On 9/22/26
Daily Letter
Inspiration & Quotes × People & Society
To hold our tongues when everyone is gossiping, to smile without hostility at people and institutions, to compensate for the shortage of love in the world with more love in small, private matters; to be more faithful in our work, to show greater patience, to forgo the cheap revenge obtainable from mockery and criticism: all these are things we can do.
Fallen into this final abyss of misery, the only resource a human being has left is courage
Science, Nature & The Future
Play is solemnity, not silliness. Adults who try to “recapture their childhood” often do so by trying to capture the whimsy of childhood. But play is serious for children, not whimsical. It’s whimsical for adults to watch, so the wires get crossed. They are “recapturing” the feeling of watching themselves watch children, watching their own memories, not of being a child. To recapture your childhood energy, take something incredibly seriously.
Inspiration & Quotes
I tried to make sense of my own suffering and I found myself reducing my experience to metaphor. To unravel some interpretation to the events. As a survival mechanism we motivate ourselves to a meaningful narrative to make sense of it. And I think that ultimately this analysis provides a sense of justice. That there is hope, that there is a measure of dignity to what we may encounter as chance or fate or misfortune. We want to make sense of it and want to reduce it to a sense of metaphor. But as I've gotten older I think I've made an attempt to reduce metaphorical clutter in my life to see things as they really are without platitude. And sometimes suffering is just suffering. It's just an accident of fate.
Rules are for infants, incompetents, incarcerated criminals and imbeciles
Design & Objects
Hypothesis: all of (popular) morality proceeds from moral intuitions, not arguments. The arguments start winning after the moral intuitions take hold. Moral intuitions change because material conditions change.
Misc
I didn't get "bonds that make us free" but now I do: it's an instance of enabling constraints — you get options not when you keep options open, you get options when you COMMIT to something because options are fractal