Life. 10 notes.

Sometimes the feelings or emotions or meanings that we wish to convey run up against the limits of the everyday language that we use. This is probably one reason why we have poetry. As Tracy K. Smith put it evocatively in a conversation with Ezra Klein: “Poetry is the language that sits really close to feelings that…

As always, another brilliant post by the awesome Tom Morgan—whether you agree with him or not. The one thing Tom’s writing consistently does is force you to think. This post feels especially important and urgent because the issue of people wanting to be someone, yet forcing themselves to be someone else instead, is—and…

So poetic:

They became upright and taught themselves the use of tools, domesticated other animals, plants and fire, and devised language. The ash of stellar alchemy was now emerging into consciousness. At an ever-accelerating pace, it invented writing, cities, art and science, and sent spaceships to the planets and the stars. These are some of the things that hydrogen atoms do, given fifteen billion years of cosmic evolution.

Carl Sagan

Therapy speak is probably at the heart of a lot of our problems:

I had a client who described a lot of their problems in therapy language. I told them something like: “hey, I believe that psychotherapy was really useful for you at the time—but consider the possibility that the pathologizing language you picked up from that culture is distancing you from your experience and causing you to consider normal things problematic.” They stopped using therapy framing and found that their inner life got better as a result.

Makes you think:

One thing I find fascinating about LLMs is that they reveal how much of the quality of our relationships comes down to our capacity to be open and prompt others in a good way. Here we have, for the first time, millions of people having conversations with the precise same entity (Claude, ChatGPT), and they are having wildly different experiences—some hate it, find it stupid and boring, others get it to say and do fantastic things.

This is true of interacting with people, too (though of course I’m not saying interacting with an LLM is anything like interacting with a person)—the quality of a relationship has a whole lot to do with your skill in prompting/asking the right question/providing good context and space for the other. But previously it was tempting to assume that differences people experience had more to do with some people being lucky in getting to interact with more interesting people vs others only had met boring people. Though that of course is also a factor.

Beautiful: Cummings should know — just four years earlier, he had fought that hardest battle himself: When he was awarded the prestigious Academy of American Poets annual fellowship — the MacArthur of poetry — Cummings had to withstand harsh criticism from traditionalists who besieged him with hate for the bravery of…

Yes, yes, a hundred times yes!

Can’t agree more with Scott Alexander. We should all do more things and have more fun.

I’m not trying to push you in any direction, honest. If you get everything totally wrong, too bad, but you’ll still be remembered forever for trying. Even Pontius Pilate has immortality of a sort. Both Eliezer Yudkowsky and Beff Jezos have their page in the textbooks assured. If you’re a well-off Silicon Valley person, you’re already well-placed to join them. So participate in the discourse. Create some art. Donate to a cause you believe in. Make a prediction. Discover something interesting.

Have more fun than anyone has ever had before - after all, history remembers Aristippus! Start a cool group house - after all, history remembers Epicurus! Be extremely hot - history remembers Antinous too! Sell people the lowest-quality copper that has ever been sold, and live forever as a meme six thousand years later!

But don’t waste this amazing opportunity you’ve been given on a vapid attempt to “escape the permanent underclass”.

So true. From this wonderful post by Vaibhav:

Most human beings are elementally similar but structurally different. Every living being around us is elementally similar, most are roughly the same few elements, but the arrangements of those carbons, protons, neutrons, electrons are different. That arrangement is what makes you you. That is the unique pattern for every species on Earth, and even for every individual. Seven billion humans, billions of animals, other species, you get this absurdly large number of distinct arrangements of atoms in space, not in vacuum, but inside this dense, interacting reality.

Ooh, also this: 2025 was the year when it dawned on my feeble brain that “when in doubt, do” is a good philosophy of life to live by.

Whenever you feel shitty, stuck, or idle, you are blocking that process. You are not exchanging energy. You are not moving. That is why so many people say: just move. Do something. Take action. When you move, you exchange energy. When you move in a direction that feels positive, you move towards maximizing your entropy.

We have long been told by physics that we are nothing but a collection of atoms. Perhaps the most memorable line that comes to mind is physicist Brian Greene saying that we are nothing but a collection of particles dancing to the quantum mechanical tunes—or something to that effect.It’s a depressing account of the…

What a beautiful article: So much held in a heart in a lifetime. So much held in a heart in a day, an hour, a moment. We are utterly open with no one in the end—not mother and father, not wife or husband, not lover, not child, not friend. We open windows to each but we live alone in the house of the heart. Perhaps we…