There’s a whole spectrum of “smartness” out there, and a thousand definitions of it. Book-smart, street-smart, style-smart, creative-smart, smartass-smart, and so on. But if I were to really break it down, here’s what smartness means to me at a meta level: the ability to acquire, compress and apply information in a way that maximises your future freedom of action in a complex environment.

I feel like this is a little controversial, especially because we live in a world that more or less measures smartness by “getting the right answer”. But allow me to explain myself.

We’re bombarded with a million sightless bits of data every single day. It sits on our radar like dust on our clothes, and inevitably you end up inhaling some of it. But you cannot remember it all. A smart person, on the other hand, is curious and open-minded in reception, but simultaneously selective about what they choose to acquire. And then they compress that information. Not memorise, compress. They find the underlying rules, strip away the details to see the bones, and recognise when seemingly disparate concepts share the same functional pattern.

This takes me back to the evergreen concept of chefs versus cooks. A cook takes a recipe they’ve been exposed to and dutifully follows it to create a great, if predictable, dish. A chef breaks it down to its absolute first principles. And from there, they puzzle out plausible pathways that could lead to a shit dish or a trailblazing one, but was entirely born from their unique reasoning process. And because they have the compressed principle, they can cook anything, even if they don’t have the exact ingredients listed in the recipe. They can adapt.

There’s also a third part to the definition that I think is important: the reality of a complex environment. If the world were static (like a factory assembly line), you wouldn’t need to be smart; you would just need to be obedient. Smartness is only necessary because the world changes.

But, really, both of these elements are downstream of the core objective of becoming smarter: maximising your future freedom of action.

Every time you use the information in your head to make a decision, you change your circumstances. Some decisions constrict your circumstances, leaving you with only one or two things you can do next. Other decisions throw the gates wide open to a variety of choices you can make thereafter. So smartness means being able to consistently identify and select the decisions that keep your list of available future actions as long as possible. It is the strategic avoidance of dead ends.

I’m choosing to define it like this because I think we tend to confuse being well-read with being smart. And of course, that’s one facet of it. Being well-read and well-educated is like having this massive hard drive of facts, narratives, histories and the like. Smartness is the processing layer that lets you select from and use information in that hard drive to process reality, often in split seconds.

When people ask you, “how did you come up with that so quickly?”, this is what’s happening. Smartness emerges from what you do with what you’re well-read about.

Care about being good at things

I think caring about being good at something, at the quality of being good, matters. For one, it allows you to expose yourself to the outer and inner mechanics of that thing. The indifferent person glazes over details, allowing their mental models to remain low-resolution. The person who cares about being good is open to 10x more data, because they become naturally curious about what makes something good (and not in the moral sense).

Unfortunately or fortunately, caring is a prerequisite for becoming smarter. If I’m not forever thirsting to crack open the world around me, it’s—in my opinion—almost impossible to gather the data I need to become smarter.

The flip side of this: I also have to be okay with being bad at things. If I don’t care about being good at something, a mistake becomes just an annoyance. I ignore it, blame someone else, or move on. But when I do care, it’s a rather painful signal that I’m lacking information, or that my internal model of something is wrong. It forces me to debug my thinking, learn more, apply knowledge in different ways.

This, put simply, is how you get good. Smartness is often the byproduct of your struggle for quality.

I wrote about the need to care more in:

Set a long-form inquiry, not a goal

The way I see it, a goal filters information out. It’s pretty easy to imagine: is this going to help me reach my goal? No? Discard. In doing so, I’ll probably end up losing information that was otherwise valuable, and confining myself to that hyperspecialisation. To borrow James Carse’s framework, a goal is a finite game, and you play simply to achieve that goal. Once you do, you feel lost, or immediately find a new goal to attach yourself to.

Instead, setting an inquiry lets information in. You chase a broad understanding rather than a narrow script, but are still defined by a few guardrails that help you not drown in a sea of information. This is a game played for the purpose of continuing the play, i.e. getting smarter. Since an inquiry technically has no end state, you can keep acquiring and assessing information that expands your knowledge of that topic.

The way I like to frame an inquiry is to pick a question so expansive I could spend months circling it (and that’s the point).

For example, “why do some civilisations collapse suddenly, and some over time?” is one that’s been rattling around in my brain for some time now. The great thing about an inquiry like this is that I don’t feel restricted to one domain or medium. I could glean information about it from a non-fiction book, a podcast, a fantasy novel, even a conversation with an economist friend. I could approach it from any angle: economics, sociology, linguistics, history, anthropology and the likes. In doing so, I’ve learnt far more about each of these domains than I would have, had I set myself a goal to, say, “finish a history textbook about ancient civilisations”.

I wrote about how to ask questions that yield more questions, here:

Interrogate your curiosity bottlenecks

In systems theory, the output of a system is always limited by its tightest bottleneck. I find that that’s the case with getting smarter, too.

Take it from me: as an academic overachiever, I realised super early in life that there’s a lot of societal weight appended to being smart. As whatever I was studying got harder and deeper, I’d find myself shrinking from asking questions, reluctant to show that I knew much less than I projected. I would steer conversations back to the safe, narrow islands of knowledge where I felt secure. Every interaction felt like some sort of insidious test I had to pass to be certified Still Smart. It was exhausting.

In hindsight, it’s pretty obvious what was going on. My intellectual growth was throttled to near zero because the input channel—admitting ignorance, asking questions—was welded shut by my own fear of looking less than. Overcoming this took a whole lot of interrogation that I won’t go into here, but I essentially taught myself to see feeling ‘stupid’ about something as a sensation of new information entering my consciousness for the first time. And that’s a good thing, right?

So I find it really helpful to ask myself: what keeps me from going deeper? It might not be that you’re not intelligent. It might also not be that you’re distracted. In my experience, it could be shame (“I should already know this”), fear of irrelevance (“this isn’t monetisable”), or fragmentation (“I have no scaffolding”). Figuring out what the real blocker is, and fixing that, unlocks nerd-flow.

Sometimes our sense of identity gets in the way. As a creative, I’ve often thought I’d be terrible at math or science (despite this being canonically not true during school). But a lot of this is just narrative, stories all the way down. It limits your freedom of action to a much smaller fraction of reality. So if you’re thinking “I’m not the kind of person who…”, the follow up question is: why not?

Turn off the mental autocorrect

My iPhone has been doing this annoying thing where it auto-completes my sentences to someone based on a sentence I’ve previously used that started with the same sequence of words. I think our brains tend to do that a lot, too. It’s called epistemic closure: you hear a concept and your brain auto-completes it using a heuristic you might have learnt maybe 5, 10 years ago. This prevents me from being blindsided from changes in the environment. But in this case, that’s exactly what I want to feel.

Interruptions are a distraction from learning, and autocorrect is an interruption. It forces me to think or say things that are not novel to me. It presumes based on previous knowledge and thoughts, and leads to the illusion of depth. And while this rehashing and regurgitating is temptingly easy (hence why our brains default to it), to probe at the cliffs edges of my knowledge, I need to turn off the tendency to gloss over gaps with stuff I already apparently know.

Construct knowledge as you go

There’s a psychological trap called the Collector’s Fallacy: the feeling that “to know about a thing is the same as knowing the thing”. I think many of us fall right into the trap of collecting knowledge, guided into its murky depths by Sirens like exquisitely designed note-taking systems and journals. What we really want to be doing, on the other hand, is constructing knowledge.

It’s an inherently human thing. When you construct knowledge, you think deeply about the meaning of the information—not the information itself—and how it relates to what you already know. There’s the slight “pain” of synthesising a complex idea that signals to your brain that, hey, this looks like it’s actually worth keeping and recalling. Those “Explain it to me like I’m 5” work so incredibly well for a reason: learning isn’t about how many times you look at the information; it’s about how many times you force yourself to build it from scratch. From this essay by on using your mind the right way:

If you’ve ever completed a commonplace notebook, Obsidian file, or Notion dashboard, yet still have found yourself constantly needing to reference information that you wish you knew (or working harder to understand the best use of the strategy than simply using it), you’ve experienced the core of the modern issue: creating repositories of information do little to help you know information, because the most important skill necessary—thinking—is something that is up to the learner, not the strategy.

I think what I’m trying to say, overall, is that smartness can move from being a badge of honour to a stance towards reality. On an individual level, we don’t know how much more our brain can do until we actively engage with it. I find that realm of possibility deliciously exciting.

I

On a Sunday a few months ago, I met my friends for brunch at a lovely café with a view of the street, at a set of tables hastily pushed together to accommodate our group of 8. As the hours unwound, so did our limbs and our topics of conversation as we got more and more comfortable. One friend then asked me, “what’s happening with your magazine?”

Patina, my digital magazine documenting the living edges of culture, had ground to a halt in the previous weeks. I walked my friend through it: So many of the essays I got were AI-generated even if the pitch came from the warm, glowy heart of a human. The fact that they could turn something that bright into the dull, polished, symmetrical lines of an AI-generated essay was disheartening. I found myself giving feedback to an essay generated by AI, and that in turn was probably fed back into that LLM to spit out a response. I was conversing less with the writer, more with their mouthpiece. We spoke about what I might do to tackle that: how I might set up “no AI essays” as guidelines, or commission trusted writers, or try a different medium altogether.

“Why bother?” I remember myself asking. Why bother creating platforms for writers who wanted their name attached to a piece of writing more than they wanted what the process of writing might do to them? Why fight the current of people giving into the path of least resistance?

II

Let me offer a different scene, although the pattern is the same.

I live in an apartment building, and naturally sound carries in unexpected ways through the concrete. A few weeks ago, around four in the evening, someone upstairs began drilling. The clock struck 5pm, then 6pm: the communally agreed time to stop any interior work that could create noise. But the drilling continued, creeping over the deadline, towards 7pm.

Messages began flowing in on the apartment owners’ group, asking for the drilling to stop as people were trying to have some quiet time with family. The offender never replied, and eventually only stopped drilling when they were done drilling.

Over the next few weeks, more drilling work happened in different apartments. All of them went past 6pm, and no one said a word.

III

A third scene, if I may. This video shows up on my social feeds at least once a week, and once a week I watch it almost religiously.

During the final stages of MasterChef America’s fourth season, one of the three remaining contestants runs out of butter. A minor disaster in a competition decided by fractions of flavour. Jesse asks another contestant for help. That contestant says—as the camera lingers on her station stacked with butter—no.

Then Luca Manfé, the third contestant, tosses Jesse a stick of butter. The judges whisper to themselves that he might have just given away a quarter of a million dollars. We cut away to Luca’s interview, where he says: “I don’t think a piece of butter is going to make her dish stand out that much. If it does, good for her. I’m going home. Tomorrow I can still look at myself in the mirror.”

IV

The human condition today is defined by a jarring dissonance. We’re more connected than ever before, information travels at the speed of light, and artificial intelligence promises to optimise every conceivable metric of existence. And yet, exactly at this apex of efficiency, the sociological and psychological indicators of human flourishing are flashing red.

Historically, human identity was forged in the lap of community. I knew myself in the reflection of my family, my tribe, my environment. But today, our identity is co-constructed with technology. Human consciousness is in a continuous, recursive dialogue with machine feedback. We’re nudged towards personalities and identities that are legible to the machine and shareable on screens.

I think a byproduct of this system is that the “other person” is now a data point, or even an NPC serving to take the Main Character’s story forward. Like Narcissus, we default to interacting with reflections of the self because those are much easier to deal with and we always come out right. We habituate ourselves to relationships where the “other” never resists, and we lose the capacity to tolerate the “otherness” of real humans. We become intolerant of the messiness, the slowness, and the inefficiency. The musculature we require for genuine connection atrophies. We stop caring.

Cultural scientists have a phrase that describes the bone-deep weariness of this moment: cultural acedia. It’s “a disillusioned detachment, disengagement or dissociation that stems from an incapacity to cope with the realities of the moment”. How would a battery sound if it could no longer hold its charge? Probably like us. Thoreau, in Walden, clocked it: “The mass of men lead lives of quiet desperation”.

Possibly the only reaction, then, is to withdraw care. To let our skin calcify into protective armour.

V

Why is care first to go? I think it’s because care is the opposite of optimisation.

Care is inherently slow; it resists acceleration and there’s no way out but through. When you cultivate deep friendships, you give it time, energy and effort over a sustained period of time. You naturally have to push sometimes, pull other times, until the scale evens out. When you work on something that matters to you, the world blurs and your focus levels completely on this thing that resides outside yourself. When you have a panic attack, no amount of optimisation can take you through what is essentially a deeply personal experience that you have to ride out.

So in a world governed by the logic of speed, care appears as dysfunction. It’s metabolically expensive in that it requires attention even when proceeding on autopilot is a much more tempting option. How does one consider the other when your own needs are loud and immediate?

Ironically, the cruellest trick of the moment is that we’ve never appeared to care more.

We’ve perfected the aesthetic of care: the emojis, the correct tones, the neat algorithmic amplification of our concern. We can support a hundred causes before breakfast without once having to sit with real discomfort.

Fake care is weightless, and evaporates as soon as you close the platform it’s being performed on. It’s making us ghosts in our own lives.

VI

When we’re told that things don’t matter again and again, we slowly but surely turn into passive consumers. Generating an AI essay takes zero energy. Not caring about your neighbours’ wellbeing takes zero energy. Many a time, these don’t even have immediate consequences at least on a personal level.

But I think adhering to a code of simply giving a shit, even (especially) when no one forces you to, is an act of agency. It is anti-entropy. In my head, care is something you do so the floor doesn’t collapse. It’s structural, it’s about upholding your end of the invisible social bargain. We don’t care to save the world in the epic sense because that’s so much weight on a single shoulder. But we care to keep the commons generative rather than hellish. Being the person who gives a shit is often the only thing preventing the baseline from crashing to zero.

This is something I’ve only made my peace with very recently: real care creates obligations. When someone actually cares about you, you feel it as a kind of tether: sometimes comforting, sometimes constraining, but always present and accountable.

The pop-up was simply designed: free caps with “thinking” printed on them, free tote bags when the caps ran out, free coffee if you downloaded the Claude app, and copies of Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei’s book up for grabs. You just had to show the app on your phone to get in. The broader “Keep Thinking” campaign included a “say no to slop” vibe that contrasted Claude with the recent deluge of low-quality AI content.

Lines to Air Mail’s front door snaked down the sidewalk all weekend. People waited two hours, three, for a cap and a latte. My feed—an actual ocean away from the West Village—was filled with photos of the caps aesthetically arranged on coffee tables, gushing about the vibes and the aesthetic of it all.

The online commentary was effusive. People said the pop-up was “tasteful”, described it as feeling “like a warm room”, even called it “the best marketing campaign, almost Apple-like”. Indeed, nearly one in every five posts on my feed was a Claude billboard juxtaposed with Apple’s popular “Think Different” campaign.

Here’s where I got curious. Pop-ups aren’t new, and free merch is a tale as old as time. David vs Goliath framings are practically a Silicon Valley cliché at this point. So what made the Anthropic campaign land the way it did? I think the answer isn’t immediately obvious, which is part of what makes this entire thing so incredibly interesting.

The circle is actually a spiral

I’ll start with the cap which, I’ll admit, is right up my alley. It’s a simple baseball cap with “thinking” embroidered onto it in classic serif against weathered fabric, with no other obvious branding.

The simplicity of this cap is the whole point. It functions as a costly signal, where the cost is time (spent waiting in line) and knowledge (about Claude, having the app, being plugged into the right networks to know about the event). This is what Pierre Bourdieu called cultural capital: the ability to recognise and value this aesthetic choice becomes, in itself, a marker of belonging. The cap is legible only to insiders; to everyone else, it’s a cap with a word on it. And that’s precisely what makes it valuable to those in the know.

Giving away Dario’s book was a particular stroke of genius, IMO. In tech culture, origin stories matter enormously. The narrative of principled researchers leaving the behemoth OpenAI over safety concerns and to do AI “the right way”, it gives people something to believe in beyond the features. Dario’s book makes that narrative tangible and portable, and giving it away for free makes that founder mythology spread that much more organically. The more people subscribe to that narrative, the more likely they are to choose that product of their own volition.

So on one level of the spiral, you have free offerings, which in general carry psychological weight. In traditional marketing, even if there’s something free up for grabs, there’s a clear transaction: give us your email or data, and we’ll give you something in return. Economists call this a market economy.

This pop-up probably felt different. The giving felt generous rather than extractive. The staff weren’t upselling you or collecting detailed information, they were handing you a whole bunch of free stuff. The singular ask—download the app if you want coffee—felt more like an optional joining of a community than like completing a transaction. From the many tweets I saw, people walked away feeling like they’d been given something, and not like something had been extracted from them. That feeling matters more than the economic reality of the exchange.

On the next level: the venue. I saw a lot of people asked: why NYC? Why not SF? I don’t think that choice was arbitrary. I think SF has reached tech saturation, so an Anthropic pop-up would register as just another tech thing in a deluge of tech things. Preaching to the choir. Choosing NYC, on the other hand, signals something beyond “we’re a tech company”.

Air Mail, for starters, sells carefully curated magazines, CBD-infused tonics, and other tangible and intangible markers of IYKYK taste. It’s also founded by Graydon Carter, the legendary Vanity Fair editor and taste-maker, which means it’s wrapped in cultural cachet. It being located in NYC’s West Village, which is not lacking in cultural significance, adds to the value.

By choosing this location, Anthropic juiced some of that credibility for itself, bathed in its alternative-boujie halo. They aligned themselves with a particular kind of taste: intellectual, established, earnest, cultural rather than just trendy. It’s not an image you’d associate a tech company with, which was the point. They made a statement as much through the venues they chose not to host in as by the one they did.

OpenAI already owns the tech mindshare. So Anthropic goes after something else: cultural legitimacy, intellectual seriousness, the sense that they care about craft and meaning. The aesthetic choices—classic serif typefaces, warm and intimate photography, a city of culture—all signalled care and intentionality at a human scale.

On the next level, you have the crowd itself. The people in line had inadvertently become collaborators in something much larger than a weekend pop-up, though most probably didn’t realise it.

Whether intentionally or intuitively, the event was designed for virality. Everything was photogenic: the warm lighting, the aesthetic cohesion, the free stuff. It was time-limited and location-specific, creating natural scarcity and FOMO. Conversations were kicking up while people were waiting in line, about which AI tool they use and what that says about them. (I called out, in an earlier essay, that our choice of software has become subtle performances of identity).

Once enough people are doing something, others join not because they’ve independently evaluated whether it’s worth spending a sunny Saturday on, but because the crowd itself signals value. You see a long line, you assume it must be worth the wait. The line validates the event, which attracts more people, and so on. That happened here, and those lines made it to photos on the Twittersphere, creating an illusion of massive scale.

I think that digital amplification spiraled outwards in ways that broke past the walls of that chic little newsstand. People who weren’t in NYC at the right time weren’t the traditional target of this popup, but many of them became the actual converts, downloading Claude to see what warranted this response (driven by social proof generated by people, half of whom might have been there because it was the weekend and there was free coffee).

To cap it all off, I don’t think Anthropic tried to hide that this was marketing. Their branding was visible. The request to download the app was explicit. They announced the pop-up from their official social accounts. They were admirably upfront about it all.

Design has this concept called “honest materials”, where something doesn’t try to pretend it’s something else. This campaign had that quality. It’s what people mean by anti-marketing marketing: it works precisely because it doesn’t feel like it’s trying to manipulate you. Commercial activity was laundered through such careful attention to taste and culture that it felt like something else entirely.

The perfect storm

So if those were the mechanics, what made them work the way they did? I spent hours going over the reactions to this campaign. Some reactions pitched Anthropic as makers of thoughtful collaborators pitted against those high up above:

Other reactions weren’t as keen to drink the Kool-Aid:

I somewhat agree that this says something about how tech culture’s tribalism operates, and how starved we are for anything that feels genuine. And granted, accounting for algorithmic bias, much of this reaction might have been contained within tech circles.

But to analyse why the philosophy and execution worked the way they did, it’s important to pay attention to the zeitgeist.

The current AI moment is uniquely anxious:

• excited about tech

• terrified about job displacement

• disgusted by slop

• deeply cynical about big tech, and

• desperate for goodness.

This anxiety creates specific receptivity. We are primed to want an alternative that feels different: agentic not predatory, collaborative not manipulative, thoughtful not slop-ful.

The anxiety reached a particular pitch over the past couple of weeks, when the AI landscape was especially active. OpenAI launched Sora 2.0, their video general model, and socials were immediately flooded with the type of rapid-fire content production that starts to blur together after a while. Other companies like Google and Meta were also pulsing out updates and new models, adding to the general noise.

Beyond the immediate timing, something slower and more fundamental has been happening about how tech culture has been evolving. We’ve been living in meta-ironic tech culture for years. Everything is a meme, nothing is sincere. Earnestness is met with skepticism, even mockery.

This ironic distance was very much a product of environments where hype cycles are short and disappointments are frequent. When you’ve watched enough companies promise to change the world and then pivot to selling, I don’t know, ads, “lol jk unless” becomes the only rational reaction, the sensible default.

But cultural exhaustion has been building, and the pressure cooker is about to explode. There is a generational shift towards post-post-ironic sincerity; people are tired of everything being deeply unserious and wanting to believe in something, anything, again. The people yearn for genuineness.

Anthropic’s pop-up, intentionally or not, landed into this cultural moment. Their pop-up doubled as emotional reassurance: human-scaled, considered, and feeding a hunger for something that was neither spontaneous ragebait (ahem, Cluely and friends) nor A/B tested to death. It offered permission to engage as a community, not a cult or a permanent subscriber to The Future. The anti-slop framing emerged organically from the timing of it all; coming right after a wave of AI tools focused on output, generation, and just more, the emphasis on “keep thinking” took on the tone of implicit critique. For an audience that is fed up to the back teeth with hype cycles and dangerous tech, this particular restraint registered as different, curious.

(This positioning is also largely consistent with the product itself. Claude already has that particular tone and emotive predisposition; the models feel more conversational, more human, less like you’re talking to an optimisation engine.)

It helps that Anthropic’s position in the market made this dynamic all the more potent. If OpenAI had done this exact same pop-up, it would have read completely differently, corporate and calculated. Anthropic benefits enormously from being in second position, because it lends credibility to that David vs Goliath narrative. They can position themselves as the thoughtful alternative, the principled choice, the underdog with better values.

All of this made the perfect storm that caused this reaction to what was, on paper, a small event with free merch.

The marketing scales

Whether this positioning and posturing reflects reality is, rather cleverly, besides the point. That’s what I think is the most subtle part of this whole thing that we need to pay attention to.

Anthropic is valued at a whopping $183 billion. They’re backed by Google and Amazon. Anthropic is far, far from a scrappy startup operating out of a garage, fighting against impossible odds. They’re one of the most well-funded companies in Silicon Valley, competing for dominance in what might be the most important technology race of the decade. The pop-up was also a part of Anthropic’s major brand campaign, a multi-million dollar effort spanning TV, streaming, print, and OOH advertising. Put into perspective, this isn’t David vs Goliath, it’s Goliath vs Godzilla (or a better analogy).

And yet, in the lines stretching down West Village sidewalks and making their appearance on feeds all over the world, it seemed like people chose not to let that valuation complicate their enthusiasm. One would argue it conveyed the same sense of familiarity and warmth as a new neighbourhood coffee shop or mom-and-pop store. It makes the intimate, grassroots feeling that much more remarkable.

That leads me to think that the pop-up worked precisely because it made Anthropic’s massive scale feel invisible. Every single choice created perceptual distance from what Anthropic actually is: a billion-dollar company with backing from two of late-stage capitalism’s Final Bosses.

(To be clear: large companies must have principles. Size and values aren’t inherently incompatible. But the interesting bit is how readily Anthropic’s scale disappeared from the conversation.)

Here’s the other thing: we’re unlikely to know how successful this campaign was in traditional terms. How many people converted to Claude at the event, or got a paid plan there or after? How many will still use it a month later? How many were first-time users versus leeched from competitors? Will they go after London, or Tokyo, or Paris next, or will this remain a one-hit wonder? I’d argue that releasing this data would puncture the narrative, and keeping it vague means everyone can project their own definition of success onto it.

Of course, this could all be speculation, smoke and mirrors. But whatever their actual reasoning, I think the pop-up—and the reactions to it—reveals a lot about how we construct meaning around our choices, especially in times of anxiety and uncertainty.

We want to believe in something. We want our consumption choices to align with our values while propelling the collective forward. We want to feel like we’re backing the good guys. And when a company provides the right signals, the right emotional narrative, we’re willing to buy it.

Whether those signals reflect deeper reality or sophisticated positioning is almost beside the point. The feeling was real and, given time, feelings create their own truths.

Here’s a nugget you might find interesting: give two equally capable, equally resourceful people the same situation, and they'll often produce different outcomes. Not just different results; I mean different categories of results entirely.

Take something simple: getting a personal project done. One person thinks about what work they need to do. Then they look at what sort of budget they have right now, and what tools they already have at their disposal, then settle on an iPad. From there, they’ll look at what models fall in that range, and filter those based on friends’ recommendations, price and other factors. If they find something that checks all the boxes, they make a purchase, and then they get the work done on the iPad.

The second person thinks about the outcome they want to see in the world. From there, they might mention it casually to their manager who says “oh, an iPad might help with that, we have some extras we’ve been meaning to get rid of in the supply room”. Or they might choose an entirely different tool, or ask GenAI, or realise that what they actually need isn't technology at all, and ask a friend in Philly to hand-make components instead. Same starting situation, same desired outcome, but somehow completely different paths to getting there.

I used to think this was about confidence, or knowing the right people, or some other special ability I don't have words for. And sure, those things probably matter. But I also think there's something both simpler and more fundamental underneath it all.

The difference isn't in what they do, it's in where they start thinking.

Some people start from the reality layer, working forward and asking “what can I do next given this environment and constraints?” Others start from the aspiration layer and work backward, asking "what do I want to exist and how can I make that possible?"

At first glance, these might seem like minor variations in planning style. But the more I observe people who consistently create remarkable outcomes, the more I realise these represent entirely different ways of relating to possibility itself.

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The fascinating thing is that both approaches work with the same basic elements: current reality and desired outcomes. But the starting point completely changes the process of getting from one to the other.

Reality-first thinkers start from where they are. They assess their current situation, figure out the constraints and resources available, and then figure out reasonable next steps, which eventually shapes the final outcome. They're working within the system as it presents itself to them, and optimising for the best outcome given what they see and experience around them.

Reality-first thinking follows logical paths, makes reasonable changes, and works within limits (however wide that net is cast). It asks: "Given what I can see and access right now, what's the sensible path forward?"

This approach has real virtues. It's methodical, it respects existing setups, it builds incrementally on what already exists. I think people who think this way tend to be excellent at seeing practical obstacles others miss and working within somewhat immobile systems.

Aspiration-first thinkers, on the other hand, approach the same situations with what seems like a completely different operating system. They ask, “Given what I want to exist in this world, what would need to be true to make that possible?” Then they work backward from there to figure out how to make that the new reality. Aspiration shapes reality, and not the other way around.

What strikes me about aspiration-first thinking is how it bypasses the mental constraints that reality-first thinking can create. These people aren't being unrealistic, necessarily. They're just not letting current circumstances dictate the boundaries of what they'll consider.

That’s one thing reality-first thinkers tend to miss out on: the very act of starting from current reality shapes what we can imagine as possible. When you start with a container—a specific tool, constraint, framework, or approach—you become bound by its limitations. If the iPad doesn't quite fit your specific project needs after all, you're stuck optimising within its constraints or starting over from scratch, hunting for another way to achieve it.

From what I’ve seen, when you start with the outcome and work backward, your solution becomes water, taking whatever shape that will make you most likely to achieve that outcome. An iPad, a different tool, a collaboration, a completely different approach: they're all equally valid as long as they serve the desired result.

The key is not to focus on what the solution should be, but what effect the solution creates in the world. I think we look at these things as a binary: problem, meet solution. But really, there’s a third step: problem → solution → effect. ANd when you start from the effect and work backward, suddenly all the walls collapse and you have near-infinite potential routes to choose from to turn it into reality.

Of course, there's something super vulnerable about working backward from what you want to exist. It requires believing that your judgment about what matters is worth honouring, even when you can't yet explain how you'll make it happen. It's easier to start from current reality because it feels more modest, more realistic. You're not asking for too much. You're not making anyone uncomfortable with your intensity. You're not putting yourself in a position where you might fail dramatically.

I’ll emphasise that this isn't about being reckless versus careful. It's about fundamentally different assumptions about what's fixed and what's flexible in any given situation. It's about which direction you face when you start thinking about setting anything in motion.

When you start from current reality, you inherit all the existing assumptions about "how things work." You see the established processes and think "this is the way." You encounter obstacles and think "these are the constraints I need to work within."

When you start from what you want to exist, you naturally ask "wait, why does it have to be done this way?" People who work backward from their aspirations have a natural immunity to these inherited scripts. They're not trying to break rules; they're often not even seeing them as influential on their goal.

At first, it seems like there are countless different ways people approach bringing ideas to life. Some test things rapidly, others build consensus, some wait for the right moment, others create elaborate plans. But when you look at the underlying structure, all of these approaches boil down to the same fundamental choice.

To be honest, I don't know if either approach is inherently better. They're tools, and like any tools, they're suited to different situations. But recognising them—and what you’re inclined towards—helps expand what you can imagine for yourself. The cognitive starting point can shape everything that follows.

So these days, when I want to do something hard, I’ve been trying the aspiration-first way. I like to start by describing the absolute best case scenario in as much detail as possible. What would it mean for this problem to be solved, or this project to be complete? What does the world look like when that happens? How will I know when I've gotten there? Only then do I let myself put pen to paper and draft solutions.

Reality is more malleable than we usually allow ourselves to believe. The space between what is and what could be is where all interesting change happens. The only question is which end you choose to start from.

If you’re curious about how this might transfer to the context of identity:

If you've been thinking about taking something seriously enough:

If you’re curious about how to choose between opportunities:

This piece emerged from a fascinating conversation with Vishwanath of (which you should definitely check out) about the different ways people we know tend to approach anything they’re trying to set into motion.

Until very recently, I worked at a product consultancy. It was a curious business. Many of the services we advertised were tangible: product design, design systems, motion and illustration. But in my experience, most of the real work was of the reverberation kind.

I’ll explain what I mean. I’ve sat in many ideation sprints—or what we call “zero to one” conversations—either as a fly on the wall or as a facilitator. I remember one of them very clearly. A French artist wrote to us, asking for some time to discuss an idea that was bouncing through her head. A professional of the fine arts coming to a tech-first product consultancy was a curiosity in itself, and her idea even more so. My bosses weren’t too keen on the viability of this project, but they encouraged me to have the conversation anyway, if it was something that interested me personally.

Over coffee, the artist explained her idea to me very animatedly. She was a teacher in Paris as well as an artist, she said, and she had come to realise that the children and adults she worked with—many of whom were iPad babies—hadn’t been exposed to art in the messy, corporeal way that previous generations had (up to the elbows in paint tubs, finger streaks on the walls). Or if they had, they had forgotten. They saw colours as flat, uni-dimensional things, pixels on a screen that they could pick up using a colour picker. They knew almost nothing of what it took to make a colour from scratch, or how a hue could look different depending on what surrounded it. She was resolute: it was cognitive decline. Mixing paint engages multiple senses: sight, sound, and smell. This multi-sensory input helps build neural connections and fine motor skills in ways that tapping a screen simply doesn’t. It builds cognitive flexibility: what happens if I mix blue and red? What do I need to add to inch it closer to purple? Colour mixing, she said, was a bodily, intuitive way to engage with the abstract concept of transformation.

That said, she wasn’t anti-screen; she knew digital tools had a definite place in our lives (ah, I thought, that explains why she came to us). What she proposed was a marriage between mediums: A simple colour-mixing game. On a minimal interface, there would be three pots of primary colour paints. In the centre of the “canvas”, there would be a single-colour drawing. The child would have to fill in the rest of the canvas to match that colour, by tapping each pot to add its colour, layer by layer, onto the canvas. Each attempt would give instant visual feedback through the canvas itself: did the colour blend right? Did it match the reference? There was no undo button, only iterative play that would tune their eyes and fingers to what small shifts in hue could do. In her words, it would free people to “play with colour as a language of subtle differences without reference to theories, categories or cultural ideas”. 

In the hour or so that followed, we circled the idea together—turning it over, tugging at its edges, testing its weight. Within the bounds of that conversation, something shifted. The idea felt less nebulous, more real. We didn’t end up building the app for her, no. But it had entered a shared space, however briefly, and the resonance there was enough to tell her that the idea had room in the world, not just in her head. 

This is, I think, the most fragile stage of desire: you’ve just birthed an idea and, right now, you’re the only person who believes in it. But for that larval idea to start to press against the boundaries of its own shape—for it to begin chafing and stretching—it needs something from the outside: just enough reverberation to keep going.

We could talk about impact at scale, or in terms of revenue and headcount and other numbers. But none of it would have mattered, or even materialised, if the desire that started it all hadn’t been kept alive a little longer by reverberation from someone else.

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Sam Altman once said that great ideas are fragile, and that at first they often sound bad. That tracks. Fragile things don’t really hold up well to scrutiny. They collapse under the weight of certainty, so they need space to stumble, reform, find shape. There’s a temptation to frame this kind of patience as a solitary act: the creator alone in a room, shielding their early ambition from a world that would crush it. I have to say, that version of events has a kind of romance to it.

But I think what we forget is that solitude is never the whole truth of ambition. What fragile ideas need isn't absence of response but the right kind of response. Reverberation—the feedback loop between thought and expression, inner voice and outer echo—is what gives nascent desires the strength to persist. You might have the inkling of a desire, but whether you follow it depends on who hears it, and whether they reflect it back in a form you can recognise, or name it in a way that helps you see it more clearly than you could alone.

The presence or absence of reverberation determines whether desire lives or dies. 

In my head, reverberation isn’t the same as validation or echo. Validation is approval. Is this good or bad? Is this only valuable because others say so? Reverberation is about acknowledgement. This stirs something in someone else (interest, happiness, understanding, anger)¹. Reverberation invites nuance; it builds relational momentum, the kind of forward movement that happens when two or more people engage with an idea together.

I think another way to think of this is: who are your co-sustainers of desire?² Early believers, yes, but also people who kept showing up while the idea changed shape, propelling it forward or, at least, refusing to let it vanish. 

***

Vanilla extract³, when you taste it on its own, is… bitter. It tastes nothing like it smells, which feels like a betrayal. It’s one of those things that only makes sense in context, as part of something larger. That’s kind of what early desire is: Too strong, too bitter, too intense to be consumed alone, but given reverberation through the right conditions and co-sustainers, it becomes the thing you notice most when it’s missing.

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¹Not all reverberation is nourishing. Some ideas get distorted in the echo chamber, or scaled too early because they sounded good before they were solid. But as of now, I think absence is still the greater risk. For most ideas, silence kills long before distortion does.

² Some questions I’m still turning over in my mind: what makes someone a good co-sustainer versus merely an audience? Are there different types of co-sustainers needed at different stages?

³ From this excellent Tumblr post I think about all the time:

Thanks for reading this issue. I’m going to take a break from this newsletter for a month or so, mostly to refuel my tank, leave my mind fallow for a bit, and work on Patina. I might post on Notes if I find something interesting during the course of my sabbatical(?) but I’m not putting any pressure on myself. In the meantime, it would be really lovely if you could share this or any other issue of Kindred Spirits with friends, family, and smart strangers so we can build our collective of kindred spirits. Back in your inbox sometime in late June or early July!

A lot of life advice I’ve come across always rings with the undertone of “don’t take things too seriously”. I’ve always been someone who takes things seriously, so this does feel a little personal. When someone tells me not to, here’s what I hear: Don’t make others uncomfortable with your intensity. Don't put yourself in a position where you might fail. Don’t ask for too much from yourself, from anyone around you, from the world. There's safety in treating everything with equal doses of ironic distance.

Insofar as this advice stands for staying flexible and avoiding perfectionism, it makes sense. But I think it’s morphed into this ugly shield against conviction, and mollycoddles us away from the vulnerability of caring deeply about something. I refuse to believe that you can get through life in an interesting way without taking anything seriously and being unapologetic about it.

Granted, I’ve probably been radicalised by the thousands of books I’ve read all my life. When you grow up on a diet of J.R.R. Tolkien, Diana Wynne Jones and C.S. Lewis, it's pretty solid evidence that something remarkable emerges only from committed seriousness.

The metaphysical weight of committed seriousness is a curious thing. When someone takes an idea seriously enough, it begins to acquire its own gravity. This is usually my first thought when I encounter a piece of modern art, where the most common critique is “I could do that”. Yes, technically we could, but what we completely miss is that someone had to first take the possibility of doing it seriously. The apparent simplicity of the act obscures the staggering shift in perspective the artist needs to make it possible in the first place.

This works recursively, like a fractal of possibility. Each person who claims the space to do something serious expands the field of what others can imagine for themselves. The systems, institutions, and paradigms we operate inside, without a second thought, all started as someone's "thing" that they took seriously enough to bring into being. Reality, in many ways, is socially constructed through these countless acts of committed seriousness.

They don't have to be huge things, either. For example, I recently started an independent culture magazine called Patina. It isn’t The New Yorker, and probably never will be. But it has shifted the fabric of my and my community’s reality a little bit, becoming another publication that intentionally prioritises long-form reading and anti-advertising stances. Each deliberate stance like this adds to the texture of what's possible.

A tiny independent magazine in one corner of the world, taken seriously enough, exerts its own kind of force on reality, creates its own kind of truth through the sheer fact of its committed existence. I experienced this shift with Kindred Spirits as well: for a long time, I thought of it as "just something I'm writing." But there's an inherent power in claiming that space for your thing and what it makes you. This is a newsletter read by thousands, and I am a writer. Patina is a serious publication, and I am its founder-editor. It's not necessarily about claiming an "identity", because that comes with its own rigidity. I think it's about making that semantic claim that creates a framework for committed action. Less "I am a writer" and more "this is writing that I take seriously." Your thing becomes a reference experience that changes how you relate to everything else.   

The space of what we can do is theoretically vast (even with the rules and ethics that govern us). But our actual sense of what’s possible tends to be remarkably constrained. When we think about what we want our lives to become, we tend to look through bifocal problem-centric glasses. We see problems and either ignore them until they fade from sight, or fix them in ways that satisfices.

Choosing the second path often results in a lot of chafing; it's very hard to be serious about something in a system that doesn't care as much as you, or cares about different things. This isn't to say you can't be agentic in a system designed by someone else. You can, but it is typically capped, or it is at the mercy of someone else's permission.

But I think we very rarely consider the agentic third alternative: taking the bifocal glasses off. Looking for opportunities to change the system or environment to such a desirable state that those problems cannot and will not arise. Committed seriousness to an entirely different script.

What fascinates me is how committed seriousness is easier with dramatic changes than when we’re changing smaller things about our lives. There's a kind of inertia at play. It's harder to maintain committed seriousness about smaller things because they seem too minor to deserve that level of attention. But the size of the undertaking doesn't change the essential nature of what's required: you have to believe that your judgment about what matters is worth honouring. Finding that third path often requires taking yourself seriously enough to create new frameworks, rather than just excel within existing ones. This is how we collectively expand what's possible.

It takes a particular kind of courage to pour energy and attention into something that you can't yet fully explain or justify to others. Committed seriousness requires a stubborn blindness to conventional metrics of success or importance. You have to be willing to treat something as significant purely because you've decided it is.

The world has enough casual observers. What it needs is more people willing to take things seriously enough to reshape what we think is possible. Think about this: What corner of reality is waiting for the weight of your seriousness?

Motifs that came to mind as I wrote this

1. : Visa is probably one of the first people who comes to mind when I think of taking things seriously, but taking yourself lightly. Here’s an excerpt from one of his essays (where he mentions he was also radicalised by books and the library):

When I say serious I don’t mean solemn and tedious. 

I mean something closer to ‘dynamic persistence’, and a sense of humor is often critical to that. It’s hard to persist for a long time if you ‘take yourself too seriously’. You become rigid, stiff, the opposite of dynamic, and eventually you bang up against something that breaks you one way or another, because you weren’t able to back down, or laugh it off.

2. Timothée Chalamet’s SAG Awards speech. I love how unapologetically he delivers it, and how he acknowledges that people don’t usually talk like this:

   

3. Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater. When faced with a beautiful waterfall, conventional wisdom suggests building a house with a view of it. Wright, instead, made the house a part of the waterfall. He took an impossible idea seriously enough to bring it into being. Fallingwater is now a reference experience for thinking about how buildings and nature could coexist.

I used to be terrible at conversations. God-awful. The kind of person who, if asked “how are you?”, would either clam up or launch into a detailed explanation of my emotional landscape, complete with footnotes and asides. It’s odd because, as a kid, I could entice even walls into full-fledged conversations. It was as if, somewhere between getting braces and nearly failing a maths exam, someone entered my brain and pulled down a Big Red Lever.

I’m happy to report that I am not that person anymore—I have managed to pull the Big Red Lever back to a somewhat midway point, if not entirely up. But it took a lot of work. It took a lot of asking great conversationalists what their secret was, and getting frustrated when they replied, “just talk to people, Sindhu”. A lot of tiny experiments in anxiety-inducing social settings, at work, on sales calls. A lot of realisations that, contrary to popular belief, I actually enjoyed human connection, but had to figure out the mechanics of it because it didn’t come naturally to me.

I can feel a longer essay bubbling up inside of me—mostly because I can’t resist the pull of more research! More curiosity!—but until I put that together, here are some of my observations on the art and science of making conversation.

While making conversation, we tend to default to what I call the ‘lowest common denominator’ rule: trying to offend the most offendable person. Often, that means playing it safe near the median line, not being weird, and being over-cautious of crossing boundaries (even though we don’t really know where they end). It’s an un-negotiable, one-size-fits-all approach. This can work if, for example, you’re passing time or not too interested in establishing a deeper conversation. On the other hand, this is a death trap if you’re actively trying to build a rapport with someone. It congeals into an act of circling each other, waiting for the other person to make the first move. 

Instead, it’s a lot more fruitful if you aim to elicit more interesting answers to questions you ask. Gently, respectfully, probe the edges of comfort. Make a beeline for the edge of what this person has ever been asked before, and you might find that people have the capacity to be a lot more interesting than when they’re drawing on a bank of templatised answers. 

In her 2016 book on reclaiming conversation, sociologist Sherry Turkle claimed that it takes seven minutes for a conversation to get really good. I’d wager that you could reach this point with 2-3 really good questions (I’ve written more about what makes a good question here). 

Take the classic “Where are you from?” exchange. It’s safe, it’s polite, but it has potential that we might end up not tapping into. You could accept it when the other person says “Bangalore” and move on. Or, you could aim for the edge: “What’s something about Bangalore that would surprise most people?” That usually gets you past the standard traffic jokes and straight into more interesting territory. You could follow that up with, “If you could take one thing from Bangalore and make it mandatory everywhere else, what would it be?” Now we’re talking.

A mistake I’ve seen—and made all too often—is sharing too much personal information too quickly in the name of being truthful and open. Emotional honesty is good, but bringing up more personal or private details too early on in the conversation can create a sense of obligation in the other person, that they also have to share something equally vulnerable even if they’re not comfortable with it. It can also catch them off guard: they might not know how to reply or, worse, might say something that instantly sours the conversation. Meaningful conversation needs a build-up; it’s less about immediate depth of disclosure and more about a graduate pooling of trust. Ironically, sharing everything at once just short-circuits the possibility of a deeper connection. 

You can only ask so many questions in a row before you start interviewing the other person. The canned advice for making better conversation is “be a good listener”, but often that’s just translated into ‘ask more questions and let the person respond’. It may feel like when you’re asking a lot of questions, you’re displaying curiosity about the other person and generously giving them the limelight. But this approach can be unkind: it offloads all the effort of coming up conversation points and directions to the other person. It can be exhausting for them to keep giving without receiving anything in return (unless they love the sound of their own voice, in which case, carry on). Of course, you shouldn’t shoe-horn your way into the conversation, either, or be too eager for your turn to talk. 

The key is finding the sweet spot between interrogation and conversational hijacking. This one took a bit of trial and error, but a 2-1-1 approach, in my experience, is a safe bet to bring up a related experience of yours at the right time. I mean: ask a couple of questions, share one relevant experience of your own, end with another question, and see how your partner responds.

Say you ask someone what their startup does, and they reply with: “We're building an AI-powered tool that helps small restaurants optimise their food ordering to reduce waste.” You might ask an engaged follow-up: “That's fascinating! What made you focus on small restaurants specifically?” to which they might reply “Well, the big chains already have sophisticated systems, but smaller places often can't afford them. Plus, I love the personal connection you get with local restaurant owners.”

By now you’ve gone back and forth twice, so you can insert a bit of your lore: “I really connect with that mission. I did some consulting work with a family-owned Vietnamese restaurant, and it was eye-opening to see how thin their margins were and how much every bit of waste affected them. Have you started piloting with any restaurants yet?” From here, it might go two ways. The other person might respond to your question. But if they’re also a good conversationalist, they’ll probably respond to your question and then come back to your experience: “Have you kept in touch with the restaurant owners you consulted for? I'd love to hear what other challenges you noticed in their operations.” Either way, you’ve balanced out the conversation. 

I fully realise this is only the tip of the iceberg that is the art of making conversation. So much of it can’t be abstracted or templatised, for good reason, I think. But I think the bottom line is that to make good conversation, you have to make it—you can’t magic it out of thin air. You have to lead with curiosity and intention. You have to want that conversation, and that means being an equal and willing participant. 

I read somewhere that, in a conversation, you aren’t only exchanging, you’re creating a third thing. I really like this, because it frames conversations as a shared act of curiosity. The topic becomes almost secondary to this process of mutual discovery. I also think this is why truly engaging conversations can’t entirely be scripted or reverse-engineered once they take on a rhythm of their own. This is a rare Pokémon, though, which would explain why when asked, we can only think of a handful of conversations we’ve had that we might describe as illuminating or perspective-altering.

A quick note: I recently launched an independent digital publication called Patina! It will document what I call stories of living culture: craft, culture and community as they persist and involve in food, art, ritual, objects and heritage. Submissions open in April 2025 and the inaugural volume will be out in June 💌

Read more about Patina on its website, readpatina.com. Writers, photographers, documentarians, readers, please sign up for pitch calls and theme updates!

A big thank you to all subscribers supporting my work. If you’d like to support me financially, please consider signing up for a paid subscription at just INR 149 (~$1.75) a month or INR 1499 (~$18) a year. Other ways to help out is to like my essays on Substack, subscribe for future essays (if you’ve come from a shared link), and share my essays with anyone you think will find them valuable.

A couple of days ago, OpenAI released a new ChatGPT model capable of turning any picture into a specific art style. Since then, my Twitter timeline has been flooded with hundreds of posts of people turning their photos into “Studio Ghibli artwork”. The problem is twofold. One, the new model is obviously capturing a style with no sense of narrative or storytelling that Studio Ghibli is known for. Two, some of these art styles aren't even Studio Ghibli—more like watercolour and pastel—which shows people don't even know what defines Studio Ghibli's art style.

This zeitgeist is perfectly captured in this screenshot of recent Google Trends data. The trending searches are all about the quickest path to creating something superficially similar to Ghibli's work, without any interest in understanding what makes their artistic approach meaningful or distinctive. The Hindustan Times even calls it “ChatGPT's ‘Studio Ghibli’”. It’s a misattribution that shows how readily we're willing to transfer ownership of artistic styles from their original creators to the AI tools that imitate them.

There's a concerning collapse of nuance happening here. We're seeing cultural flattening where “Studio Ghibli style” has become a catch-all term for any anime-adjacent art with soft colours or watercolour effects. This surface-level imitation without understanding the underlying principles reminds me of what happened with Van Gogh's style—people often reduce his work to swirly strokes without acknowledging how those techniques expressed his unique vision of the world and his emotional state.

The ability to distinguish between genuine Studio Ghibli aesthetics and general anime-inspired watercolour styles represents a deeper understanding of artistic literacy. Art relies heavily on aesthetic ecosystems. Their power goes beyond any single image; it's in their distinct aesthetic worlds. Yet we're reducing universes that took years and many minds to develop into Snapchat filters, and worse, we're happy to accept that that's all there is to these styles.

This pattern reduces our ability to recognise and appreciate quality in general—not just in art, but in design, media, and visual communication that we interact with daily. You don't know why certain colours work together, or why shadows need to fall at a certain angle to indicate a time of day, or what the significance is of a character's hair going from brown to white over the course of a movie. Sure, you could say all of that doesn't matter. But you can apply that reasoning to anything. “The purpose of food is to give us energy and nutrients, so let's all eat bland nutrient pellets and get on with our lives”. Or, “The purpose of college is to get a degree, so let's use an LLM to pass our exams instead of actually applying ourselves”.

Oddly, this reminds me of the discourse about porn. There’s been plenty of studies that show how constant exposure to pornography can dull sexual response and create unrealistic expectations. I feel like it’ll be the same with AI-generated art: the endless flood of images risks desensitising us to the subtleties of artistic expression. Porn strips intimacy of its emotional and relational context; AI art generation strips creation of its cultural and personal meaning. The sheer volume and accessibility of content leads to quick consumption rather than deep appreciation, and quality gets lost in quantity. Both reduce rich human experiences to purely visual consumption; both can make the real thing seem inadequate by comparison.

Just because you can, doesn't mean you should

This rush to generate without reflection has darker implications too. One user on X (fka Twitter) turned a photo of the horrific murder of George Floyd into a cute Ghibli-style image. That feels to me like a prime example of how defaulting to AI generation can strip away human judgment and cultural sensitivity. That’s not to say Studio Ghibli never talks about difficult topics, because they do. But they do it through carefully constructed narrative frameworks that provide appropriate context and respect for the weight of these issues. Grave of the Fireflies depicts war trauma, but rather than making war ‘prettier’ or more ‘palatable’, the film creates a specific narrative space for processing difficult truths.

There’s a crucial difference between making difficult topics accessible and making them consumable. Converting a documented instance of racial violence into a style associated with whimsy and childhood wonder for internet clout doesn't make it more approachable, it trivialises it.

Look at this post from the White House's official X account: an actual photo of a detained immigrant converted into ‘Studio Ghibli style’ art. When the highest office in one of the world's most powerful nations reduces law enforcement and human suffering to cutesy memes, we've moved beyond bad taste into something genuinely dystopian. This goes beyond cultural flattening and misappropriation, it's institutional trivialisation (and of course the style isn't accurate).

Aside from being poles apart from the ethics and values of Miyazaki and the entire Studio Ghibli franchise, these images spread rapidly without context, they shape public perception of what's acceptable and inadvertently normalise insensitive depictions. They also become attached to the Studio Ghibli canon, which is even more dangerous for their reputation. The whole "just because you can doesn't mean you should" argument becomes painfully relevant here. Without taste and human judgment, there's no understanding of what's appropriate or respectful.

And don’t even get me started on how the large corporations profit from this cultural strip-mining and us literally helping them profit from it by filling our timelines with the resulting slop. We may as well let burglars enter our homes and help them load up the van with your things, maybe offer them a cup of tea for their hard work.

Luke Plunkett says it best: “Companies like OpenAI are hoping that the longer their tech can stay out there, the more it becomes part of the background noise of the modern internet, and the more likely it is that they themselves will become part of the fabric of the modern internet, and not a bunch of raiders stripping the place for its creative wiring”.

The 'accessibility' argument is a cop-out

Some people have argued that this AI-generated content is a good thing because it introduces new audiences to Studio Ghibli, potentially bringing more viewers to their work. But I wonder if that's actually the case? They're being introduced to a surface-level impression that might actually prevent them from engaging with the actual films and their deeper artistic and narrative elements. I think the Google Trends screenshot is a clear example of that: no one’s looking for “Studio Ghibli movies”. Our focus on output and our rush to produce content often comes at the expense of genuine engagement, simply because we cannot take the time to learn, engage, and let things breathe.

Another argument I’ve seen crop up about AI art generation is that it removes the barrier to entry to art. I’m not thoroughly convinced by that, either. You still have to pay 20 dollars a month for a subscription to a model that can generate quality images. It’s like renting an ability. That same amount can get you a good set of paints and a drawing book that will last months, has no token limits or downtime, and can be preserved for as long as you choose.

Sure, it’s not equal to dropping millions of dollars on art school. But I’d argue that many prolific artists haven’t done that, either. They’ve just sat down with their supplies day after day to bring something to life. What, then, is the real barrier to entry? I think what people often mean by “barrier” is actually the time and effort required to develop skills. Art has always been accessible—people just didn't think it was because they didn't want to put in the effort or make bad art before they got to good art.

If creation is the process, the labour, then the creator themselves is the end product, not the art they produce. The art is proxy, a stand-in for all the growing, learning, and perspective-shifting the creator has gone through during the process of creation. I think perhaps people forget why we create art in the first place. Sure, one aspect is getting eyeballs. But there was always the foil to that, i.e., creating to grow, or for the sake of creation, or to document. I fear, with AI, that the convenience of generation is compromising the other benefits that art truly has for us. Is the Sistine Chapel beautiful only aesthetically, or is its beauty enhanced by Michaelangelo’s effort? Conversely, does the ease and speed of perfect art generation make it less meaningful—just another pretty picture in an infinite feed?

Art has historically been much more than what meets the eye: a means of documenting human experience and perspective, a process of personal growth and discovery. The benefit of AI is in mass production. It might give us more images, but it might also make us poorer in terms of personal growth, cultural understanding, and human connection.

The problem with a lot of common arguments against relegating art creation to AI is that they don't resonate with a society that values output over effort. Nobody wants to take the time to learn a skill—or pay someone who has the skill—if they can generate the result in just 5 minutes and for under 20 dollars. Artists are consumers, but not all consumers are artists, and so they’re perfectly happy with a perfect “on spec” image. People don't want to develop the underlying skills to tackle new challenges, or work through the creative difficulties.

But again, the looming risk of that is that everything starts feeling and looking the same because true breakthroughs often come from deep understanding and novel combinations of knowledge. This has already become pretty obvious in the software world and will slowly creep into art and other creative spaces. The shortcut to an aesthetic image ultimately limits our capabilities in ways we might not recognise until it's too late. But because these degradations are gradual and systemic, they're hard to see at the moment. By the time the impacts become obvious, we may have lost something difficult to recover.

Who serves whom?

I want to be clear: this isn't an argument against AI, or against people having fun with new technology. These are tools for humanity, after all, and unbridled joy is a massive part of what makes us human. But what I’m wary of is when tools start shaping us instead of us shaping them. The question isn't whether to use AI or not—it's about understanding what we're gaining, who we’re profiting, and what we might be unconsciously losing in the process. Because once cultural literacy and artistic understanding erode, they're much harder to rebuild than they are to maintain.

Perhaps we need to be more precise with our language, and differentiate between ‘generating’ images and ‘creating’ art. The former might produce beautiful outputs, but the latter involves a transformative process that changes both the art and the artist. As noted about writing with AI (and I think this applies equally to art): AI is great at execution—except for “the very tip of agency which is actually making creative decisions about what's worth creating at all and why, and what to prioritise/ emphasise for a given purpose.” This is almost the essence of creation itself.

In the long run, it'll all depend on what we value more: the convenience or the skill.

If you’ve made it all the way here, thank you for reading! This essay marks the start of a new section of Kindred Spirits called Zeitgeist, dedicated to tracing the intricate connections between tech, culture and human experience. There will definitely be plenty of overlap between Zeitgeist and Kindred Spirits because, ultimately, they both seek answers to the same question: How do we exercise more agency over what we do, choose, consume, make and become? While Kindred Spirits looks inwards, Zeitgeist will look outwards, at the external influences that impress upon us.

The real test of the efficacy of this practice will be in your own experience. It will be you noticing that you have a new capacity. Until you do that, you probably won’t be convinced that this is an important practice. But once you do that, there will be no denying it.

Sam Harris once said this in the context of meditation, but it really struck me because I think this is exactly how journalling works, too.

I’ll be honest, I was never big on keeping a journal. I reasoned that I was really good at rationalising and coping already, so I thought there wasn’t much beyond that that journalling could do for me. I was wrong. Ironically, keeping a journal helped me realise that.

The most tangible benefit is that my memory has improved significantly. I mean this not necessarily in the context of remembering things, but remembering moments. The line of work I’m in, combined with the way I’m wired, keeps me in constant reaction mode. That made me terrible at recollecting the little details, because I would only make space for the larger thoughts. That sucked, because its the little details that make up the texture of life. The experience of not being able to recollect what happened over a couple of days just because they were mundane days jolted me into action. I started to make sure I put down as much as I could remember, especially making sure to record not just the bad (since we have a tendency of blowing negativity out of proportion) but also the good and the neutral. A full picture of a life lived.

A great side effect of this practice is that I’ve become a better conversationalist, because it increased the number of anecdotes I can draw on to fuel interesting conversations. Even if binge-reading Brandon Sanderson’s Stormlight Archives doesn’t seem worth archiving in your memory, it might end up being great fodder in a conversation with someone you really want to hang out with more often. So you never know what ends up being social gold.

The second benefit of journalling is subtle, but life-changing. Keeping a journal has created a place for me to set down all the thoughts swirling around in my head instead of letting them muddy the waters of my mind. Many of these thoughts shrink when exposed to light; darkness makes them more threatening than they are. Once I give them concrete form on paper, they often reveal themselves as underwhelming or even silly. But left swirling in the mind, they can become almost physical blockers to rational thought. I've noticed that negative thoughts, in particular, persist longer in my head. Having them down on paper makes it easier for me to recognise their true nature and, in a more meta fashion, quantify how many negative thoughts i’m having vs positive, and try to course-correct.

Third, it’s made me confront and understand the way I process heavy emotions. For example, I have realised I am averse to confrontation but I also have a keen sense of justice, which makes for a difficult combination. It means one part of my mind tells me to raise a stink, while the other is scared about the repercussions and reputational damage that comes from that. Just the act of recording these incidents has made me visualise how many times not confronting someone has caused me damage, and how it continues to linger in my mind and subconscious even if I tell myself I’ve let it go.

On grief: while I am an emotionally-aware person in general, encountering grief of any kind would make me turn off that lever and switch to logical, analytical mode. For years, I was convinced I was really good at dealing with grief. But over time, I realised how the emotions I had clamped down on had found their own path, anyway: through stressful chats at work, moody silent days at home, sleepless nights even though I’d worked my body until the point of exhaustion.

I feel like there’s plenty more I’m missing from this list, but Sam Harris’ words keep ringing in my head: you notice the capacity when you have it. The fact that I can now spot these patterns is itself evidence of this habit’s quiet effects. I'm noticing new capacities I didn't have before, and my field of vision (emotionally, logically, intellectually) has definitely expanded over time. The practice doesn’t make grief easier or my anger less red-hot but at least I now know what triggers it, how I deal with it, and what past me can tell present me about making future me’s life easier.

For those more interested in the “how” of my practice, I’ve put together some notes as well as links to my favourite supplies below.

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Notes on my toolkit

I don’t typically subscribe to the scrapbooking style of maintaining a journal, although I deeply admire it; visual recollection can be just as powerful as written collection for many people. I’m personally more of a longhand, long-form enthusiast. I occasionally stick scraps like tickets and photos in my notebooks, but only if I remember that I have them on hand. Otherwise, any paraphernalia I’ve collected on my travels tend to be put in this one catch-all clear folder.

I have four notebooks for different purposes.

The first is a journal journal, the one I use for longer record-keeping, thought-dumping and emotion-processing. This has been my most used-notebook over the years. I write in it maybe once in two weeks, sometimes once a week depending on how urgently I feel like clearing my mind. This is my most private notebook and so I’m very careful about where I keep it—stuff from it almost never makes it elsewhere, at least in its 1:1 form. This is important, because it gives me the freedom to write anything in it, regardless of flow or coherence or style (which, if you’re a writer, can be hard to break out of). This notebook does all the heavy-lifting in terms of pattern recognition and shadow work. I very rarely reference previous entries other than for those reasons. Once I’ve written in this journal, I feel significantly lighter and freer to apply my mind to other things.

Supplies: I prefer to use a sturdy notebook and ink that won’t fade over time. I have tiny, ant-sized handwriting, so I usually end up using one notebook for a year on average, depending on how many pages I write each session. I switch between the A5 ruled notebooks by Moleskine and myPaperclip. My pen of choice is the Muji 0.5 gel or the Uniball Eye 0.5 roller ball (also the pen I used as a court reporter during my journalism days, precisely because it doesn’t fade and can’t be tampered with).

*

The second is a pocket notebook, what people would typically call a commonplace notebook. I’ve had varying notebooks of this kind over many years, but it’s only now that I’ve started using it intentionally, as a way of curating ideas and thoughts that matter to me at that moment. This notebook is pocket-sized: I made this choice because I wanted to have it on me all the time, and so it needed to fit into even the tiniest handbag I own. I’m really satisfied with that decision—I’ve been spending more time with it than on scrolling through social media, especially during those transitory moments of the day like commutes and waiting rooms where you tend to while away time anyway.

Some things I’ve put in it so far: snatches of overheard conversations, direct quotes from novels, lists I want to get through over the year, reflections on culture or travel, dreams that I’ve decided mean something and need to figure out why, ideas and plans for personal growth, quick pen sketches. Nothing super private goes into this notebook, and neither do fleeting thoughts or one-and-done bits of writing like shopping lists and work to-dos. I don’t follow a format or a template like I’ve seen some writers do. But I do prefer to keep one note per page in case I want to come back and add to it in the future.

Supplies: I prefer hardcover over softcover just to lengthen the life of what will be a much tossed-about notebook. I’m currently using the myPaperclip pocket notebook with grid pages, but might switch over to the Moleskine square pocket notebook next. I prefer a 0.5 nib pen for this notebook because of limited space, like the Sharpie needle point roller pen I’m using right now.

*

The third notebook is a daily diary*. This notebook serves to hold more objective details of what happened in a day, including everything that’s happening around me and with people I care about. I got this idea from my grandfather, who has been meticulously keeping a diary for the last few decades. He calls up family members to get details from them: what time my sister’s flight landed, for example, or how I would describe my job in one line to someone who wasn’t in my field. Minus the phone calls, I’ve been following a similar process: recording my day in short sentences and then any notes on my family, friends, colleagues, or the news. I also draw a little box that I draw an emoji in, to indicate my mood that day. A typical entry might look like:

Went to the office today. It was relaxed, mostly a lot of copy work. Finished Ia Genberg’s The Details—lovely book. Dad has been thinking about taking on a new project, as he’s got more time on his hands now. [Aunt name] has gone to Malaysia to visit her son; they plan to visit Singapore, gave them some recommendations. Grandpa coming to stay with us this weekend.

The key is to make the process short and snappy, so I can fit in as much information as I can. I usually update my diary after dinner, when my day is more or less over.

*I use “diary” and “journal” distinctly. To me, a diary implies recording and a journal implies processing.

Supplies: This notebook mostly stays at home as well, so any diary with dated or undated monthly spreads will work. I’m currently using a Midori A5 planner I bought in Japan, but Muji and myPaperclip also have good options. I personally chose not to buy the ones with a page per day, because that defeats my purpose of short and snappy recording.

*

The fourth is a weekly and monthly planner that I use to keep track of projects and to-do lists for both work and life. I refer to it every day; it keeps me organised, and I also use it to record Wins and progress which then feed into my work brag doc. It’s also helpful to keep track of significant dates: project start and end dates, deadlines, birthdays and work anniversaries, etc. I tend to keep a scratch notebook or notepad on my desk for even more ephemeral writing like 2x2s and note-taking during meetings, but those I usually scrap once I’m through with them.

Supplies: I use the Muji A5 yearly planner because it’s the ideal balance of rigidity and flexibility for my use cases. The scratch pad is usually something off Amazon or the local stationery store. As for pens, I rotate between whatever’s in my bag at the time: Muji, Pentel EnerGel, Uniball Eye, or Sharpie.

I've been playing with this idea that some stories are worth believing not because they're capital-T True, but because they make life more interesting and generative.

It's a strange thought at first, that we might choose to believe something not because it's absolutely true. But I prefer to think of it as: it’s not absolutely true yet. We forget that all the stories we tell about ourselves start small, and only then are they reinforced with our actions over time. Strange how we demand absolute truth when, really, truth is just a seed waiting for time and attention.

The fascinating thing about these stories is how quickly they can become self-fulfilling prophecies. When you start telling yourself you're someone who takes action, you begin noticing opportunities for action everywhere. When I was journalling, I called it narrative bootstrapping: the story creates its own evidence.

As a kid, I radiated energy, and trained that intense beam on any activity that fell into my way. That included sports: I never considered myself super athletic, mostly because as a kid you don’t consider yourself at all. In hindsight, I wasn’t particularly good, but that didn’t matter because I hadn’t learnt yet that it was supposed to matter. That’s the thing about being a kid: you haven’t et learned to narrate yourself into corners.

As I grew older—and I can’t really pinpoint exactly when the shift happened—I started becoming the person who ‘wasn’t into sports’. I once went on a long-weekend getaway with friends, and casually mentioned thinking of going for a morning run, if anyone wanted to come with. “You? Run?” one friend scoffed. That was a year ago. And then last Saturday, I woke up and joined a run club with total strangers, ran a 4k, and was completely caught off guard when someone said “you didn't have a tough time, right? You seem like you've run before”.

It’s funny how so many of the stories I carry around came from throwaway moments that warped into load-bearing pillars in my mental architecture. We’re such selective archivists; we think we need mountains of evidence before believing something about ourselves, but let a single casual comment become gospel. We filter out anything that doesn’t fit a story we’re currently telling ourselves, and selective evidence-gathering creates a kind of confirmation spiral. But I’m learning: the same double-edged sword can be reverse-engineered, sharp and precise.

The whole running thing made me realise that we can actually “level up” just by deciding to change what we count as evidence in the first place, and identify with a new narrative. The first time I realised that, it sounded too simple to be true. We tend to think of identity as this sacred, unchangeable thing, especially if you’re like me—always the “reliable” and “constant” one. But you know that feeling when you do something totally "out of character" but it feels surprisingly... right? That's what I'm talking about. The opportunities are always there, but well beyond your peripheral vision because you didn’t think they apply to you. But when you decide to be that person, you start seeing more ways to do that. Changing the story about who you are changes what you see as possible. Our ability to see future paths of execution is tied to the amount of things we believe apply to us.

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At this point, you might run into this wall like I did: I wasn’t the only one who’d been telling a version of my story. I remember my friend S telling me that our identity was like “this collaborative Google Doc that’s commented on and revised by everyone we meet”. Depending on the size of the change, updating your story also involves hoping others will update their version of you, too. “You? Run?” wasn’t just a comment about my athletic ability; it was about my friend maintaining his story of who I was in relation to him. It’s funny, but strangers became my best allies when I was shifting some of my stories precisely because they were reading me with fresh eyes, without all the tracked changes and revision history.

When you’re up against all this, it’s easy to feel like you need others’ permission first to make any changes. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to let people know what we’re doing, to feel validated and more confident about it. But it serves us to remember that, ultimately, we get to choose. We can just… do the thing. The world has this wonderful way of shifting slightly on its axis to make space for your new dimension. Even better, you start attracting new people to whom this side of you is completely natural. They haven't gotten the memo about who you're "supposed" to be. It’s super liberating; you can almost feel your sense of self warp and stretch to accommodate this new version. 

Of course, there’s a baseline for this experiment to really work: you have to have a certain amount of self-trust. I think it’s both the foundation and the reward of story-shifting. You need some amount of trust in yourself to try on new stories, but each successful shift builds more trust, creating this beautiful feedback loop. Sometimes stories feel too big to try on not because we can't do the thing, but because our self-trust muscles aren't quite strong enough yet to handle the potential outcomes. I hack this by asking myself: "what could possibly go wrong?". It’s not to spiral into over-planning, but just as a quick reality check. But the clarity it brings you—that even at their worst, things won’t turn out like the scary stories in your head—is a freedom I hope all of us get used to.

Your current story isn’t the only possible truth. You shape the story. The story shapes you. And slowly, that new version of yourself emerges, one ecology of personhood.

My city is always in flux, always in the process of becoming. Cranes pierce the skyline, turning chunks of metal and stone into intricately designed buildings. People very close to my age colonise tables in coffee shops, working furiously on their vision boards, starting their metamorphosis through sheer force of will. Seeds of thought erupt in conversations, prompting me to buy a pocket-sized notebook to plant them in so they germinate with time. I collect them curiously, these instances of faith in an unmapped future. I feel the force of their attention on their ambitions like a ray of light through a magnifying glass. I see them as living proof of commitment, of what’s possible when we pick one path.

My own dynamic with commitment is curiously split. To relationships, I commit easily, almost instinctively, digging channels so deep they’re visible from space. I find endless fascination in the daily rhythms of loving someone. But with projects—like the novels and publications and businesses in my drafts—I’m all movement, no roots. The same person who wants to spend years exploring the depths of a single relationship will abandon a personal project at the first sign of resistance. These two versions of myself feel like strangers sometimes: one who knows how to stay, and one who's always looking for the escape hatch.

As a culture, we have such a weird relationship with commitment. We talk about it like it’s a heavy thing, draped in the language of loss: doors closing, options disappearing, futures foreclosed. I used to think of it this way too, wanting to collect possibilities like talismans against the future. Wondering what it would be like to ping from thing to thing like stones across water, maximising how many times I can skip before I sink. To me, especially fresh out of college, keeping my options open felt like the right game to play, but I wonder now if it wouldn’t have trapped me in its own kind of finitude. 

Observing the nature of commitment has taught me quite a bit about the nature of optionality. We think we’re maximising freedom. What we’re really doing is trapping ourselves in a kind of shallow-end infinity: always beginning, never evolving. Choice is great; endless choice is distraction. A fake richness, like Midas gold. What feels like living fully actually limits us to a very narrow band of human experience. 

I’m thinking now about the writers I love, and how they return to the same themes over and over, each time discovering something new. Hokusai painted endless visions of Mount Fuji; Sally Rooney stuck love under a microscope. Scientists spend decades studying a single species of moth, finding entire universes in its tiny frame. I think about the relationships around me that I secretly envy, the kind that deepen not despite routine but because of it. There's much to be said about choosing to stay with something long enough for it to surprise you.

This is what nobody tells you: commitment is an act of agency. We often get through life comforted by the thought that we have the ability to make choices, theoretically. But there's a peculiar magic that happens when you actually exercise that choice: the world shifts on its axis. You make active choices about how to use your time, energy, and attention. When you think of it like this, keeping your options permanently open feels a lot like surrendering your agency to circumstance. That kind of uncommitted energy is potential: it just sits there, pristine and perfect, full of promise but changing nothing. Committed energy is kinetic: it engages with reality and creates real change. When you choose to commit to something, you pour ourselves into it completely. You guide its evolution.

I guess what I’m trying to say is that our ability to bind our future selves to a future is what makes us agentic, rather than just moment-to-moment responders. Maybe the total inability to commit is a deeper kind of temporal fragmentation—the self splintering into a thousand disconnected moments instead of flowing through time as a continuous “I”. It’s fascinating to turn this idea over, to realise that true agency requires the ability to project our will forward in time. The core ability to commit to something and hold on to it is perhaps inseparable from true agency itself. Refusing to leave ourselves stuck in a perpetual present tense.

If we were to flip that on its head, the fear of commitment is really a failure of agency, of taking full responsibility for our choices and their consequences. A kind of learned helplessness dressed up as freedom. I think that’s why commitment feels so heavy to some people. You’re accepting full authorship of something, and you can't blame circumstances or timing or compatibility for much longer. You're essentially saying 'This is my choice, and I accept responsibility for making it work’.

The older I grow, the more convinced I become that commitment generates a kind of experiential wealth that can't be brute-forced into existence. There's this fascinating fractal effect that occurs, where constraint transmutes into focus, revealing layers of complexity a dabbler would miss entirely. It's not a limitation, because even that word feels subtractive, stressing what you can't do. No, commitment is generative—it's about what you discover when you choose to stay. You’ll know who you are by what you choose to go all in on. 

Hi again, from this side of the new year. I hope you all had a restful break, and I wish you a 2025 full of wonder. I’ve had so many thoughts about commitment spiralling in my mind that I don’t think this is the last you’ll hear of the topic. The grand thing about questions is that they generate more questions, and I want to write about those soon. Particularly on commitment in relationships, which feels like a different ball game. I would love to hear from you: what do you think commitment signals?

I’m writing this note as dusk settles over the city, and lights come flickering on in the buildings opposite mine. We spent this year quite similarly: turning on the lights in small corners of our minds, of lives lived with intention.

So much of what I’ve written this year has come from wrestling with questions: How do we make meaning in a world that moves too fast? What does it mean to truly choose our path rather than inherit one? Every month, the cursor blinked and I wore my backspace key thin. but—so slowly, each time—something true emerged.

To me, this newsletter has become a kind of practice, a kind I’ve never really had before. It’s not devotion to any doctrine, but more to the belief that meaning reveals itself through sustained attention. Writing is a watered-down form of altered consciousness, and so many ideas evolved as I wrote about them, breaking free from the constraints of my initial framework, insisting on their own form. Of course, many of those seeds were planted during my conversations with friends and some early paid subscribers. Like stones in a river, their gentle interrogation and shared experiences helped so many of my half-formed thoughts find their course.

I think this kind of attentive living is slow, humbling work. It really does feel like being a beginner at life, despite having lived it for nearly three decades now. There's no finish line to cross, no moment when you finally "arrive" at an intentional life. There’s just this moment, and the next, and the next, when you re-confirm your existence and hold on just a little tighter to the life you’ve been given.

I guess that’s what draws me back to my notes each month, to find meaning while becoming. I recently wrote that opportunities whisper rather than shout. What I didn't understand for a while was how I was sitting plumb in the middle of such an opportunity. Kindred Spirits, to me, has evolved into not just a space for writing about agency, but a living practice of it.

And of course, your response to my work turned my once-solitary writing into something far richer than I could have created alone. I still struggle with imposter syndrome and the idea that, often, the most personal is the most universal. I look longingly at other essayists, wishing I could borrow some of their eloquence and try it on for size. I didn’t tell people for the longest time that I had a newsletter, because I was pathologically worried that they would laugh or—worse—dismiss it as insignificant.

As a result, so much of my feedback and support comes from strangers. It’s only now I realise that, in fitfully stumbling over ideas and broadcasting towards people I don’t know, I’ve managed to live up to the name of my newsletter: kindred spirits instantly recognise the same spirit and energy in each other as they do in themselves, even if they’re interacting for the first time.

Like anything worth doing, this newsletter needs more room to grow, stretch its lengthening wings. As we go into 2025, I plan to deepen my explorations of agentic and attentive living. I'm thinking of creating more intimate windows into my process. Think:

• reading lists and research rabbit holes that feed my curiosity

• excerpts from my personal weeknotes and questions I’ve been thinking about

• voice notes and readings of essays, with commentary and tangents

If any of my essays have cleared the fog for you, please share Kindred Spirits with people in your life who might appreciate that clarity, too.

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The lights in the distant windows look like a constellation of their own now, dimming and flaring as people walk in and out of their beams. Perhaps that’s also what we’re doing here: creating pinpoints of light. Not answers exactly, no, but something better, something that helps us recognise meaning in the making.

Already, the first of 2025’s essays are taking shape: treating self-respect as a habit of mind, knowing when to quit, diversifying meaningful friendships as an adult. I’m so excited to dig into these, and I hope you are, too.

The calendar turns. We carry on. Thank you for the support and see you next year,

Sindhu

Self-help books always lurk in the bookstores, but they seem to multiply in November, materialising on window displays like early frost. They place themselves in my path with polite determination: their spines straight and promising, their covers decorated with checkmarks and metaphors and the word "habit" rendered in sans serif fonts. Walking by them, I sometimes feel like I’m being watched by a hundred better versions of myself, waiting patiently to be manifested into reality. Lately, I've been thinking about change almost by force, because this year it picked me up and shook me until my teeth rattled: new job, new desk, new creak in my right knee. A romance novel that abruptly ended mid-chapter, right when everyone else was turning their page. (Here's how it goes: you spend months building a future with someone, and then suddenly you're alone on the cusp of the new year, watching couples drift into cafés while you train your algorithms to forget). 

Like the books, my resolutions also multiply. I hunch over my journal against the setting sun, writing out a list of things I'm tempted to promise: Early mornings. Clean eating. Barbed-wire boundaries. A body made muscular through sheer force of will. I try and fail to forget that these same promises echo across years of journals like a stubborn record scratch. I think deeply about why that might be, and realise: 

The thing about resolutions is that you’re trying to negotiate with your future self using the language of your past self. 

You write promises in the voice of who you are now, but make demands of someone you haven’t met yet. You work from an outdated blueprint. You are a caterpillar trying to make future plans, but all your dreams take the shape of what you lack. And so you think you should want to crawl faster, to eat more leaves, to camouflage more naturally. But the caterpillar has no language for flight, no concept of wings. How could it? What lies ahead is written in a vocabulary it hasn't learned yet. The mathematics of transformation don't work in reverse.

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So, feeling the particular kind of untethered openness that arrives after life has thoroughly dismantled itself for the time being, I’ve been experimenting with a different question. Instead of asking “what will I force myself to become next year?”, I’m asking myself, “who am I curious about being?” It feels like a subtle semantic change, but it really is more of a paradigm shift. 

What I’m trying to look for, I think, is the difference between pushing and being pulled. From “I should do this” to “I can't be drawn away from this”. Funnily, it’s probably the same action, but an entirely different energy. One feels like pure effort, like forcing yourself against your own resistance. The other feels like following something you can’t resist. I think fragments of this pull already exist in the present. I feel it with reading — there are days when I feel exhaustion in my bones but come back alive at the thought of picking up a Discworld novel. I’ve started feeling it with running, despite never being one for exercise. I see it in others around me, who make time for the gym and play and meditation as effortlessly as they make time for brushing their teeth. The difference: having to convince myself to do something vs. having to convince myself to stop.

This is where my curiosity about my future self helps. My actual future self might look nothing like what my current self thinks they should, especially when shoulds and musts get in the way. Tuning into the frequency of my future self calls for somewhat ignoring the frameworks I'm in right now. What counts according to my current framework might be too insignificant to future me! So following that frequency might mean deliberately ignoring what my current framework defines as 'practical' or 'successful'.

I’m thinking it’s a little like method acting. I’m reminded of that Marylin Monroe quote about feeling your way into your characters, making their emotions your own. That's what I'm learning to do with my future self: get under her skin. Understand her granular reality, her choices and trade-offs, the micro-decisions that make some things an extension of her identity.

To me, this approach to personal evolution feels a lot more nuanced and holistic.

If you think about it, behaviours don't exist in a vacuum — they're tangled up with everything else in our lives. And our lives are entangled with other lives, so any resolution we make will inevitably involve some renegotiation with almost every other relationship we have. I decide to go to bed at 10PM one night, every night, and suddenly I'm staring down the yawning mouth of an unhealthy relationship with my phone. Some people feel abandoned by my early bedtime. Others might read judgment in my new choices. Change, after all, is a kind of betrayal. When we pick at a single thread in our sweater, the whole thing will inevitably unravel in our lap. So our first instinct is to panic, back-pedal, try to stop the unraveling, stuff the loose threads back in. But maybe there's wisdom in letting it come apart. Real change is always going to reshape more than you bargained for.

I'm also slowly learning to look at every resolution as really just an expression of some deeper current. Like, I only realised this year that I really do love movement — I just didn’t enjoy the forms I was forcing it to take. I struggled to go to the gym regularly but I’d throw all other plans out the window for badminton or pickleball. I think when we grip too tightly to the form we think something should take (sometimes because it takes that form for everyone else), we inevitably miss what we’re instinctively reaching for. Instead, when you find the pull, the resonance, it remains constant, but lets you be more curious and experimental about how it wants to move through you. Sometimes what you think is resistance to change really is just resistance to the particular shape you’re trying to force it into. 

As I write this, I'm warming up more and more to the gentler, more forgiving idea that personal evolution is less about action and more about alignment. The person I am right now probably only knows how to evaluate success based on old metrics. A huge part of trying an evolved way of being is figuring out how my future self might measure successes and misses. She might not think of one missed gym day as failure; she might see it as a pause, a natural break in any sustainable pattern. With any new habit, you want to get to a point where the pattern is so embedded that one miss won’t disrupt the system. Even if the behaviour temporarily pauses, the pull remains intact, ever tempting.

I guess that's the resolution I'm making: not to force myself into a predetermined shape based on my limited vocabulary right now, but to stay open and curious about the shapes I’m naturally growing into. To trust that tuning into the frequency of who I'm becoming is a more honest kind of evolution.

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If you asked me to place myself on a spectrum of low risk to insanely high risk, I’d feature somewhere in the middle. I’m the kind of moderate risk-taker who is regular in life so I can be different in my work. You won’t catch me upending my life for a year of debauchery in Paris or quitting my day job to write a book I don’t even have the first sentence for. But that’s okay, because my acceptance of that has brought me to the doorsteps of opportunities that work for me. So if I had to distil how I choose between opportunities, it would be like this:

An opportunity worth chasing must have a limited downside and an open-ended upside.

What does that mean? There needs to be a floor to how bad things could get if I chose that opportunity, a contained bounded space of negative outcomes that I can stomach. On the flip side, there needs to be potential that lacks a ceiling. Not just a "big" upside, but specifically unbounded—the possibility space extends infinitely upward. When an opportunity checks both boxes, I know I have something potentially great inches away from my reach.

The Trampoline Theory of Opportunity isn’t an exact science, but it works. I think the first thing the theory unlocks is being able to see through the stories you tell yourself about risk. A lot of us tend to catastrophise, ascribe the same level of potential to any change. Make mountains out of mole hills. We also inherit some amount of our risk assessment sensibilities: from our parents, our culture, our weird experiences in middle school. So it’s our default setting to assume that what’s in our head accurately represents reality, and let that sway our decisions.

But here’s the thing about a lot of our beliefs: they are, at best, hypotheses and, at worst, completely false dogmas. Our reasoning is often only as strong as its weakest link. Seeing them for what they are makes us more likely to understand why we make the choices we do, and how we might make more attuned ones in the future. As long as we’re a little tactical about it, it’s actually quite simple to hijack this dark thought pattern.

When I notice myself feeling anxious about something, I'll ask myself: "What story am I telling myself here?" Say I’m nervous about DMing someone on X that I really admire. The story playing in my head might be: they’ll think I’m weird or that I’m trying to sell them something and it’ll go horribly. Then, I run it through my 2x2. What’s the actual downside? They reply briefly, or rudely, or not at all. That doesn’t seem unbearable. What’s the upside? It could lead to a meaningful conversation, collaboration, friendship or, at the very least, a different perspective.

The beauty of this formula is that you can apply it to almost any opportunity. Like, applying for a new job. In most of our cases, the downside of chasing the opportunity is bounded: time lost on applications, a fudged interview, maybe a “no” that, honestly, only you and the recruiter will know about. The upside, though, can be quite open-ended. You might meet people who become mentors, discover new strengths, realise something important about what you really want out of your career. It literally is a trampoline: the worst that could happen is that you bounce back to where you started. 

I think this reveals two really important things about the Trampoline Theory. The first is this: what counts as a "limited downside" is deeply personal and contextual. The same opportunity can be a safe trampoline for one person and a high-stakes gamble for another. It isn’t about being fearless, or reckless. I’ve written about this before, but opportunity-hunting is very much rooted in your personal reality. It’s about being brutally honest with yourself about the risks you can take—real ones, not the stories you tell yourself. 

The second is something you’ll run into when you have to choose between two opportunities that are differently shaped but similarly valuable. The kind where the pros and cons columns are infuriatingly equal, and the choice feels extremely hard because of that. In those cases, what’s helped me is looking at each opportunity’s bounce potential. Even if the floors are at the same level, which of the two opportunities has more space over your head? Which one might open more two-way doors in the future, has more optionality? That might well be the right choice at that moment. 

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The thing about optionality, though, is that we tend to hoard opportunities without actually committing to a choice. It’s kind of like being on a dating app: swiping through a thousand profiles but not really committing to any. In such cases, it’s a cop-out to say the options aren’t good enough, because you don’t know that—you haven’t tried them. We mistake having options for having opportunity, when really, opportunity comes from engaging deeply with our choices. The worst thing you can do is not choose. 

What’s particularly sneaky is that not choosing often masquerades as wisdom ("I'm keeping my options open!"), when it's actually fear and opportunity cost anxiety stacked in a trench coat. Paths not taken are Schrodinger’s opportunities; they exist in this quantum state of perfect possibility. We romanticise them so hard that we forget every path has its own messy complexity and unexpected twists. But I’ve discovered that opportunity cost is actually impossible to calculate accurately. Each choice creates new possibilities we couldn't have seen before, and closes off others we can't really know about. So ironically, the energy we spend anxiously calculating opportunity costs is itself an opportunity cost.

What I’m getting at is that, often, the best way to create valuable optionality is to commit to something. It's when you commit to exploring one path that you see more opportunities you couldn’t have seen from the starting point. You don't get the interesting opportunities without first saying "yes" to something specific. 

There’s another side effect of the Theory that I haven’t spoken about yet: how it transforms decision-making from this heavy, anxious process into something more playful. I’ve noticed that, on top of being a lot more clear-eyed about opportunities, I’ve also started approaching them with the spirit of an experimenter rather than the caution of a catastrophist.

It’s funny: the safety of a limited downside and unbounded upside actually becomes an invitation to play, to be more willing to try unusual combinations or unexpected paths. Instead of trying to predict every possible outcome (which is impossible anyway), we're just checking if we've got a good trampoline to jump on. It's surprisingly liberating to realise we don't need perfect certainty. We just need a bouncy floor and the space over our heads to jump high.

This is part three of my series on how to spot opportunities and expand your life. In part one, I unpack getting better at spotting opportunities that lurk around us. In part two, I explore the mental and physical prerequisites for finding opportunities.

Did this essay speak to you? Share it with someone who might need it, and consider supporting my path to full-time writing through a subscription or one-time donation. Every recommendation and every subscription brings me closer to writing full-time, which means more essays like this one. Thank you for being part of Kindred Spirits.

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When I was a kid, I did a lot of origami, more to keep my hands busy than anything else. Like most things you experience as a child, I could only understand the deeper significance of it once I grew up and learnt to peel back layers. I find it super interesting that, for many people, a piece of paper is just that — a piece of paper. But for those who do origami, there’s an opportunity in each square: cranes, flowers, geometric shapes waiting to be coaxed into existence. I feel awe, and I feel pretty similarly when I see the work of sculptors, those who see angels in marble and carve to set them free. The paper is as it is, and so is the stone, until perceptive eyes see the opportunity they hold. 

I’ve met a lot of people like this, who see life through the eyes of possibility. Even more so because I work in tech, which is pretty much a playground for some of the most entrepreneurial spirits around. It usually feels like they’re having a different conversation with reality that others can’t participate in. Honestly, I sometimes catch myself wondering if these people are just incredibly lucky — Fortuna's favourite children playing dress-up among mortals. How else could it be that they look at ordinary circumstances and see extraordinary opportunities and grab them with both hands?

But as someone who also rationalises a lot, there’s still a huge part of me that believes opportunity-spotting is less about random chance and more about crafted consequence. They say that fortune favours the bold, but I've come to believe that fortune also favours the observant. I wouldn't call myself bold, for example, or someone who snatches possibilities by the neck and bends them to my whims. And yet, I've found myself in situations and places I never could have imagined, simply because I've learned to keep my eyes open and my mind receptive. Writing, going to college in England, almost all of my meaningful friendships: they’re all things I found when I doggedly followed a signal of opportunity.

I think there's a certain magic in this kind of attentiveness. It's like I’m tuning into a frequency that's always been there, but I’ve only just learned to hear. Suddenly, I start seeing connections everywhere. This reminds me of a conversation I had with a very entrepreneurial friend, who told me that the most successful ideas weren't about having a perfect plan, but having perfect attention.

Perfect attention. I've been turning that phrase over in my mind ever since. What would it mean to cultivate perfect attention in our lives? Not in the anxious hyper-vigilant way, but in a state of relaxed awareness?

Sometimes, it's the aftermath of major life changes. An upheaval that rearranges the world overnight almost always reveals pathways that we never noticed before. COVID19 was that for a lot of us. It’s not everyday you come face to face with mortality, but suddenly we were confronting it almost everyday. The busy roads I travelled on everyday were eerily empty, and the constant noise of kids playing and cars merrily honking was replaced by an unsettling silence. I’d interact with the rest of my world only through a six-inch screen, feeling smaller and more fragile than ever before. 

Opportunity lurks in the residue of intense emotions. A joyful experience leaves the world saturated with possibilities. I've felt it after grief too, and even after anger. In those moments when you feel raw and exposed, you are also strangely receptive to new perspectives and life-altering decisions (radical haircuts and all).

But I think it’s reductive to assume opportunities only come in the wake of a seismic shift. If that were always the case, we wouldn’t have people who spot opportunities and make use of them in a way that makes others say, “that’s so obvious! Why didn’t I think of that?” But we do. So I think there’s something else at play: The most intriguing opportunists I've met don't need problems to enhance their alertness; they're alert even when everything is rosy. It’s a state of perpetual readiness. It's like they've rewired their fight-or-flight mechanisms to create a sort of binocular vision, seeing both the immediate reality and the potential futures all at once.

This binocular vision isn't just about seeing more; it's about seeing differently. In my previous essay, I wrote that the most dangerous aspect of tunnel vision isn't what you miss; it's the illusion that you're seeing everything. I wonder if we're making the same mistake when we look at opportunities through the lens of what we already know how to do.

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I was reading about evolution the other day, about how new species don't emerge because the old ones got really good at what they were doing. They emerge when life becomes more complex, to adapt to something new in the environment. Legs are reflections of gravity, lungs of oxygen. I can't help but think about opportunities the same way now. The really big ones, the ones that change everything, aren’t usually about doing what we're already good at, but better. They're invitations to become something new entirely. It's like they're daring us to grow a new limb, to learn to breathe in a new way.

This is what I think the real trick is for those people who seem to spot opportunities everywhere. They're not just really good at what they do. They've figured out how to not take their knowledge and skills for granted. It's like they've found a way to shake off that mental inertia, the tendency to see new information through old filters. They have a remarkable perceptual acuity that helps them notice subtle changes or anomalies in their environment that others might overlook. They can switch between different mental frameworks with ease, and filter out irrelevant noise from relevant signals. It's this flexibility that allows them to reorganise ideas into new sequences, to make connections that aren't immediately obvious to others. Strong mental models, loosely held.

There’s a world of difference between frantically searching for something specific and being open to discovering something you never knew you were looking for. In a way, it reminds me of those Magic Eye pictures that were popular when I was a kid. At first glance, you see a flat pattern of colours and shapes. But if you relax your eyes in just the right way, a 3D image emerges from the chaos. That's what opportunity-spotting feels like, I think: learning to look at the world in a way that reveals the opportunities lurking just beneath the surface of everyday reality. 

All of this doesn’t matter if you’re not in the right frame of mind. Even the most obvious opportunity can be ignored by a person who isn’t motivated to see it. Anxiety, for example, is antithetical to opportunity because every nerve in your body is screaming at you to retreat, retreat, retreat. Laser focus on a goal doesn’t help, either. Your world contracts, your vision narrows to a pinpoint of immediate concerns, and anything that comes out of the left field is either ignored or batted away in annoyance. You are constantly running away. 

Opportunists, on the other hand, seem to have an internal compass that points not just away from danger, but towards growth. I like to think of it as a trusted partnership with their own intuition, but they use that not to be constantly on guard against threats (like a lot of us). Instead, they're attuned to potential gains, to growth, to what could be. The noise of fear is drowned out by the ringing signal of opportunity.

I think of all this as I walk through my city, a city full of opportunity for those who can spot them. Maybe Fortuna doesn’t play favourites after all. Maybe she’s simply more visible to the attuned, the flexible, the innately curious. I think this is what it takes to be a finder of opportunities: a willingness to look at the world with fresh eyes each day, to hold our knowledge lightly, and to remain open to the whisper of possibility in the ordinary.

Did this essay speak to you? Share it with someone who might need it, and consider supporting my path to full-time writing through a subscription or one-time donation. Every recommendation and every subscription brings me closer to writing full-time, which means more essays like this one. Thank you for being part of Kindred Spirits.

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I haven’t done much fishing in my life, but I have watched many people sit patiently by the water, hooks in the water, a bucket of bait at their feet. I learnt that experienced anglers don't just cast their lines randomly and pray for good luck. They "read the water", looking for subtle signs that indicate where fish might be hiding or feeding. They observe ripples on the surface, the way water flows around rocks, even changes in the water’s colour.

I like to think that spotting opportunities is a lot like reading water. To the untrained eye, it seems more like a game of chance and luck than anything else. But to those who fish regularly, it’s about attuning yourself to signs of an adjacent possible that is hovering just outside the edges of the present moment.

That said: like the anglers, you have to know exactly what to look for.

The first shape of opportunity, I think, is that of an annoyance. Ideas that feel irrelevant, paths that feel impossible, ruptures in linearity that feel too disruptive. We tend to brush these annoyances off or get irritated when they show up, but a little reframing tells us that they are a knock on the door inviting us down another path. 

Another signpost towards new opportunities is momentary discomfort: that nagging feeling when we face information that doesn't fit our existing mental models. It's the mind's way of showing us a gap between what we know and what we’re encountering, a cognitive itch just begging to be scratched.

Our instinct to avoid these irritations is deeply ingrained. We're wired to seek comfort, to stay within the boundaries of what we know and understand. It's a survival mechanism, really—stick to the familiar, avoid the unknown. We like our lives to follow a straight, predictable line. It's comforting, after all, to see the path ahead clearly marked. But life rarely adheres to such neat linearity, and neither do the best opportunities. The instinct that kept our ancestors alive can now keep us from truly living.

So when we come face to face with discomfort or annoyances—those deviations from our expected linear path—we stand at a crossroads. The choice is between dismissing the dissonance and clinging to the familiar, or embracing it as an opening to expand our life. What happens when we don’t reject the idea immediately? We get a moment to identify the beliefs or assumptions that are being challenged. Are they based on solid evidence, or simply habit or deep-rooted fears? What are they showing us in the mirror, and why does it make us uncomfortable? That split second between stimulus and response is often ringing with potential.

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It’s pretty hard to give your attention to annoyances and momentary discomfort, wired as we are to seek safety in linearity. But linearity itself can be one long obstacle. When you focus only on one goal, you develop tunnel vision and inevitably dismiss all the opportunities that don’t lie in that linear path. You’re thinking, I want to shoot this arrow and have it cut clean through the air and hit the bull’s eye with precision. You’re thinking about making one possibility a reality out of a million. The most dangerous aspect of tunnel vision isn't what you miss; it's the illusion that you're seeing everything.

I’m reminded of dating apps, which sell the idea of opportunity but function purely on linearity. You sign up expecting to find the perfect life partner, and swipe left on anyone who doesn’t fit that criteria. You dismiss the very real possibility that the person who could truly shake up your world might not fit into your neat little boxes, and might be hiding behind a profile you'd normally dismiss without a second thought. There's a certain irony in how we might be swiping past the very people who could challenge us, complement us, and help us grow.

I think this dating app mindset seeps into other parts of our lives too (or perhaps software learns from life?). We craft mental "profiles" of what success should look like, what friendships should be, what skills matter. Then we dismiss anything that doesn't match up, potentially missing out on experiences that could reshape our understanding of ourselves and the world. In reality, opportunities are spotted when you stop demanding what that opportunity should look like. 

Most opportunities are rarely obvious or direct. They are weak signals, foggy in their potential and promising very little. The shape of opportunity is fluid and unpredictable. They might be one step removed, or seven steps removed from the moment that makes you think “aha! I knew I made the right move”. They index heavily on your faith in them and yourself; only if you have faith will you take the first step in that new direction. All of this makes them very easy to miss.

I’ve come to realise that recognising opportunities for what they are calls for more than just keen observation; it needs a fundamental shift in how you perceive and interact with the world around you. It’s not an easy shift, or a comfortable one. But honestly, any growth demands that we become strangers to our former selves, and any change is a kind of betrayal. Change is the price of opportunity.

I think seeing opportunities around us1 begins with more than just engaging with dissonance. We're giving ourselves permission and priming our vision to see the world differently. Paradigm shifts are earthquakes in our mental landscape, shaking the foundations of what we thought we knew and rebuilding our understanding from the rubble.

Think of it like swapping out an old, scratched pair of glasses for a new prescription. Suddenly, the world snaps into focus. You find yourself wondering: Has the world changed, or have I? The answer, of course, is that the world has always been this complex, this ripe with adjacent possibles and shadow futures. The water has always been this rich with fish. The only difference is that now, you can see them all.

This is part one of a series on how to spot opportunities and expand your life. In part two, I plan to explore the prerequisites for finding opportunities, the ones that separate those who always find black swans from those who let them slip by, unnoticed.

I have been thinking deeply about nature similes and they way they tend to evoke an instantly graspable image in my mind. As quick as lightning. As steady as a stone. As tenacious as ivy. As old as the hills, which is the one I was thinking about as we negotiated the hairpin bends carved into the Nilgiris like sleep wrinkles on skin. We keep these linguistic relics of our ancestral connection to the natural world, and wear them out like prayer beads. We scatter them like breadcrumbs along the trail of human consciousness, whispered echoes of a time when we were nature and nature was us.

I think one of the secrets to adulting is that you have to dress the part. Act as if you’re already the healthiest person you can be. Act confident even if you don’t feel it on the inside. Take the seat at the table even if you feel you haven’t earned it yet. Humans don’t like cognitive dissonance, and our minds shift our self-perception to match our actions, and our brain rewires to make the act feel more natural next time, which turns into a nice little self-fulfilling loop. You grow into the skin.

We hold in the palm of our hands some of the most advanced technology in human history, that allows us to do things that previously took hours, in fractions of seconds. It should follow that we’re one of the most relaxed generations of all time, and yet we are the most frantic our line of ancestry has ever seen. Our attention fractures like light through a prism. I have loved watching the rise of slowpunk, the defiant antithesis to the frenzy that we’ve been spoonfed as good for us. A return to the pace of clouds across blue skies. Nature does not hurry, yet everything is accomplished. In the hills, I revoke the world’s access to my attention both by force and by choice. My homestay’s brochure comes with this guidance:

Reception here is temperamental. Take this time to do a digital cleanse and spend time with your loved ones and yourself.

I sit on a rock under a tree overlooking a valley whose ever-ness is astounding. I take the cleansing air into my lungs, smooth the dog’s soft fur, let sudden raindrops run through my hair like a tributary finding its course. I try to melt into the landscape like moss on stone so that, when someone asks me what I did, I can simply say: you just had to be there.

Nature makes quick work of habitual patterns of thought. It is far far easier to relax into a state of non-conceptual awareness in the depths of a eucalyptus forest than in your meditation cushion, earplugs all the way in. Sometimes, real meaning-making happens not in the rational mind, but the intuitive body. To understand that is both a liberation and a challenge, because it comes with a request for a willingness to not know. To stop playing at Rorschach’s test for some time. To let go of the distinction that the moss ends where your feet begin.

Is the refusal of purpose the pinnacle of maturity?

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“I think I write okay. I know I really enjoy it. And I couldn't agree more with your views on writing with conviction. But I really struggle with overcoming this fear of sounding inauthentic, pretentious, or worst of all...cringey. Did you also feel this way when you first started writing? What helped you break past this? How do you deliberately build ‘authority’?”

Dear reader,

When I first started this newsletter, every email I sent made me want to curl up into a ball. I wrote them warmly, and made sure I did my research, and wrote them to feel less like emails and more like the beginnings of a conversation. It didn’t matter — every 'whoosh' of my email outbox was the sound of my dignity leaving my body. I was embarrassed by the nakedness of my effort, of coming across as a try-hard. It’s also evident in the topics I chose haphazardly, in the way I fluttered between writing styles to, ironically, maximise authenticity and minimise cringe. So yes, I’ve been there. I think no one will shoot me if I say every half-decent writer has should.

I say should, because I think a lot of the times, cringe is a signal of taste. It’s a visceral reaction, an instinctive oof that tells us there’s a gap between where we want to be and what we’re currently projecting. Some amount of cringe also comes from a subconscious desire to be liked, to be seen. The process of being seen is being vulnerable, and that feels uncomfortable.

Unfortunately or fortunately, the only way out is through. “Being a well-meaning phony,” Joshua Rothman suggested, “is key to our self-transformations”. The route from aspiration to reality is paved with stumbling, cringey efforts. It’s embarrassing to be in the process of being someone. You’re trying to be someone you’re not, which makes you a tryhard, but there’s no other way to start other than by trying hard.

The beginnings of writing—and of anything that lets you strengthen yourself—will always feel as though you are play-acting. I honestly think that’s okay, and it’s okay to be okay with others possibly thinking you’re cringe. Cringe is subjective: what resonates with you will resonate with some and not with others. Like Bob Dylan said,

I'd either drive people away or they'd come in closer to see what it was all about. There was no in between.

These groups are always in flux; as you keep writing and grow comfortable with your boundaries and how you want to push them, the people that make up the two groups will shift, switch parties, even leave. So it might not be worth optimising for, anyway.

For those same reasons, neither is authority. Fortunately or unfortunately, you can’t control if you’re perceived as an authority or not. Many people you’d consider aspirational “authority” figures today probably stumbled into it quite by accident while fiddling around with things they love. But I feel that to actively pursue authority is to open yourself up to sirens tempting you to play a very different game than one you set out to play. Or to get locked up in a little psychic prison, left to stare longingly at the intoxicatingly free meadows that stretch beyond the bars. So instead of focusing on anything that will eventually be tracings in the sand, it might be more fruitful to aim for “to the best of my ability” with every single piece of writing you produce. All else that should follow, will follow.

And then there’s the matter of authenticity. There’s a million things I can think of that could be driving your fear of sounding inauthentic. You may be worrying that your work doesn't accurately represent who you really are, or worse, that it reveals a self you don't recognise or like. You may be feeling the weight of societal expectations to be "original" and find a niche or brand for yourself. You might be questioning whether you have the right to speak about certain topics, or be pursuing the idea of perfect authenticity. Since I don’t know the root cause of your fear, I don’t want to make any off-the-mark suggestions.

But of this, I’m reasonably sure: authenticity is nebulous. Most people today are perceiving you through a screen, and will only ever see the one dimension you choose to project towards them. On top of that, sometimes we don't know what we think or feel until we see it manifested in something we've made. So as long as we’re not forcing a fit into a form we don’t want to be in, I think we’ll be okay.

The most interesting writing often comes from that uncomfortable place where we're not quite sure if we're brilliant or ridiculous. So leap into that pool of cringe and splash around a bit. You might be surprised at what you make over time.

Dear Reader is a new section of Kindred Spirits that thinks through questions submitted by readers about living agentic and meaningful lives. More than an advice column (because who can claim to be an expert in living life?), think of it as a conversation prompted by a curiosity. If you have questions for Dear Reader, you can ask them here :)

In my second year of college, I signed up for a contemporary dance course to top off my credits for the year. The classes took place in the dusty basement of one of the university’s buildings, in a room that could just about fit the 50 people that had signed up. Our teacher was a tiny lady, fairy-like but formidable in every way. In contemporary dance, she would advise us, you need to improvise and embody. As we practised character work as deeply as if we’d each worn the literal skin of our characters, we shed whatever limitations we had as ourselves. For the duration of each class, we were re-invented.

I often go back to those moments to remember how utterly and completely we gave ourselves permission to become someone else, and how instantly that changed what we could do. I think you can extrapolate this to any other sphere of life: People's range of what they're capable of expands exponentially when you tell them to pretend to be a self that is not theirs. They become agentic.

For a long time, we live in what developmental psychologist Robert Kegan calls the "socialised mind". Our sense of self comes mostly from our relationships and social roles, not from inner convictions or feelings. We choose college majors, clothes, and weekend plans based on what authorities and friends thought were best or cool. It's not that we didn't have our own principles; they just took a back seat to fitting in. It’s a kind of self-preservation.

But as time goes on, we start to wonder why we're making choices this way. Our true convictions start to bug us like an itch we can't ignore. We begin to notice how much social expectations have been shaping us. We realise we can look at these expectations and decide whether to go along with them or not. This kicks off our journey to "self-authorship," where we start taking charge of our own beliefs, values, and actions. 

Conceptually, this transition feels natural. If you have a conviction and you have the ability to satisfy it, you do it. What could be more reflexive than that?

But I think many of us get stuck with a socialised mind, continuing to paint our story using borrowed paints and brushes. Over time, these compound into a warped understanding of what's possible, acceptable, or desirable. We build walls that define and eventually box ourselves in by. I catch myself saying "I can't do that" or "that's not me" a lot, especially in situations where I don't feel confident or in my element.

Subconsciously, we cling to the belief that the game is pre-defined. We have no control over who we’re born to, where we’re brought up, our quality of education, and how often we’re at the right place at the right time. But that’s where we trip up: we begin to conflate our lack of control over starting conditions with a lack of control over outcome. Perpetual victimhood cannot coexist with agency. To truly exercise it, you have to exorcise any belief that external forces have full control over your fate. Where you begin is chance; where you end is choice.

The first time you reach for a truly autonomous decision is usually the first time the blinkers fall away from your eyes and you see how much more you can do. For me, it was the day I decided I wanted to major in the Humanities, not STEM like most other people in my peer group. That one act radically changed my worldview, because it made me realise just how far ahead I could chart my path myself. For you, it could be anything — but from then on, you will notice forks in roads that once looked like a straight line, and almost instinctively know which path you want to take.

Once you flip this switch, there’s no turning back. It’s a challenging mental space to occupy. On one hand, you recognise that you haven’t been living the life you could have. But even as you realise that, external factors continue to exert their influence on you. Only now, you can feel them like needles in your skin. You’ve taken a bite out of the forbidden apple. But without doing that, you might fall into another trap: non-conformity for the heck of it. Without personal conviction, you might strain against the ropes in the wrong direction and only come away chafed and bruised. And since not playing is not an option, the only way to break away from the game board is to know what games you want to play. 

I’ve been struggling with this a little, myself. I recently started a new job in a massive organisation (the design team alone is four times the size of my entire previous company). Part of my role is to introduce better ways of working, which is phenomenally frustrating when everyone is set in their ways and sees systems as constraints. Exercising agency within these limits often feels like double the effort. Not only do I have to make somewhat contrarian choices, but I also have to prove to sceptics (including myself) that it’ll be worth the effort.

Believe me, it can be super tempting to default to the way things were and sulk about it in private. People often want change, but they don't want to change or be changed themselves. It’s a self-defeating loop you can experience as painfully as a stone embedded in your shoe. Having a victim mindset—that we’re powerless and at the mercy of external forces—is the antithesis of agency because it reinforces passivity.

There’s a quote from the book Crucial Conversations that I keep going back to in these situations:

As much as others may need to change, or we may want them to change, the only person we can continually inspire, prod, and shape—with any degree of success—is the person in the mirror.

When trying to change the person in the mirror, I like to remind myself that there are degrees of consequence. Not every decision carries the same weight; not every unconventional choice needs to be explained as if it were a life-altering decision. This really channels my energy into action, not defence. I stop feeling the need to justify minor decisions and don’t pay attention to what I think others think. It also means I can focus on evaluating their consequences for me. Am I ready to own the outcomes, whatever they may be? What are the potential ripple effects of my choices? How far am I willing to go in pursuit of my convictions? There’s a stupidly simple way to put this: “what could go wrong?”

One consequence of making choices that are in conflict with the status quo is that you’ll invariably experience friction. People are typically sceptical and dismissive of others displaying agency. After all, many of us spend years tweaking our lives, relationships, or careers to fit what we think are the "right" guidelines. So when we run into people who are winning without playing by the same rules we’re playing by, we’re coloured embarrassed. Other people’s confidence is embarrassing because it holds up a mirror to our lack of it. Validating them would mean admitting that we were playing a weaker game the whole time, so we don’t. It took me weeks of self-examination to realise that when anyone said “what makes them think they can do that?” they most likely meant, “why can’t I?”

That’s where consistently agentic people differ: they operate from a place of self-permission and self-trust. Their agency is built on the backs of numerous decisions where they've trusted their convictions and seen positive outcomes. Each time they make a choice that goes against the grain and it turns out well, it reinforces their trust in their own decision-making abilities. I think this acts as a thick skin against criticism and turned-up noses: instead of immediately second-guessing themselves, they're more likely to evaluate feedback objectively and pick out what resonates with them. Baseline social criticism is just…water off a duck’s back. Over time, they begin to play games of their own design that many of us can’t fathom.

I don’t think the goal of agency is to be completely independent of social influence. That's neither possible nor desirable. As humans, we’re inherently social, and our wellbeing and growth will always be intertwined with the larger group. Even those who actively reject societal norms are still defining themselves in relation to those norms. The idea, I think, is to cultivate discernment: the ability to first recognise helpful vs. harmful social influences. 

Agency is also differential. I consider myself decently agentic in my personal life, but not so much at work, where my circle of influence drastically changes. I don’t necessarily see that as a failure of agency. I’m still evaluating benefits and consequences, and focusing my effort on increasing agency where it matters most to me.

With agency, there’s no finish line. There’s no Final Boss to kill that certifies you as a Truly Agentic Person. Agency feels very much incremental to me: every autonomous decision increases my baseline of agency. I become more comfortable with discomfort. The anxiety of going against the grain lessens, and I start to trust my judgement more. In life, as in dance, the key to exercising agency lies in our capacity to improvise and embody.

This essay is part of my series on conviction, which began here. Since each essay is somewhat leading to the next, I’d love to know what you think I should dive deeper into from this essay. Please hit reply or comment if you’re on the app, I read and reply to everything :)

My approach to writing has significantly evolved in the past six-ish months. I began this newsletter as a way to collect “old alchemy for a young century”. I saw myself as an amateur archaeologist, digging for nuggets of wisdom collected across time and space. Over time, though, the process of building on other’s thoughts started to feel disingenuous. It felt as though I was creating an illusion of understanding something.

I think it boiled down to confidence. Every sentence in an essay has gravity. The more sentences you dedicate to someone else’s thoughts, the more they pull readers away from the orbit of your own writing. I was willingly letting that happen because I lacked confidence in what I was saying and how I was saying it. I felt as though my thoughts and experiences weren’t important enough, interesting enough, to strangers on the internet. Ironically, feedback from readers was the opposite: all of them said they’d like to see more personal stories woven in.

I wrote in my essay about conviction that “self-doubt and a lack of conviction make more people abandon a vision than competition ever will”. This was doubly true in the case of writing here. I wasn’t entirely convinced that what I was writing was true to myself, and yet I was scared to be more vulnerable because I was seeing myself from outside in. I was writing for a nameless, faceless audience, and letting that dictate what I should and shouldn’t write.

However, intuition has a way of making itself known. I think high-performing people generally fall into this trap: we obsess about the external world while neglecting our internal world. I used to think I had to be rational and logical about how I approached most things. But in the past six months, I’ve come to acknowledge that my emotional and bodily reactions had far more truth in them than rational thought ever did. That said, once a systems thinker, always a systems thinker — I wanted to see if I really could write something that resonated both with myself and with my readers. So I went back to my archive and identified all the essays that

1. did really well (in terms of likes and comments as well as replies and questions from readers)

2. felt authentic to me (in the sense that it accurately reflected my thoughts and feelings and wasn’t hiding behind someone else’s ideas)

In the Venn diagram that emerged, I noticed there were essays that ticked both those boxes. Each of them felt like the truest story I could write. That authenticity coloured readers, too, and many of you wrote back telling me how you felt seen or wanted to understand more. That was good enough incentive to stop disappointing myself and act on my conviction.

Good writing is downstream of self-knowledge. I once wrote that writing “is the act of externalising thoughts and feelings that might otherwise remain tangled and hidden within the depths of my psyche.” The only way to get this right was to engage better with what was going on inside my head.

I began taking more time to explore each idea I had. To poke and prod and hold it up to the light to see if it was worth pursuing. I pushed myself to examine every sentence and choice of word, because ambiguity in writing is where weak thinking lies. Like any act of self-expression and love, writing is embarrassing. You have to grab hold of a floating thought and shape it until it makes sense. You have to admit your failings as a human being navigating the world for the first time. That reveals ignorance and vulnerability in thinking as nothing else can. This process sounds harsh, but the voice doing the questioning inside my head is always lovingly patient. Less jailer questioning prisoner, and more parent helping a curious child understand. In doing this, I found a well of thoughts and connections I previously hadn’t tapped into for my writing.

It’s still cripplingly hard to weave personal narratives into my essays. No one wants to admit their fears and failings, least of all someone who has been a poster child for academic excellence. But I do feel a lot freer now that I write what I feel like writing about, rather than should. It’s a much longer process, because now I first write to think and then write to publish. I continue to pay attention to the craft and quality of writing — no hiding, whether behind someone else’s ideas or strings of metaphors that read pretty but hold no water.

I still love watching my subscriber count tick upwards, slow as it may be, but what I put out there is no longer coloured by it. Kindred Spirits feels more like a channel for selfhood now, something to look back on in a few years to see how my perception and thinking evolved over time. I think that’s why now, when someone tells me to keep writing, it feels like a command to keep living.

Some recommendations

• Why I Write, Greil Marcus via The Yale Review [essay]

• The B Lane Swimmer, Holly Witteman [essay]

• Babel, R.F. Kuang [novel]

• Personal Renewal, John Gardner [speech transcript]

P.S. Kindred Spirits now has a new URL: readkindredspirits.com. I like to see this decision as a sign of my commitment to writing on here. It’s also easier to share, so please consider sprinkling it in all your conversations with friends and strangers 🩵