my job is to do my research and write my thesis, not for the reward of a future job in australia or india or elsewhere, not for the reputation of being a well published author, but for the duty to…

There are few places in modern life where a person is encouraged to say something with confidence before every question has been resolved. Much of the world around us rewards verification. We compare…

Just make pople flourish now.

Reading one of Robert Birming's post, We Live and We Learn, made me think of something my mother once told me and I don't know if it was something she...

An irritation is an undigested annoyance. The way through isn't chewing on it. It's noticing who's doing the chewing.

Sorry this took too long. I quite terrible at reading yet I wrote this

A while ago, there was a screenshot circulating on online spaces, of someone blatantly saying you guys might be thinking about yourselves too much . Personally, I enjoy introspecting, and I've based…

When I look at death and everything I’ve done with my life, I think about my goal: to improve people’s lives and leave this world a little better than I found it. But when I think about the scale of…

This is the fourth of a series of articles — opinionated, fanciful writings, speculations — about The World After Collapse. It draws on what I’ve learned about pre-civilization humans and other…

You need to practice living without the things you love. If you love food, you need to fast for a day, or spend a week without indulging in your favorite dishes. If you cannot live without books, you…

The totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts. --Aristotle Many years ago, during a particularly wayward period of my misspent youth (i.e.: my cowboy…

There is nothing to see here, unless you're into reading reflections & lessons about short-sighted traps and blindly focusing on the wrong things.

YouTube videos or other checklists such as, "The 10 Things You Need To Get Healthy," or, "21 Fantasy Books You Must Read," are as likely to have a valuable idea as not. When consuming them I need to…

A Hierarchy of Seriousness There are things in life that deserve to be taken seriously. A child is ill. Someone you love is in danger. A friend dies. A family breaks apart. A decision may genuinely…

When we learn about the history of civilization, we get to hear about the Stone Age, the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age. Whatever follows is named after historical events or political systems…

Today out of the blue I decided to use my Apple Fitness+ plan's meditation catalogue to try guided meditation. In the list there were multiple categories of the same - sleep, calm, creativity, etc. I…

§ July 2025 The honeymoon is over. The first draft was a thrill. Now, it's a tombstone in the ‘review’ folder. Here’s how you ship: 1. Slay the Enemy. Your enemy is fear. You feel it now. A tightness…

Staring into the Void - by Myles Marino

Where to focus your attention.

We human beings seem to have a chronic addition bias. When something is wrong, our instinct is to add: more words, more meetings, more analysis, more features, more possessions, more interventions,…

Out of interest and sometimes necessity, I write. I write and share those writings with others. The purpose of my writing is always to convey an idea of some sorts. At its core, the process is about…

Assumptions set the boundary of the problem space, and also define the region of potential in solution space. We learn about unsaid assumptions during testing solutions by asking questions about the…

Some of my oldest habits as a human creator have become markers of AI slop. Example one: I love the em dash. I use it all the time. But for some reason LLMs, especially early chat models, developed a…

Ask a fighter which punch put them down and you will usually get a shrug. They can describe the round, the taste of the mouthguard, the ceiling lights swimming back into focus. The punch itself is…

I understand being mad, I understand not tolerating it, but I think there's an uncomfortable truth, representing the world being a messy place where few things are completely black and white.

In Poor Charlie’s Almanac, Charlie Munger tells a story that struck me. “Max Planck, after he won the Nobel Prize, went around Germany giving the same standard lecture on the new quantum…

Juxtaposed thoughts about aging, cultural change, and the friction between ideals and lived reality

Here’s a story I made. There was once a mathematical system that tried to define itself fully. When it succeeded, it ceased to be a mathematical system — and everything could then be “proved” from…

The past is static.

What is love? is it something that we are biologically preconditioned to inherit and discover or is it something that developed as humans thought themselves more? There is so many questions that…

I. The Soft Animal All our soft animal bodies ever wanted was the feeling of strength in numbers. Who knew our progress would come with so much chaos?

Note: This post was written by Google Gemini. For over half a century, the social contract of the Western middle class was remarkably straightforward: exchange twenty years of rigorous cognitive…

People occasionally describe someone as having strong opinions. The phrase is usually delivered as a neutral observation, though it often carries the faint scent of a warning: this person may be…

Richard Hamming on choosing important problems, doing first-class work, and making the most of the one life we have.

Listen to the audio version There is a particular sound a front door makes when it is not quite locked and not quite willing to admit it. The key turns. The knob moves a fraction. The door gives you…

The gap between an early idea and its first meaningful reaction is often filled with expensive attempts to manufacture certainty.

Pride can damn you, but it can also save your soul. Suicidal pride is perilously difficult to forgive; the other kind drives you to keep living and to be forgiven.

ask any artist what their source of inspiration is, and they'll tell you. what's mine, though? being alone. in silence. with my thoughts. yes, really. i strive to be bored and have a quiet moment to…

In the previous chapter, Culture As Armor, I explored Ernest Becker’s argument that culture provides us with systems of meaning that help protect us from the psychological weight of knowing that we…

sometimes i think we spend too much time looking for things. looking for something interesting to read, something beautiful to see, somewhere new to go, someone who might change our lives. we keep…

I have a lot of fires in my mind right now, and a lot of voices from within saying things that I can’t validate. How can I know what someone’s opinion is unless I ask them and they tell me? How can I…

When I was in my UG years I always used to feel a really deep discontent with myself, whenever I used to accomplish anything I used to tell myself I can achieve even more, my potential is beyond…

In the beginning, we believe that there must be someone in order for the breathing to be possible. There must be someone in order for the walking to be possible. But in fact the walking, the…

There will be no coffin. No priest. No flowers dying in expensive vases. No black clothes. No trembling hands lowering polished wood into the earth. No crowd standing around pretending they knew him…

Thinking about death can make us appreciate life more. A reflection on mortality, memories, the things we own, and the meaning we give them. The post The Things We Leave Behind appeared first on Eric…

Consumer surplus is value the buyer keeps. Fan surplus is value nobody collects.

Someone said to me the other day that much of what writing is is finding your reader. While I agree with that wholeheartedly, for a self-taught writer like myself, it can feel somewhat discouraging.…

Two paragraphs, multiple basic errors.