing at the world until it starts to assemble itself. Toes, tables, chairs, colours, movies, manners, what counts as funny, what counts as frightening. Before perception feels private, someone else is already teaching us what things are.

Later, friends do this too. I have a friend, Penny, who is devoted to cooking in a way that goes beyond taste or preference. When she talks about ingredients, she talks about what happens to them, how onions collapse slowly into sweetness, how acid brightens, how fat carries flavour, how heat changes the texture of almost everything it touches. At some point it became clear we weren’t talking about the same thing. What I called food, she experienced as a living system of reactions, textures, timings, and small transformations I didn’t yet know how to see.

Before meeting my friend who studied music theory, a song existed mostly as atmosphere, something I liked or disliked without being able to say why. After listening to him talk, obsessively and beautifully, about rhythm, harmony, tension, intention, the same song starts to feel constructed. Now, when I listen to my favourite songs, I hear more of what holds the feeling in place: the pause before the chorus, the chord that refuses to resolve, the bass line moving underneath. Nothing about the song itself has changed, but the experience of it has.

Of course, friendship is only one version of this. Reading can do it too, as can teachers, conversations, professors, anywhere you come into contact with someone else’s focused way of looking. Information alone is often inert, but what often changes us is the live charge of another person’s fascination, the way someone lights up while explaining a proof, a poem, a chord progression, a sauce splitting under heat, and suddenly you understand that this is where something is happening.

This kind of borrowed attention can feel like increasing the resolution of experience. Where I see broad, blurry shapes, someone else sharpens it into texture, variation, meaning. A stranger’s posture now carries information, a song no longer just a sound, a grocery aisle no longer just shelves. The background starts breaking into detail.

iii. parsnips

The world doesn’t arrive fully known. It unfolds through contact, detail by detail, becoming larger as we learn how to see more of it. This also means whole layers of reality can remain opaque simply because no one has shown you how to see them. You can go years, maybe a lifetime, without realising they’re there, until the right person points at something and a door appears where there had only been wall. The further you move, especially with other people, the more doors appear.

I often think about Penny when I walk through a grocery store. The shelves don’t feel as fixed as they used to. Ingredients register less as objects and more as states that can be transformed. I catch myself pausing, holding a parsnip a second longer than necessary, trying to imagine what it becomes in the presence of something else.

Most of the time, I still see parsnips as just parsnips. But every now and then, the aisle feels briefly denser, like there’s far more there than I can quite see.

Once you start learning about that stuff, the density of accessible information per city block increases in an extremely literal sense: you are able to engage with more of the world than you were before, even though the amount of physical world around you has not changed. — How I read by

This essay can be read as a companion to:

1. the over-examined life

It has never been easier to analyse your life.

Over the past decade an enormous self-help industry has emerged devoted to helping people reflect more carefully on how they live. Life reviews, personal dashboards, quarterly goal audits, frameworks for tracking the person you are becoming. My friends and I even host quarterly “life strategy sessions,” complete with memos and slide decks, where we examine how closely our lives resemble the ones we say we want. I say this on Substack, the natural habitat of the reflective thinkpiece. Here I am, writing a thinkpiece about thinking.

The premise behind all of this is sincere: if you examine your life carefully enough, you might be able to live it better. And there is clearly truth in that instinct. Meaningful change often requires some introspection, a willingness to look honestly at the parts of ourselves we might otherwise avoid. If we are what we repeatedly do, then at some point we have to pause long enough to notice what we are doing.

And yet the examined life has probably never been more examined. At what point does reflection stop producing insight?

In my experience, after one too many journalling sessions, the mind can begin folding back in on itself. It becomes unclear which part of you is actually living the life and which part is standing slightly outside it, observing. Like standing in a room lined with mirrors, the reflections multiply until it becomes difficult to tell where the original image is. Eventually nothing is seen clearly anymore, only reflections of reflections. At some point the mind stops living the experience and begins narrating it instead.

2. two kinds of introspection

One way to think about this problem is that introspection may not be a single thing. Henrik Karlsson once pointed out that introspection can take two very different forms.

In the first mode, we make ourselves the object of attention. We journal, analyse our habits, narrate our identity, construct models of who we are and who we might become. This voice can be extremely useful. It helps us notice patterns, reconsider our choices, and make sense of our behaviour.

But this mode also strengthens what he calls the narrating self, the internal commentator that constantly evaluates whether we are living correctly.

When the internal commentator grows too dominant, reflection stops generating insight and becomes a kind of recursive commentary about the self. The mind begins circling its own thoughts, replaying the past, searching for the correct interpretation of everything that has already happened. What we call rumination may often be the narrating voice refusing to fall silent.

3. attention outward

But there is another mode where attention moves outward instead. It attaches itself to a person, a task, a question, a landscape. For a moment the self stops being the centre of the scene, like watching a bird cross a wide sky or listening closely as someone explains something that matters deeply to them.

Sometimes the clearest moments of self-knowledge arrive when the self isn’t being examined at all. You’re talking to a friend and, without thinking about it, hear yourself offer the kind of advice you realise you needed to hear too.

Astronomers have a technique called averted vision for spotting faint stars. Instead of looking directly at the object, they look slightly to the side, allowing it to appear in the edge of their vision. The rods around the periphery of the eye are more sensitive to dim light, so paradoxically it helps to look away in order to see more clearly. As Aristotle noticed centuries ago:

“For one of the stars in the thigh of the Dog had a tail, though a dim one: if you looked hard at it the light used to become dim, but to a less intent glance it was brighter.”

The self can behave like a faint star. Look at it too directly and it fades from view. Self-knowledge often arrives indirectly. When attention turns outward, reality re-enters the scene, reminding us that we were never separate from it in the first place.

I was reminded of something Susan Sontag once wrote in her diaries. She observed that she felt she was only truly thinking when she was speaking or writing. When she was simply thinking to herself, it often didn’t quite feel like thinking at all.

I recognise that feeling. Left alone in my own head, it’s surprisingly easy to get lost in elaborate loops of internal reasoning, whole architectures of thought that feel busy but rarely produce anything new. They have the structure of thinking without the generative movement of it.

Actual thinking, at least for me, often requires that I touch reality. It seems to happen most through interaction, in conversation, in moments where something outside myself interrupts the loop. The world offers something and the mind responds. Thought becomes a kind of call and response.

4. fragile ideas

Once I started noticing this, I began seeing the same pattern somewhere else entirely, while writing.

When you care about ideas, it is natural to pressure test them. As I write this piece I find myself questioning my premises, wondering whether the argument holds, which I suppose is how thinking develops internal solidity in the first place. There is something healthy about holding ideas to high standards.

But ideas, especially new ones, are fragile. They often begin as vague intuitions that barely exist yet, half-formed thoughts that feel more like a direction than a conclusion. Subject them too quickly to the full force of critique and they collapse before they have time to grow. The same mental habit that sharpens mature ideas can suffocate new ones, because the internal commentator arrives too early.

To overcome this tendency, lately I’ve been experimenting with separating these two mental modes while writing. In the first stage I try to write as quickly and freely as possible, letting the thoughts move faster than the critic. Anything is allowed. The goal is simply to keep the flow of thought moving across the page.

Only later do I switch into the second mode, the slower and more evaluative voice that edits, questions, and refines. The editing voice is valuable, but I find it works better when it arrives later.

My friend M used this approach while drafting her novel and incredibly wrote fifty thousand words in three weeks (!!!). I suspect part of the reason it worked is that she kept the internal commentator out of the room long enough for the ideas to exist first.

If excessive introspection fractures agency, and attention directed outward restores it, we might ask what a mind looks like when it is no longer caught inside its own commentary.

Which brings us, somewhat unexpectedly, to the himbo.

5. when himbos have a point

For those blissfully offline and uninitiated, a himbo is a blend of him and bimbo, a slang term for a hunky, naïve, and somewhat unintelligent man. In certain corners of the internet, the himbo has become an unlikely hero. The meme description is simple: warm heart, strong arms, no thoughts, head empty.

The himbo does not spend his time narrating his own life or analysing whether his actions align with a carefully constructed identity. In his idealised form, he lifts the weight, eats the meal while it’s still hot, laughs at the joke without wondering if the laugh was too loud. His attention is directed wholly outward rather than inward.

In this sense, the himbo belongs to a much older category of minds: children, animals, great athletes in motion. Forms of consciousness that have not yet split into observer and observed. The dog does not analyse whether it is enjoying the walk. The child does not evaluate whether the game aligns with a five-year plan. They are simply inside the experience, mud on their hands, wind in their hair, attention moving wherever the world pulls it.

Of course, this figure is partly a fantasy, a corrective myth, but the magic of the himbo is that the least reflective person sometimes ends up closest to the experience reflection was meant to protect.

Another way of describing this is that the internal commentator has temporarily disappeared. The mind is no longer standing outside the experience narrating what is happening. It is simply participating in it. As my friend summed up succinctly, “I am stupid but I am free”.

6. stepping outside

Even as I write this, I’m aware of the irony that I’m trying to reflect on the optimal amount of time to spend reflecting, which suggests the problem may run deeper than I’d like. I notice a faint impulse to determine the correct ratio between reflection and living, as if the problem were simply one of calibration. Twenty percent introspection, eighty percent experience. Or maybe the other way around.

The himbo does not try to determine what the optimal ratio is. He stands up and steps outside. The air is colder than he expected.

The only level on which I function is the level of living. Only now, now I know of a secret. Which I am already forgetting; oh I feel that I am already forgetting...”

“Every moment of finding is the losing of oneself.”

- Clarice Lispector, The Passion According to G.H. (via )

related:

As my friend wrote in her post ‘why I love being stupid’ (recommended read!):

”There is an arrogance to intelligence and reason that at the end of the day, still only manages to skim the surface of direct experience. not that we ourselves are arrogant, but more this thing that we call the scientific or analytical voice. If you pause, you can feel it sometimes: this graspy, panicky quality of your mind trying to cling onto explanation, to parse reality in a way that creates safe distance from the actual subject with a triumphant ‘hmph’.”

I. the experiment

A few months ago, I started a sabbatical with the earnest and deliberately experimental intention of writing more and exploring what a fully self-directed creative life might look like. Leading up to it, my Substack had been gathering momentum in a way that felt both accidental and electric. Ideas were arriving faster than I could metabolise them, essays emerging in the margins of workdays or late at night, and I began to feel an impatient curiosity about what might happen if I removed those constraints entirely. If time was the bottleneck, then surely clearing my calendar would allow the creativity to expand.

So I cleared it.

But then something less cinematic happened: the assumption that more time would equal more meaningful output proved incomplete. I drafted fragments and journaled privately. I rearranged sentences that did not quite want to exist. I stared at the blank page and felt it stare back.

The writing machine that had once turned in the background of my life now sat squarely in front of me, and the more directly I looked at it, the more it stalled.

At first, I treated it like a productivity glitch. Maybe I needed a stricter routine, a better system. But slowly it became harder to ignore that I had misidentified the constraint. I had assumed the problem was time. It wasn’t. Creativity, at least for me, runs less on open hours and more on contact with something real.

When I was working full-time, my mind incubated ideas in the background of everything else. Client problems, deadlines, small wins, disappointments, the pulse of shared ambition, all of it fed something subterranean. The constraint of a busy schedule created a kind of subconscious spaciousness. Once I removed most of the inputs, the system turned inward. The days felt diffuse, productive in small ways but lacking a sustained centre of gravity.

And while this was happening, I did what writers do when something feels unclear - I tried to narrativise it. What is going on here? What is the lesson? So I tracked it. I paid attention to what changed in my energy, attention, and output. I drafted essays that circled the experience without quite landing on it. They were adjacent, sometimes almost convincing, but they orbited something larger I couldn’t yet name. There was a structural shift happening in my relationship to work, ambition and self-concept, and every time I tried to articulate it, the piece felt premature, as though I were freezing the story before it had finished forming1.

This is where the incentives of the algorithm and content ecosystem complicates things. Online, there’s a subtle pull toward immediacy: regular posts, neat frameworks, insight extracted while it’s still warm. But I was still thinking. The ideas weren’t ready to stand on their own yet, while something was consolidating beneath the surface. Publishing too early would have been an attempt to impose clarity before it existed.

II. discipline and the muse

This pause made me think about the psychology of creativity. once aptly described writing as being employed by the world’s most erratic boss: “You never know when the tasks will arrive, only that you must somehow be ready when they do. The only thing you can control is the state: read, take notes, have conversations, sit down consistently and wait.”

I recognised the truth in that description, but I still longed for effort to reliably produce results. There’s a long-standing tension in how to be productive with creative work around this desire. Broadly, two schools of thought dominate. The first says: sit down every day at the same time and it will arrive. Discipline precedes inspiration. If you show up consistently enough, the muse eventually learns your address. The second says: respect the whims of the gods. Wait for the current to move through you. Anything forced will be lifeless.

Both can be seductive for different reasons. The first flatters competence; the second flatters sensitivity. Like many things, it would appear both contain truth. Both, taken too far, become distortions.

The sabbatical revealed how deeply I wanted the first to be sufficient. I wanted writing to function like other forms of work, where diligence accumulates and progress compounds. I wanted consistency to guarantee vitality.

What I discovered instead is that discipline can prepare the ground, but it cannot summon the spark. No amount of staring at the page could force something vital into existence before it was ready. I could produce sentences, construct arguments, assemble something technically sound, but the piece with pulse would arrive on its own timetable.

III. friction as fuel

Of course, none of this is universal. Some writers seem constitutionally built for full-time creative life. has described herself as monomaniacal, able to orient everything around the work. appears to have accepted the erratic boss. Others, like , sustain deep creative output alongside full-time work, drawing energy from the friction of both. Temperament and configuration matters.

On sabbatical, with entire days available, I kept myself busy. I volunteered, freelanced, taught, read more than I had in years. On paper, the days were full, but at some point I began joking that I missed creating shareholder value. The joke was partially absurd and partially true. What I mostly missed was a reliable sense of contribution, working with others toward something larger than myself

The right job, I am beginning to think, is a container for many things. It holds structure, challenge, contribution, income, collaboration. The gift of relative prosperity is that we now have the luxury to demand more from it. We want purpose, identity, growth, community, moral coherence. Part of that scrutiny is healthy, a sign that survival is no longer the only metric. But it also creates new pressure. We may begin to want our jobs to behave like soulmates, to meet every psychological need and complete us.

What I suspect some of us crave is not free time in the abstract, but internal spaciousness, a mind that is not clenched. The wrong job can suffocate that spaciousness, but the right job can generate it, by giving the day edges, creating friction that sharpens rather than erodes, and leaving marks that remind you that you moved something, however slightly, in the world.

We see versions of this elsewhere. People who retire abruptly, or who make enough money to opt out of structured work altogether, often describe an unexpected listlessness. The fantasy is that less obligation equals more vitality. The reality seems more complicated. Without tension or structure, days can lose their shape.

When I talked about this to my friend V, she told me about her art professor in Tokyo who worked full-time in the metro system and turned the slow leaks in subway ceilings into her artistic language. She did not retreat to protect her creativity. She rode the train. She watched water stain concrete over time. The work accumulated, almost incidentally.

iv. living truths

There is a line from John Keats I have always loved: axioms in philosophy are not axioms until they are proved upon our pulse. You can believe something intellectually and still not know it.

I suspect many things in life are like this. Clichés sound worn out and trite, almost embarrassing to repeat. They read like fortune cookie advice, and yet when you actually live them, they are dazzlingly complex and disorienting and simple all at once. The cliché is thin, but the lived version is not.

Life is a series of experiments, and responsible experimentation requires updating honestly when the data contradicts your hypothesis. You gather information, build a model of reality and yourself, take a swing, then update based on how things go. But the update must happen in the body. As writes, searching for your life’s work is a multi-turn endeavour. Rightness reveals itself gently over time, and brings you closer to finding a life that fits:

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

This sabbatical was one such turn of the peg for me. Now, when I imagine a day that feels alive, it has weight to it and presses back. The subway ceiling leaks slowly. Water darkens the concrete almost invisibly at first. The air smells faintly metallic. Weeks pass. The stain deepens.

Note: This experiment also changed how I think about posting cadence. The internet likes consistency, but thinking doesn’t always follow a schedule. As I end my sabbatical, I’ll probably post less regularly. I’m still writing, just giving ideas a bit more time before I share them.

“We are each other’s harvest; we are each other’s business; we are each other’s magnitude and bond.” —Gwendolyn Brooks

Last week, I called my dear friend O, who lives oceans away, and we found ourselves reflecting on how keeping in touch becomes harder as our lives stretch. As the years go by, your world expands across cities and continents, a map of love drawn wider each time someone you care about enters into another timezone. Each friend becomes an orbit to keep trying to return to.

I’ve long attempted to take staying connected to long-distance friends seriously. It’s something I always admired about my dad. He was the first in his family to leave his small German hometown, chasing work across continents and making friends wherever he went. He says that because he was the one leaving, it was his responsibility to reach out. Having moved cities over ten times myself (yes, I’m tired), I’ve begun to learn the same lesson of how distance reshapes closeness, and how friendship bends without always breaking.

Even so, I often lose my threads. There are people I love deeply who I can take months to reply to, because my attention scatters. Sometimes being wired into the whole world feels like too much current, and my brain short-circuits, collapsing into the immediacy of what’s in front of me.

Part of what makes friendship drift, I think, is the gradual loss of shared context. As we age, new characters enter, new storylines unfold, and it becomes harder to translate them to someone no longer embedded into your everyday world. The simple question “how’s life?” begins to demand lengthy preamble, stories that now need introductions to Johnny, your funny coworker, or Nancy, your helpful neighbour, along with explanations of the new rhythm of your days. Eventually, with everything else that fills a life, it can sometimes feel easier not to try.

Another thing I struggle with in maintaining long-distance friendships is how easily conversations collapse into big life updates, the milestones and headlines: moving house, changing jobs, relationship news. They matter, but I miss the in-between moments, the everyday of a friend’s life, where intimacy often lives.

For me, what’s helped is learning to think smaller. In that spirit, I started collecting some of my favourite small bids, the opposites of big updates, gestures that open a window into each other’s ordinary days. Of course, there are phone calls, but when life scheduling gets in the way, what else do we have?

small bids to maintain long-distance friendships

• Random live photos. Sometimes mid-text-conversation, I like to send a quick photo of where I am, either a selfie or from the front camera, just to show the scene I’m sitting in. Often it’s something small: my living room, the street as I’m walking home from the grocery store, the way the light hits the window. Seeing each other’s lives through these glimpses makes the text feel more alive to me. That app BeReal was speaking to this too.

• Photo drops. With two friends, R and L, we share photo drops whenever we remember. They’re like a digital mundane scrapbook, with screenshots of random texts, receipts, blurry concert photos, notes to ourselves. Each photo opens a portal into what’s been happening in our lives, and often leads to unexpected stories we might never have told otherwise.

• Social media. People often criticise social media for not being social anymore. Flooded with ads, AI generated cat videos and celebrity content, it’s easy to see why. Many of my friends have left entirely, preferring the intimacy of private messages. I miss its original promise, the way it once offered a window into each other’s lives, and I sometimes wonder what it would take to bring that spirit back.

  Still, I find social media can be randomly intimate at times, when I try to use it intentionally. A story reply from a friend you haven’t heard from in years, a quick comment, a fleeting reminder that someone’s out there. They’re easy to dismiss as shallow, but sometimes I find those tiny gestures are what reignite old friendships.

• Personal newsletters. After university, a few friends and I experimented with sharing private newsletters, but the habit didn’t stick. Now this Substack somewhat fills that space for me. Even when I’m not writing personal updates, publishing here can be a conversation starter, saying hey, this is what I’m thinking about lately, which my friends can opt-in to replying to in their own time. I often wish everyone I love had their own blog or small corner of the internet where their inner life surfaces, as I said on why should everyone should start a blog.

• Emails. Recently, O and M have been bringing email back. I used to only associate email with work, but I like the idea of reclaiming it for friendship again. M sends drafts of her writing; O sends long updates organised around the themes running through her mind. There’s something refreshing about the slower rhythm, which allows thoughts to meander in a way instant messages don’t.

• Voice and video notes. O and I started doing Waffle Wednesdays, where we send each other short, rambling video notes about whatever’s on our minds, often while walking between errands. I also love long voice notes as a kind of exclusive friend podcast, a ten-minute lowdown on the random stories of a friend’s life that becomes the background soundtrack of a walk.

• Sharing media as love notes. When I read or watch something that brings someone to mind, I try to send it to them. I sent an article on Marcel Proust to J, because she once told me she didn’t like him, and I wondered if she still felt that way. I sent a note about The Little Prince after I finally finished the movie, to V and F, who I always associate with that story.

  I enjoy this practice because the media stops being just a point of consumption and becomes a bridge of affection between friends. As Daisy Alioto said, “Our desire and attention fall to certain things because of the way we feel about the person, place, or thing that introduces them to us. In that sense, taste is less about education and more about love.”

• Random check-ins. Sometimes an old friend’s name or memory surfaces out of nowhere. When it does, I try to message them right then. I used to think a message needed a reason, but the ones that touch me most are sometimes the ones without one, just hi, I thought of you.

Beneath all these bids lies part of my philosophy on friendship. Some friendships are elastic enough to stretch across months, even years, without losing their shape. I’ve never liked the term low-maintenance friend, because it reduces something living to convenience. Still, I appreciate the belief that closeness can withstand distance, the trust that love can rest without fading.

At the same time, these moments with friends cast a gently important light across my days. Rather than a side note to my life, messages with friends are its very fabric, the notes, half-thoughts, and jokes that stitch the passing days together. They keep the invisible thread between us intact even as our independent lives carry on and everything else changes.

Keeping in touch makes my world feel both smaller and wider at once. Each friendship glows like a pulsing light in the wide night sky. While I sleep, some are awake, moving through their days. Through their stories, I feel my life extend past its own limits, linked to worlds unfolding elsewhere.

Over time, this ‘work’ of friendship becomes a life. It holds so much in place: the continuity of who we’ve been, the scaffolding that lets us grow into who we’re becoming. When we tend to it, it’s always there, buffering against loneliness, reminding us that we exist in more than our own minds.

I’d love to hear - how do you stay close to the people you love?

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This piece sits within a constellation of essays on attention and love. You can read the earlier ones here:

“Love doesn’t just sit there, like a stone, it has to be made, like bread; remade all the time, made new.”

— Ursula K. Le Guin, The Lathe of Heaven

When someone mentions they’re in love, there’s often an older voice nearby that smiles and says, “enjoy it while it lasts.” It’s rarely said with cruelty, more often it carries the soft fatigue of experience, the kind of knowing that comes from having loved and lost before. There’s tenderness in it, but also resignation, as if love was something always destined to expire, a temporary high doomed by human nature.

I think I understand where it comes from. I know what it feels like to love earnestly, to lose, to rebuild and to try again. But if anything, those heartbreaks have only deepened my reverence for love. They’ve shown me how how miraculous it is to find a connection that feels both deep and mutual.

Of course, I’m still young and learning what love truly asks of us. But I find myself returning to this question often: what makes some love stories stay alive when so many fade? We tend to talk about love’s unfolding as if it were chance, a matter of timing or temperament. Sometimes that’s true: people grow apart, want different things, or uncover incompatibilities that can’t be bridged. But what about the slow fades, relationships that die not from conflict, but from inattention?

Every so often, I meet couples who seem to have escaped that fate, their love still humming with the curiosity and warmth of the day they met. They remind me that decay is far from inevitable and that sometimes, what keeps love alive is the simple, deliberate act of paying attention.

a labour of love

As I’ve said before, I’ve come to believe that attention is love, that the two are almost synonymous. Where we place our attention shapes what thrives in our lives. Mary Oliver once wrote that “attention is the beginning of devotion,” and noted that “almost anything you give sustained attention to will begin to loop on itself and bloom”

In the beginning stages, attention in love comes easily. Every detail of the other person glows; each glance feels like revelation. The rush of novelty has its own electricity. Neuroscientists might call this the brain’s reward system at work, the dopamine that fires in response to the new and unpredictable. But as familiarity settles in, the brain grows efficient and stops registering what it already expects. Psychologists call this habituation: the fading of wonder when something once extraordinary becomes ordinary. We start to mistake knowing for seeing. That’s when sleepwalking begins, the slow drift into complacency, when love stops being made because we assume it will make itself.

Even our language reveals this forgetting. The phrase “honeymoon phase” assumes passion must fade, that early warmth is a temporary season before a cooler permanence sets in. There’s some truth to it, because the thrill of discovery can’t be replicated in quite the same way. Still, every now and then, I meet a couple who never left that orbit of wonder and their love feels alive. I’m beginning to think impermanence is far from fate, but the result of forgetting to notice.

Henrik once described this idea beautifully in an essay:

“A person can’t be contained in your ideas about them. This was a core idea for us... You can only ever know another individual if you meet them in open dialogue—if you treat them as unfinished, as capable of surprise.”

Valarie Kaur captures this spirit when she writes that “love is more than a feeling. Love is a form of sweet labour: fierce, bloody, imperfect, and life-giving, a choice we make over and over again.” Rilke also described it as our most serious work: “For one human being to love another, that is perhaps the most difficult of all our tasks... the work for which all other work is but preparation.”

I’ve come to appreciate the idea that love is a serious kind of labour, not a casual accident or an instinct. If love is labour, then it can be practiced. It moves beyond emotion into devotion, into the daily act of returning to what is alive. The couples who remain deeply in love after decades aren’t just randomly lucky, but devoted to the practice of returning to the mystery of the person they love.

the miracle of meeting

When I think about what it means to love over a lifetime, I think of one of my all-time favourite poets Mary Oliver. For more than forty years, Oliver lived on Cape Cod with the love of her life, the remarkable photographer Molly Malone Cook. Their relationship was a practice of noticing, a devotion made visible through poetry. In The Whistler, Oliver writes of the shock of rediscovery after thirty years together. In the surprise of hearing her partner whistle, she realises that, even after decades, the person beside us remains partly unknown:

I also think of Arline Feynman’s letter to her husband, the physicist Richard Feynman, written after her death. In it, Arline reflects on love, loss, and the impossibility of believing in an afterlife, and yet she writes with breathtaking grace:

“I find it hard to understand what it means to believe in an afterlife. I don’t. But I still believe in you. And I am so lucky. Lucky to have met you, lucky to have loved you, lucky to have been loved by you.”

Her words remind me that to have loved at all, to have known that depth of connection even once, is already the miracle. That gratitude for having met at all might be what helps love last, a continual remembering that it was never guaranteed in the first place.

remaking love

People often cite that half of marriages end in divorce as if it were a natural law. But statistics like these flatten human agency. Unlike illness or accident, love is something we can shape through attention and will. To treat those numbers as prophecy is to forget that our beliefs become self-fulfilling.

If we assume love must fade, we start living accordingly, stopping the small gestures, ceasing the renewal, becoming passive observers of our own emotional entropy. But if we believe love can endure, we tend to it differently. Our faith in its possibility changes the way we show up. Love, like consciousness, loops back on itself: what we attend to strengthens.

Perhaps I am naïve to believe love has a chance at all. But if the alternative is to guard myself against wonder, I’d rather remain naïve. I’d rather believe in the possibility of enduring love than surrender to the safety of detachment.

I’m still learning what love asks of us, and maybe that learning never ends. But every act of attention, every small return, seems to keep it alive a little longer.

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“I wanted to eat life by the mouthful, to devour it, to be swallowed up in its dizzying vertigo, to be both actor and spectator, to possess and be possessed, to discover and to create, to make of my life a work of art.” —Simone de Beauvoir, Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter (1958)

Every now and then, I meet someone I’d describe as truly alive, someone who punctures the fog and reminds me what it means to feel. They move through the world like circuit breakers, radiating an undeniable voltage. Proximity to them has the power to rewire what you believe life can be and to open new ways of inhabiting yourself.

Like fireflies, they carry a glow. To stand near them is to stand near flame, to feel the air shimmer with aliveness. Joy, in their presence, stops being an idea and becomes something you can breathe. I remember that misery is contagious, but so is joy, and joy, too, can be a way of being.

Over time, I’ve learned that some corners of the world are concentrated with misery, and others with life. Stay long enough in one, and you forget the other exists. Spend too much time among the miserable, and their default becomes yours: muted, clenched, fogged. Adulthood can begin to look like a long game of endurance.

My first job felt like that. Many people seemed to carry a certain heaviness no amount of Friday drinks could shake. When you asked how they were, they’d say “just getting through” or “living the dream”, irony barely disguised. Maybe I was partly projecting my own dissatisfaction, and I’m sure some found meaning there, but the air often felt thick with resignation.

At twenty-three, that unsettled me. Was this what growing up meant, a slow inevitable dimming of brightness? Was I naive to believe it could be otherwise? It seemed easier to imagine enduring life than enjoying it. Most of the people around me seemed to be gritting their teeth through the days, holding out for small pockets of escape on the weekend.

Of course, there’s a certain fatigue that economic obligation can breed. Responsibilities stack quietly and choices get outsourced to circumstance. Over time, the weight becomes visible in slumped shoulders, sighs between meetings and the hollow “can’t complain”.

Yet, through meeting enough people in wide enough circles, I’ve come to believe that this state isn’t inevitable, because some people have found a way to resist it. They somehow stay light, alive, awake, glowing on everyone they meet.

I think often about how we have detailed maps for misery, DSMs for every shade of pain, but almost none for joy. We know how to diagnose what’s broken, but not how to cultivate what’s vibrant.

When life slips into lukewarmness, that middle ground where nothing is terrible but nothing sings, how might we find our way back to vividness? How might we move from endurance to aliveness, from surviving to thriving? In other words, what is anti-depression: a deliberate practice of tending to the light that remains?

the anatomy of aliveness

At dinner earlier this week, my friend O asked what I actually meant when I said someone felt “alive”.

At first, I replied vaguely that it was just an aura, an imperceptible but palpable charge. You sense it in the air orbiting them, like static before a storm. Their presence feels vivid, more saturated.

Later, I began thinking more about the people I’ve met who seem to embody it. There’s certainly a je ne sais quoi1 that can’t be distilled, but still, I’ve noticed some patterns that seem to run through those who feel unmistakably alive to me.

1. awareness: seeing freshly

Aliveness begins in awareness. The truly alive see clearly because they seem to refuse to let the film of familiarity settle over their eyes, something I wrote about once in clap when the plane lands.

Norman Friedman said E. E. Cummings’s poems sought to “strip the film from language to strip the film from the world.” Monotony does the opposite: it lays a fine dust over everything, softening edges, bleaching colour from the day until you find yourself performing life instead of inhabiting it.

The lucidly alive resist that erosion. They move through the world as if their senses were newly minted. John Berger wrote, “Reality is not a given; it has to be continually sought out, held, salvaged.”

They practice noticing as devotion, like the sound of rain on metal, light flickering through an evening window, the small absurdities that punctuate the day. They stay porous to texture, sound, coincidence. Through that tenderness of attention, the world keeps revealing itself, again and again, as if for the first time, leaving a trail of wonder in its wake.

Tells: they name what they see, take detours, jot notes, touch textures, cook from scratch, learn the names of trees. They live as though each sense were a prayer.

2. vitality: dancing with the world

That awareness naturally expands outward into vitality, the animating force that turns attention into motion. Alive people seem to be highly responsive, porous to the moment. Conversations with them feel actively co-created, like jazz. Their attention is an electrical current, and you can feel when it’s switched on.

They respond to people, weather, appetite, timing, rhythm. Plans flex, curiosity leads. They let the world modify them instead of armouring against it. As wrote in ‘What the people like is responsiveness’, “Talking with her is like dancing lead with a really good follow… they make you feel like their endless marvelousness is a product of your actions.” The alive make others feel more vivid by responding in full colour.

Vitality, then, seems to be a kind of permeability and willingness to be moved, rather than a permanent state of excitement. The world meets them halfway because they meet it first.

Tells: they laugh easily, follow tangents, adapt pace to mood. They’re usually physically expressive with gestures, posture, tone alive with presence. Their energy feels playful, contagious, not forced.

3. integrity: moving from center

Out of that vitality grows integrity, the click between intention and action. Alive people often orient their movement around an inner compass. This usually seems to follow a period of disillusionment, a reckoning with what they’ve inherited and what no longer fits. They’ve actively stopped chasing borrowed desires and their choices begin from the inside out.

Steven Pressfield once said, “The most pernicious thing is the person who has a calling to creative work and doesn’t act on it. They become a kind of walking shadow, haunted by what they could have done.”

That haunting, to me, is the opposite of aliveness, a hollowing drift away from one’s own center. The alive, by contrast, move toward coherence. They make peace with what calls them and design their lives around it, instead of forcing themselves into a path simply because it was offered. They move with intention and agency, willing to endure discomfort for the sake of alignment.

Tells: values written down, boundaries that feel clean, fewer apologies for what they’re not. They choose constraints and sacrifices on purpose. Their presence carries the ease of someone no longer pretending, a rightness of being.

4. expression: life as an artwork

Finally, aliveness often seems to ripen into expression, the impulse to turn being into creation, to leave fingerprints of self on the world. Their lives become idiosyncratic artworks, intentionally composed rather than passively inherited.

Susan Sontag wrote in her journals that she wanted “to write something that only I could write.” The same feels true of the truly alive: they choose to live a life only they could live, one that bears the unmistakable shape of their essence.

Martha Graham also wrote, “There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action… and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium.” The alive are open conduits for that vitality. They let it move through them and into the world.

At its fullest, expression becomes generative. The truly alive radiate energy that spills outward, awakening others by proximity. Their joy becomes a kind of transmission, a reminder that to live fully is to create, and to let the world be changed by your existence.

Tells: personal rituals, recurring motifs, environments that hum with fingerprints of choice. They share work, ideas, meals, care. Their existence itself feels like a contribution.

embodied examples

When I think of people who feel truly alive, those who’ve transmitted that unmistakable voltage to me, a few come to mind.

The first is my literature professor, Bryan Waterman. He’d been teaching the same texts for decades, yet still walked into our 9 a.m. class with a pulsing wonder in his voice, as if meeting them anew each time. From him, I learned that passion regenerates through care. While we sat bleary-eyed in our seats, he coaxed sparks from our confusion, genuinely curious about our half-formed thoughts. He carried a sense of stewardship, a duty to pass on the light he’d found in those books. Outside the classroom, he was just as alive, known for his 6 a.m. workouts, somehow both scholar and athlete. His energy seemed to multiply the more he gave it away.

The second is a German woman I met in Tromsø, who spent half the year guiding bike tours under the midnight sun and the other half in Berlin, immersed in its pulse of art and conversation. She had built a life that matched her metabolism, part motion, part stillness. In summer, she lived in motion: cycling through mountain passes, tracing the curves of the fjords, sleeping beneath skies that never darkened. In winter, she returned to Berlin for the warmth of friends, galleries, and the city’s electricity. She told me she sometimes missed the silence of the mountains while she was away, but the trade felt right, a life composed in rhythm with herself. There was no trace of apology in her choices. She had designed a life that answered her own rhythm, not anyone else’s.

I think, too, of my Airbnb hosts in Norway, who hugged their daughter for ten unhurried seconds every morning, as if resetting the world’s tempo before the day began. Each evening, they walked together for kilometres through the nearby forest, talking softly beneath the pines. They treated attention like a sacred resource, something to be offered with both hands. Their calm, luminous presence stayed with me long after I left.

Each of them showed me that aliveness takes many forms, but it is always a current that spreads through contact, like warmth passed from one hand to another. Bryan’s aliveness came from devotion; the German woman’s from congruence; the family’s from tenderness and attention. None were chasing intensity for its own sake. Their vitality came from alignment, a coherence between values and actions, body and tempo, self and world. Being around them taught me that aliveness exudes most clearly in those whose inner frequency matches the life they’ve built, where what they love and what they do finally begin to rhyme.

live vividly

A few years ago, I made a ring with two words engraved inside: live vividly. When the world starts to dull around the edges, I look at it and try to remember that vibrancy is a choice of attention, a daily decision to keep reaching toward what feels real.

Every person who chooses aliveness over numbness, who moves through the world with care, hunger, and clarity, becomes a small transmitter of it. Their light ripples outward, invisible, but unmistakable.

Maybe aliveness isn’t something you find once and keep, but a pulse you catch, again and again, from those who still remember how to see.

If you’d like to support my writing, I’ve set up a Buy Me a Coffee for one-off or recurring contributions. Your support truly means a lot - it helps me keep creating work like this, especially as I recently left my full-time job to pursue creative expression more fully 💌

Other forms of support are also meaningful: subscribing or pledging to my Substack, leaving a comment, or sharing this with someone who might enjoy it. Each small signal helps others find their way through the noise. I’m curious to know in the comments: who embodies aliveness to you? What qualities do they carry?

To close, sharing an assortment of related Anaïs Nin quotes (one of my favourite writers who speaks often of living deeply):

“People living deeply have no fear of death.” —Anaïs Nin

“Living never wore one out so much as the effort not to live.” —The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 4

“There are many ways to be free. One of them is to transcend reality by imagination, as I try to do. There are many ways to be free. And to awaken is to be alive, to awaken is to be free. And some people never awaken.” —Anaïs Nin’s The Diary of Anaïs Nin, Vol. 1: 1931–1934

a related poem:

A Brief for the Defense
By Jack Gilbert

Sorrow everywhere. Slaughter everywhere. If babies
are not starving someplace, they are starving
somewhere else. With flies in their nostrils.
But we enjoy our lives because that’s what God wants.
Otherwise the mornings before summer dawn would not
be made so fine. The Bengal tiger would not
be fashioned so miraculously well. The poor women
at the fountain are laughing together between
the suffering they have known and the awfulness
in their future, smiling and laughing while somebody
in the village is very sick. There is laughter
every day in the terrible streets of Calcutta,
and the women laugh in the cages of Bombay.
If we deny our happiness, resist our satisfaction,
we lessen the importance of their deprivation.
We must risk delight. We can do without pleasure,
but not delight. Not enjoyment. We must have
the stubbornness to accept our gladness in the ruthless
furnace of this world. To make injustice the only
measure of our attention is to praise the Devil.
If the locomotive of the Lord runs us down,
we should give thanks that the end had magnitude.
We must admit there will be music despite everything.
We stand at the prow again of a small ship
anchored late at night in the tiny port
looking over to the sleeping island: the waterfront
is three shuttered cafés and one naked light burning.
To hear the faint sound of oars in the silence as a rowboat
comes slowly out and then goes back is truly worth
all the years of sorrow that are to come.

Love is the difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. -Iris Murdoch

Few things strike me as sadder than love that turns into loneliness, two people together yet unseen by one another. If relationships are meant to be the cornerstone of happiness, why do they so often harden into shells, hollow with silence instead of alive with warmth?

The tragedy of such relationships is two lives may be thoroughly intertwined, with shared homes, shared routines, even shared children, and still feel unbearably separate. Slowly, the music of real intimacy is replaced by the noise of logistics.

I was reminded of this fear last week while watching Lost in Translation, Coppola’s melancholy portrait of disconnection. At its heart, this film is about this very erosion of intimacy: Scarlett Johansson staring listlessly out of a train window, Bill Murray awake in a hotel bed too large for one, both drifting through marriages where intimacy has collapsed into isolation. Tokyo’s noise and neon brilliance only heightens their inner vacancy. They seem trapped in their separate silences, until they glimpse in each other’s loneliness a mirror of their own.

Drawn from Sofia Coppola’s marriage and divorce from Spike Jonze1, the film lingers for me, because it shows how love can dissolve slowly into years of quiet estrangement, two people drifting apart while still sharing the same life.

So I return to the question that has haunted me for years: why does love decay into silence? How can intimacy survive?

the anatomy of lonely relationships

The film captures this lonely ache in marriages and also in families. One of the film’s most devastating moments to me is when Johansson’s character, silently weeping, calls her mother. “I went to this temple and all these monks were chanting and I didn't feel anything. John's been using these hair products and I don't know who I married anymore,” she confesses. Her mother, oblivious, chirps back: “That’s great, honey, anyway I gotta go, call later.”

The scene is almost unbearable, because it’s a clear example of someone trying to smuggle a shard of sadness into words, only to have it dismissed. If you’ve ever hinted at your pain and been brushed aside, you know the emptiness it can leave behind. A reach for recognition is met instead with the wrong reply or register, leaving the offering stranded in one’s hands. To reach out and remain unseen is its own kind of anti-conversation, a silence where love should be.

Rilke once wrote: “Love consists in this, that two solitudes protect and touch and greet each other.” But what happens when solitudes merely coexist, never piercing the membrane between them? That, I think, is the anatomy of lonely relationships: words without reception, gestures without touch.

It raises the harder question: why is it so difficult to truly understand another person sometimes? I’ve written before that the key to love is understanding, yet understanding itself can often seem elusive, more a labyrinth than a straight path. To be understood at all feels close to a miracle, because at least three gates must open in sequence, and any one of them can jam:

1. Knowing what you feel

   Feelings can arrive first as subtle murmurs in the body: a tightness in the chest, a hollowing in the stomach. But most of us are trained to distrust these signals and so by adulthood, we can easily become estranged from our inner worlds. If you don’t know what you feel, you cannot ask to be understood. Sometimes even speaking is impossible, because you haven’t yet found the words for what lives inside. Or in the words of Carl Jung,“Loneliness does not come from having no people around you, but from being unable to communicate the things that seem important to you.”

2. Communicating what you feel

   Even if you discern the feeling, how do you translate it? Words are blunt instruments, better for facts than atmospheres. To say I’m sad flattens the texture of the ache. Still, to voice it feels risky: will they understand, or will they turn away? So we might vaguely hint, like Johansson did with her mother, hoping someone will decode the signal. But unless the listener is deeply attuned, they may never see what we mean.

3. Being received

   Being received can be the most fragile gate, because it’s the one you cannot fully control. Does the listener have the patience, the emotional room, the courage to take in what you’re offering? Listening is an act of devotion, yet no one teaches us how to do it. Many of us fumble by rushing to fix, rerouting to ourselves, averting our gaze from the weight of another’s vulnerability.

If the sequence breaks at any point, you end up with Johansson’s unanswered tears or her mother’s chirpy dismissal. This, I think, is how two people can lie side by side for decades, sealed in silence, mistaking proximity for intimacy.

What cuts through that distance is attention: true, steady, loving attention.

Simone Weil called attention the “rarest and purest form of generosity”. To really listen is to notice the tremor beneath someone’s words and to hand them back their own reality, reflected and affirmed.

Listening, though, is harder than it sounds, far more than a passive act. True attention means resisting the constant pull of distraction, with our buzzing phones, our restless minds, our urge to redirect the conversation toward ourselves. It asks for patience with silence, the humility to withhold judgment, and the courage to sit with another person’s unfiltered truth. Of course, most of us were never taught how to do this. Instead, we inherit conversational habits that skim the surface, with interruptions, quick fixes, when what is often really needed is the willingness to linger.

Perhaps the deepest relief is simply to be seen in one’s entirety, without being rushed or reduced. Love shows itself in small, steady acts of presence: the way someone hears the subtle quiver in a voice before sadness is named, notices the detail revealed without intention, or lets their gaze stay long enough to remind another they are real.

This is what Johansson and Murray’s characters offer each other in Lost in Translation. While their marriages leave them unseen, they give one another the rare gift of attention, companionship that neither fixes nor overwrites, but acknowledges. Their connection makes their loneliness bearable, if only for a time.

the work that saves us

I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that true understanding is one of life’s greatest gifts. You share something fragile, and instead of falling flat, it is received, because someone meets it with care. After a long drought, understanding can feel like a miracle, the sudden relief of being briefly accompanied inside the vastness of yourself.

That is why it’s worth the effort. To love is to attempt the impossible task of mutual translation. To be loved is to risk being seen in all one’s particularity.

So against Lost in Translation, I want to hold another image, one that happens everyday, alongside all the lonely relationships. Two solitudes that truly meet, turned toward one another like open palms, listening without deflection. Love as attention passed back and forth, steady as a flame.

Perhaps that is all we can ask for: to risk the translation, to try again and again, until the words finally land. When they do, each word is proof that two solitudes have touched, if only for a moment.

If you’d like to support my writing, I’ve set up a Buy Me a Coffee for one-off or recurring contributions. Your support means a lot and helps me keep making work like this. 💌

Other ways to support are just as meaningful: subscribing or pledging to my Substack, leaving a comment, or sharing this with someone you think would enjoy it. If this piece spoke to you, I’d love if you subscribed, commented, or passed it along, each small signal helps others find their way into the noise.

“We are always infinitely more complicated than the words we have to describe ourselves.” — James Baldwin

“Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer.” — Simone Weil

“Perhaps everything terrible is in its deepest being something helpless that wants help from us.” — Rainer Maria Rilke

“Call a boy a gentleman and watch his shoulders straighten. Call a girl a lady and watch her spirit turn graceful. Humanity was brought into existence by God speaking words into the void of the universe. We tend to become what we are called.” - The Medicine of Hope

I keep returning to that idea: we tend to become what we are called. Think of the words you reach for when you describe yourself: funny, rude, gentle. We wear these words as if they were entirely our own, but how many did we actually choose? How many were smuggled in, slipped to us through a passing comment, a stranger’s glance, a lover’s remark? The self, I’m reminded again and again, is a story written in collaboration, drafted from the words others use to name us.

This piece can be read as a continuation of my earlier essay, Some Parts of You Only Emerge for Certain People. There, I explored how relationships draw hidden facets of us to the surface. Here, I want to go further: we are revealed by others, but also actively authored by their words. To be named is to be seen and to begin becoming.

We tend to become what we are called, and just as easily, we drift away from what is no longer named. When I stepped into the full-time corporate world, writer was no longer one of my words. At work I was acknowledged as a “stakeholder manager” and “client collaborator,” but never a writer. The word itself vanished from how others described me, and so it slipped from how I described myself. What brought it back a few months ago were my friends, asking casually, “Have you been writing?” or nudging me to try my hand at essays. Their faith kept the flame alive just long enough for me to claim it again.

words lighting up who we are

I think of it a bit like light falling across a face. Under butterfly lighting, Rembrandt lighting, or rim light, the same person looks entirely different, each angle pulling out certain features, exaggerating some, softening others. Words work like that. The labels and descriptions others use act as different lighting setups: one word sharpens you, another softens you, another casts you in dramatic relief. None of them are the whole picture, yet together they shape the image you come to recognise as yourself.

Or think of a diamond: its surface refracts differently depending on where the light strikes. From one angle you catch blue fire, from another a sudden flash of red or gold. Words are like that too. Each description lands at its own angle, drawing out a different facet of who we are. Called stubborn, we gleam one way; called resilient, another. No single word captures the whole, yet together they refract the many colours of our presence.

We know this truth already when we talk about parents. The ones who notice a child’s spark and fan it into flame, or the ones who crush it with neglect. Sometimes we witness the opposite extreme: parents who insist their child is flawless, an angel beyond reproach. That kind of blindness helps no one. Maybe, I’ve come to believe, what matters is something more like an encouraging clear-eyedness. The faith that we are not yet who we could be, paired with the grace to assume our intentions are good and our trajectory still unfolding. This is far from dishonest praise, but more like a knowing, loving smile that says, I know you’ll get there.

the scaffolding of our being

For fiercely independent people, it can feel like a betrayal to admit that your sense of self rests on something as fragile as another’s glance, yet perhaps this is simply the condition of being human. None of us fully escape the architecture of others’ belief.

There are extremes, of course: those who cannot act without validation, who wait for permission before taking a step. But even the most grounded and self-possessed still need someone in their corner, a clear-eyed friend or lover who can remind us of what we forget in the fog. Sometimes it takes another’s description to steady our own, to hold up the mirror that shows us who we are and who we might yet become.

expectation as prophecy

The Greeks told this story first. Pygmalion, a sculptor, carved an ivory woman so beautiful he fell in love with her. He treated the statue as though she were alive, dressing her, kissing her, whispering devotion. And when he prayed to Aphrodite, the goddess of love answered by bringing the statue to life. Belief animated stone.

Psychologists later borrowed the myth to describe what happens when we hold high expectations for someone: they often live up to them as a self-fulfilling prophecy. Teachers who expect brilliance from certain students unconsciously give more attention, patience, and feedback, and those students, in turn, perform better. This is the Pygmalion effect.

Its shadow twin is the Golem effect: when low expectations drag someone down. Tell a child they’re lazy often enough and you’ll watch their will erode. Describe someone as careless, and soon they will start to see themselves that way. We live inside the prophecies cast upon us.

This is why early encouragement carries such disproportionate weight. Many of the people we call “greats” can trace their trajectory back to a teacher, professor, or mentor who paused long enough to say: you have something special. Sometimes that single moment of recognition plants a seed that grows for decades. As economist Tyler Cowen notes, you can “significantly raise a person’s ambitions when they are young”, often with nothing more than a few words or a gesture of belief. He argues this might be one of the highest-return investments we can make in another human being. A single nudge, well-timed, can alter the entire arc of a life.

Our self-belief can be more like candlelight than flame, fragile, flickering, easily snuffed out by indifference or dismissal. In those early stages, affirmation is oxygen. A few words of belief can steady the hand that carries the candle, shielding it from the winds long enough for it to catch and grow.

I also know this because I’ve felt it myself. In my first year of university, my favourite political science professor, Dr. Boisen, hovered over one of my essays and told me I should apply for a summer writing fellowship. I never applied, but her belief had already done its work. In that brief exchange, she handed me a mirror I hadn’t known I needed, and in it I glimpsed a version of myself I hadn’t yet dared to imagine. Her words rewrote my sense of self.

the loops we live inside

Once you see that words shape us as much as they describe us, two questions emerge.

First: how do you describe those around you? Do you choose to magnify the traits you want to see more of, or do you fixate on the parts you dislike? The difference is often in the framing. Every trait has many lenses. Stubborn can also be resilient. Naive can also be hopeful.

Second: How do those close to you describe you? Are you being shaped into the person you want to be? Because we live in loops of feedback, rewards, reinforcement, growing in the direction our milieu permits.

coevolution

Friends, lovers, family sculpt us as they walk beside us, through the words they choose to emphasise. We are reflections that don’t exist until the mirror tilts, catching the light just so, showing us facets we couldn’t see alone. One person draws out your voice, another your daring, another your steadiness.

The language we use is far from neutral. Each description tilts the mirror, sets the lighting, decides which colours will glint to the surface. We are written into being by what we call ourselves and also what others call us. In turn, the words we offer those around us play a role in the authorship of who they are becoming.

At times this can feel frightfully fragile, even fickle, am I only what others see in me? What remains at the core if I am nothing but a house of mirrors? Walk through such a house and you’ll notice: some mirrors flatter, some distort, some stretch you taller or smaller than you feel inside. Yet each reflection, however partial, is still you. Perhaps this isn’t something to be solved, but simply part of being human: gathering these shifting reflections, becoming real in the eyes of others, and returning the favour in kind.

We become what we are called. The stories we inhabit are collaborative fictions, mirrored back to us again and again, shaped by shifting lights, yet no less true for that.

If you’d like to support my writing, I’ve set up a Buy Me a Coffee for one-off or recurring contributions. Your support means a lot and helps me keep making work like this. 💌

Other ways to support are just as meaningful: subscribing or pledging to my Substack, leaving a comment, or sharing this with someone you think would enjoy it. If this piece spoke to you, I’d love if you subscribed, commented, or passed it along, each small signal helps others find their way into the noise.

“You didn’t construct the image you have of yourself, it was handed to you. Constructed layer by layer, built out of glances, comments, expectations. Like a mirror made out of other people’s thoughts. From the moment you are old enough to speak, you are told who you are.” -Alan Watts

Goethe: “If you treat an individual as he is, he will remain how he is. But if you treat him as if he were what he ought to be and could be, he will become what he ought to be and could be."

One of my favourite quotes about friendship is this by Albert Camus written in a letter to his friend René Char on 17 September 1957, translated from French:

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

Jeanette Winterson describes the same phenomenon in The Passion, where Henri says of love: “It is as though I wrote in a foreign language that I am suddenly able to read. Wordlessly, she explains me to myself.”

The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love, whether we call it friendship or family or romance, is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other’s light. Gentle work. Steadfast work. Life-saving work in those moments when life and shame and sorrow occlude our own light from our view, but there is still a clear-eyed loving person to beam it back. In our best moments, we are that person for another. - Maria Popova

I’ve noticed a pervasive hostility to yearning lately. Reels tell us longing is wasted energy, projection, a distraction from our “real” lives. Memes follow suit, mocking desire into silence. “Simping” is the most telling, an insult that has likely kept more people from loving fully than it has ever safeguarded. The word grates because of what it collapses: care, devotion, tenderness, enthusiasm, all recoded as weakness. We call it “simping” or “cringe,” and suddenly the gestures that make connection possible are treated as shameful. These cultural scripts shrink us, rather than expand us. What we need are counter-memes, new signals that say it is safe again to want, to risk, to reveal the pulse of affection without apology.

It’s odd that yearning, one of the most basic forces of being human, has become countercultural. That to want openly is now seen as naïve, inefficient, or embarrassing.

This is the world I’m writing against. My earlier essay, The Intelligence of Desire, sketched the outlines of longing as a form of intelligence, a way the body knows before the mind admits. But I realised I had only brushed against a deeper thread: love as invention, desire as blueprint, yearning as the very engine of creation. That is the argument I want to press further here: that desire is far from weakness, distraction, or cringe, but rather the first motion of life, the fire beneath the form.

desire as blueprint

Desire is a blueprint for expansion, a tug toward something that doesn’t yet exist but might. If we never desired, we would never build, never leave, never create. Imagine the opposite: a world where no one wanted more. No bridges, no love songs, no rebellions, no symphonies. Just flatness.

We’re taught to distrust desire, told it’s greedy, shameful, unrealistic. But who does that story benefit? Who profits when people shrink themselves into lives that are “fine,” when they trade wanting for appeasement? Desire is dangerous to systems that thrive on stillness, because it ignites change and cracks open the familiar.

Every creation starts with a flicker. Before there is action, there is vision. Before vision, there is want. Everything around you, every skyline, every song, every essay, was once a feeling that wouldn’t leave someone alone until they gave it form.

take yearning seriously

This is why I bristle at the reels that call crushes a distraction. Projection is real, yes. Lacan said that “desire is the desire of the Other,” meaning what we want is never simply the person in front of us but the reflection of ourselves we find in them. It’s easy to get lost in that mirror, to orbit someone else’s gravity instead of your own.

But to dismiss crushes altogether is to miss their generative power. A crush can be a threshold moment, less about the person than about the way they make the world glimmer again. The ordinary shimmers, your own self feels newly electric. This can offer a reorientation of perception, far from a frivolous distraction or quest for possession.

Anne Carson, in Eros the Bittersweet, writes that longing is defined by lack, the awareness of something just out of reach, absent yet vividly present in the mind. The ache is a condition of intensity itself. Lacan calls it projection, Carson calls it lack, but both point to the same paradox: it is the gap that generates movement.

So even if a crush is partly projection, the projection itself can actually be helpful, because to imagine through someone else is to temporarily expand the limits of your own possible life. A crush, then, can be a rehearsal for intensity, a reminder that you are capable of being moved. Sometimes the real gift of yearning is nothing to do with consummation, but in the way it awakens you to your own aliveness. To feel your pulse quicken is to find that you still have a pulse at all.

This is the throughline of desire in every form: even when it seems misdirected, even when it embarrasses us, it is still the first motion, the fire that stirs us out of dormancy and back toward life.

love as invention

I love this story because it makes something obvious yet easy to forget: love is not passive. To love is to invent, to reconfigure the world so that someone else might live more freely. Desire materialises as forms, objects, movements, new possibilities, far beyond just an inner sensation.

This is also where the famous Portrait of a Lady on Fire line returns to me:

I think they often do. Love and heartbreak are the root of so much around us. Songs, buildings, startups, cathedrals of every kind. I wonder, if we could trace every act of creation back to its emotional source, how many would map to love? How many to spite, or ambition, or pure devotion to the game? My guess is love dominates, especially in art, where even mourning becomes generative.

Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Jonze’s Her are heartbreaks talking to each other, a breakup transmuted into two films that became icons. Their private ache became a map for the rest of us, proof that grief itself can invent.

the fire beneath the form

Without desire, nothing would exist and nothing would change. Desire is the fire beneath the form, the pulse under every invention, every revolution, every love and heartbreak song.

This is why I will always die on the hill of defending yearning, even in its clumsy, excessive, or misdirected forms. To want is to be porous to the world and to ache is to admit that life still has its hooks in you. Desire embarrasses us sometimes, God yes, but it also animates us, cracks us open and remakes us.

To desire is to resist the forces that would rather we be numbed out, efficient, and manageable. It is to say: I will choose intensity over indifference, invention over appeasement.

Because life begins, every time, with longing. Longing is the match and life is what catches fire.

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My friend recently told me that whenever he feels happy, all he can think about is how it’s going to be taken away. The shadow of predicted loss eats into the actual moment, like a candle trembling under a draft. I recognise this in myself. I sometimes half-eat happiness, nibbling instead of biting, suspicious it might vanish if I savour it fully. But I want to learn to better sink my teeth into it. I want joy to feel like peaches and pomegranates: sticky, luscious, childlike, a reminder that bliss is our default state before we learned to distrust it.

It’s a curious fact that joy can sometimes feel scarier than pain. Pain, at least, can be familiar, predictable, something the body knows how to brace for. In contrast, happiness can destabilise. It feels too bright, too exposed, so we ration it, as if too much sunlight might blind us.

Psychologists have a name for this: the upper limits problem. Each of us carries an invisible ceiling for how much joy we’re willing to let in. Cross it, and the alarms start to sound, so we pick fights, invent crises, fall suddenly ill, anything to tug life back down to the safer, lukewarm bath of “fine.”

wrote recently about this exact phenomenon in her piece how lucky are you allowed to get:

When I ask my friends how things are going and they’re doing well, they get shy. Most people can tolerate only a moderate dose of happiness before they begin to self-regulate. They grow suspicious of their own good fortune like they’ve stumbled upon a vault left open by mistake. They act like joy is a smuggled gem.

I’ve noticed this in myself too, how hard it can be to hold joy without flinching. The sweetest moments arrive and instead of sinking into them, I catch myself looking sideways, as if they’re too bright to face directly. A sudden rush of happiness feels almost suspicious, undeserved, like if I linger too long it will burn me. I get shy about it, worried that if I’m seen enjoying it too fully, someone, or the world itself, might take it back.

let the light in

I think often of Lana Del Rey’s two songs: Let the Light In and Say Yes to Heaven. They circle the same truth: the audacity it can take to let yourself be unbridledly happy. To believe, without flinching, that you are allowed to have good things.

It sounds simple, of course we want happiness, but receiving seems to be a different kind of work. Giving love is active, outward; receiving it asks for surrender. It means lowering the suspicion that what’s arriving is undeserved, resisting the reflex to bolt the door just as something beautiful comes knocking.

I’m struck by how many of us seem clumsy at this. If your dream life appeared, no catch, would you really step into it? Or would some part of you hesitate, scanning for the trapdoor? The old line says we accept the love we think we deserve (thank you Perks of Being a Wallflower). The same feels true of joy. The real question isn’t how much joy is permitted? but how much will you let yourself hold before you start reaching for the exit?

I suspect there is more joy available than we usually allow. Unlike sugar or alcohol, joy doesn’t spoil in excess. Too much is exactly enough. The ones who know this don’t just crack a window, they throw it wide, stand in the flood of light, and let themselves glow.

Recently I realised I had been living with only half the light I could have had. I mean this not metaphorically, but literally. My bedroom has two windows and I open the one within reach every morning, but neglected the other, which was slightly harder to reach. For months it stayed closed, and my room stayed dimmer than it needed to be.

Now, when I open both, the whole room glows differently, light bounding into every corner and filling the room with an airy brightness. The light streams through leaves, dancing golden across the carpet floor, my reminder that joy is plural, arriving from more angles than I expect.

It made me wonder: what other windows in my life am I forgetting to open? What joy is within reach, waiting only for me to notice the latch? Some opportunities for bliss don’t require effort. They just require remembering the second window even exists.

the ethical protest

Sometimes I wonder about the moral hesitation that shadows happiness: how much joy am I allowed while others are suffering? Isn’t it a kind of betrayal to be happy when the world is burning?

I’ve felt that guilt myself. Sitting in the afterglow of a day spent with someone I loved, only to scroll past images of wildfires devouring homes. Or walking through a park in spring, blossoms so blindingly pink they felt unreal, when suddenly I remembered a friend’s family member battling illness. In those moments sweetness soured into shame, as if joy were something stolen, as if by feeling it I had abandoned the suffering of others.

On social media the sensation sharpens. It can feel almost obscene to swipe from a brunch picture to a newborn’s smile, and then in the same breath to a warzone. Latte art, then charred buildings. A wedding dancefloor, then bodies pulled from rubble. The juxtapositions make it hard to know what to feel. How can all these worlds coexist? How is that allowed?

But of course, they always have. Children are born as others die. Lovers kiss under the same sky that bombs fall through. Spring arrives even when grief is thick in the air. The simultaneity is not new; only the delivery system is. What has changed is that we are now handed the whole spectrum in a single flick of the thumb. The world has never moved in a single register, and neither can our hearts.

This is why I hesitate to treat joy as suspicious, as though sorrow were the only honest proof of compassion. Misery doesn’t feed the hungry, and refusing joy will not bring the dead back. Grief matters, but it can’t, on its own, tilt the scales of justice. Joy is just as real a part of the fabric of existence, and to deny it distorts the picture as much as ignoring pain does.

Still, joy can lose its shape if it hardens into insulation. There’s always the danger of drifting so far into private sweetness that the rest of the world disappears. At its best though, I think joy can sharpen rather than numb. It reminds me what is worth protecting, what tenderness and beauty continue even in the middle of fracture.

I see this most clearly in writing. Essays often begin in heartache, something unsettled, but as I follow it, the ache cracks open into something that doesn’t erase the heaviness but makes it breathable. When I write abstractedly about my own heartbreaks, it feel raw, almost indulgent to share. But then come the replies. Sometimes strangers tell me my words had helped them love again. What began as a private wound became, somehow, a map for someone else’s renewal. That is the strange generosity of joy when it’s given form: it refuses to remain contained.

Rather than erasing suffering, joy can sit beside it, like a second sun in the same sky. One sears, one warms. Grief alone makes the world flat; joy alone makes it false. Held together, they let you see in full colour: broken and radiant, devastating and precious.

And joy is not zero-sum. Opening a window to more sunlight doesn’t darken your neighbour’s room; it spills brightness into the street. Joy multiplies and a laugh grows louder when it echoes.

Joy, in this light, feels less like escape and more like ballast. It can hold steady against despair, a reminder that life is still leaning forward. Choosing joy doesn’t require being a betrayal of suffering, but can be a refusal to let suffering be the whole picture, a pulse that carries us toward beauty, intimacy, even justice.

bite the peach

Joy moves like weather, sudden, undeserved, soaking everything it touches.

Most of us hesitate at the threshold, trying to decide if it’s safe to step into the light. But joy passes through, brief and dazzling, and what it leaves behind is the shimmer of having been met.

It ripens, slips through the fingers, runs down the wrist. Its vanishing is part of its shape, the reminder that what matters is that it was ever here at all. To taste it at all is already to be changed.

Like rain on skin, like fruit on the tongue, joy disappears, and yet, for a moment, everything is illuminated.

If you’d like to support my writing, I’ve set up a Buy Me a Coffee for one-off or recurring contributions. Your support means a lot and helps me keep making work like this. 💌

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I’d love to hear, what’s a recent small joy you encountered? Mine is my window :)

"My Uncle…taught me something very important. He said that when things are going really well we should be sure to notice it. He was talking about very simple occasions, not great victories. Maybe drinking lemonade under a shade tree, or smelling the aroma of a bakery, or fishing, or listening to music coming from a concert hall while standing in the dark outside, or, dare I say, after a kiss. He told me that it was important at such times to say out loud, 'If this isn’t nice, what is?”

—Kurt Vonnegut