Department
Life.
Personal growth, career, and daily reflections.
Lately on the shelf
30 of 916When Ahead, Get More Ahead
If you find yourself in a game of StarCraft, and ahead of your opponent, the worst thing to do is to try to wipe them out. This is counterintuitive. You have a better economy and a stronger army. Why not attack? The first reason is in game theory. StarCraft is…
Dostoyevsky, Just After His Death Sentence Was Repealed, on the Meaning of Life
"To be a human being among people and to remain one forever, no matter in what circumstances, not to grow despondent and not to lose heart — that’s what life is all about, that's its task."
Performance
On Sunday, just before we left for our holiday to Sri Lanka, we started dismantling our dasara doll display.
How to Be Transformed When Things Fall Apart
"Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us."
The Wildest Bet Is the Winning Bet
We place life’s bets by countless calculations of probability, conscious and unconscious, only to discover over and over how short they fall of the wildest reaches of the possible, which always includes but exceeds the probable. It helps to remember that we ou…
Software is slow because of bad design, not slow languages
Ursula K. Le Guin on the Meaning of Life
We are the survivors of immense and minute events — violent cosmic collisions and subtle genetic mutations, the deaths of innumerable suns and the births of innumerable cells, the splitting of continents and the splitting of atoms. Out of it all, we emerged as…
Nathaniel Hawthorne on How to Look and Really See
"The mystery is revealed, and after a breath or two, becomes just as great a mystery as before."
After 14 years, I finally built my dream personal finance app
It took me more than a decade, but I finally built my DREAM personal finance app. Let me tell you everything about it.
Introducing the Museum of Delight
After twenty years of making immaterial things with my mind — ideas sculpted of words, questions woven of sentences, translucent vessels for thought and feeling in the shape of poems — I found myself overcome by the urge to make things with my hands out of mat…
How to Hold Your Heart with Golden Hands
One bleak English winter a long time ago, wandering through London in the wake of a relationship that had just unraveled, I walked into an antiquarian bookstore and chanced upon a rare century-old edition of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales — which I had grown u…
A project of one’s own
William Russell Flint, 1880
Clothes diversity
When there is a small number of “good” brands there is a high chance that you wear the same thing as someone you meet. And that can be embarrassing at times
Corrective for a Broken Heart
“Life will break you,” Louise Erdrich wrote in her passionate insistence that “you are here to risk your heart.” It can happen with a shattering, or with a thousand small fissures, but the great paradox — the great salvation — is that every time it happens, yo…
Leopards in motion!
Finally I saw a leopard walking in the wild today!
How to Be Un-Dead: Notes on Waking Up from the Trance of Near-Living
"Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through. Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death."
How to Grow Old without Letting Life Become a Parody of Itself
"In old age we should wish still to have passions strong enough to prevent us turning in on ourselves."
The Constitution of the Inner Country: Leonard Cohen on Language and the Poetry of Presence
"The poem is nothing but information. It is the Constitution of the inner country."
How to Stop Waiting and Start Living: A Jolt from Henry James
"It wouldn't have been failure to be bankrupt, dishonoured, pilloried, hanged; it was failure not to be anything."
Laypeople support technical fields for technology, not art
Love After Life: Nobel-Winning Physicist Richard Feynman’s Extraordinary Letter to His Departed Wife
Where the hard edge of physics meets the vulnerable metaphysics of the human heart.
When Relationships Change: Anne Morrow Lindbergh on Embracing the Intermittency and Mutability of Love
"All living relationships are in process of change, of expansion, and must perpetually be building themselves new forms."
What requirements don't you have?
20 Truths about Life from 20 Years of The Marginalian: A Ceramics and Lichen Raffle
It is an odd thing, looking back on your life, trying to recognize in the mirror of memory the people you used to be, finding them strangers: the person who kissed your first kiss, the person who drank your last drink, the person who had your best idea, the pe…
How to Unself in Order to Be Who You Really Are
"The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself... to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is."
Istanbul Tűrkiye - 12 days in 10 neighborhoods, meeting up with 30 local people for 60 hours of conversation
Istanbul Tűrkiye - 12 days in 10 neighborhoods, meeting up with 30 local people for 60 hours of conversation: sive.rs/met/at-16
Celebrating 20 Years of The Marginalian and the Search for Meaning: Free Livestream This Friday
At the dawn of my twenties, lonely, destitute, and disoriented by the demands of making a new life in an alien world, I started keeping notes on my search for meaning while working four jobs to pay my way through college. On October 23, 2006, I began sharing m…
Writing is no longer proof of work
The Map to the Route of Your Life
No one will map for you the path by which you must cross the wilderness of your own life — not your parents or your teachers, not your heroes or your lovers, not the self-help books or Shakespeare’s sonnets. Some may give you signposts, some may become turning…