Many people are migrating to Substack, searching for an intentional digital existence. Yet, I believe these same individuals are also looking to decenter the digital in their lives. We don’t want our careers or cultural experiences confined solely to a screen. I see an opportunity here to figure out a healthy balance of what belongs on a screen and what belongs in the world.

Substack’s CEO has noted that other platforms don’t have creators’ best interests at heart (no ownership of your audience, no way to make real money doing the work you believe in). That diagnosis is about the digital world, and I believe Substack is addressing it successfully. But offline institutions have their own versions of the same misalignment.

Substack is a natural place to correct that because its creators are already producing culture in online and offline forms.

Writers whose reputations were built in mainstream media, publishing, literary journalism, and the university system keep newsletters here. These are not obligatory presences that most authors treat as a tax on real work. But as an extension of their intellectual work, they engage with their readers and maintain freedom over the content. These are just four examples, but there are many: George Saunders, Slavoj Žižek, Suleika Jaouad, Maggie Smith

The traffic runs the other way, too, and this may be more consequential. Digitally native writers who built their audiences entirely on the platform are being picked up by traditional publishers who now treat Substack the way editors once treated literary magazines: as a place to surface talent. For example:

1. Nicole Kelner had 4,000 subscribers when she published a post about the quietest places in New York. A reader who had worked in publishing forwarded it to an editor at Rizzoli. The post became a book.

2. Naomi Kanakia published her novella Money Matters in full on her Substack. Peter C. Baker profiled it in The New Yorker as the best new fiction he’d read that year. Random House offered her a deal.

3. Ethan Mollick was already a Wharton professor when he started One Useful Thing, his newsletter on AI. But when Portfolio published Co-Intelligence in 2024, the cover didn’t lead with Wharton. It led with Substack. “From the author of the popular One Useful Thing Substack newsletter” is how Penguin Random House introduced the book to the market.

4. Caroline Chambers was rejected by every publisher when she pitched a cookbook. She turned the concept into a Substack, grew it to half a million subscribers, and when the cookbook finally came out, it was an instant New York Times bestseller.

This porosity creates healthy dynamics for Substack. Each online-offline crossing solves a business problem. Distribution, monetization, professional credibility, and subscriber acquisition. They are the things most independent creators spend half their working hours chasing, usually alone.

For example, Lena Dunham just ran what amounted to a Substack press tour for her memoir. Night of Desire, a reading series in a Wall Street bathhouse, sold out in minutes and left a three-hundred-person waitlist before expanding to Los Angeles. Martha Stewart led a pie competition with Substack creators. A limited-edition I-D zine collaboration sold out. The appetite for free-range Substackers is real.

These seem to be on-off initiatives by Substack. But on average, when a post wants to become a physical thing: a book, a talk, a screening, a gathering, a course, it leaves the Substack platform. And with it leaves a residual economic and cultural value. The institution that gives it that real-world form captures most of that value away from the creators (often offering bad economics), and then away from Substack. Substack currently functions like a minor league that develops talent, proves demand, and then watches as other institutions sign the players.

Substack’s recent push into video, the TV app, and podcast suggests an effort to keep more of the creator’s output, and the value it generates, inside the platform. This approach has proven beneficial. However, digital channels are getting increasingly saturated. So the question is whether it extends past the screen.

Is there room for a Substack Offline, Substack Institute, or Substack in the Wild, or whatever it ends up being called, to institutionalize under one umbrella some of the efforts I mentioned above?

I would love to help implement some of that and build more partnerships with the physical world. Below are a few examples of concepts I would explore, acknowledging that these are ideas that require validation, before they could scale up:

1. A quarterly print magazine. A mix of emerging and established writers, curated each issue around a theme. Pre-ordered by subscribers, funded before it prints. Contributors receive a revenue share, and each issue includes a code for a free month of a featured writer’s paid newsletter, turning the magazine into a subscriber acquisition tool for every writer in it. A small number of print ads from aligned brands is one of the few formats where Substack’s audience would tolerate advertising.

2. Workshops and lectures. Led by creators, co-hosted with universities or cultural institutions where many of them already work. Draw with a New Yorker cartoonist. Edit your own memoir with Suleika Jaouad. Learn investigative reporting with the Dropsite team. Cook through a seasonal menu with Caroline Chambers. At a modest fee through a Substack ticketing system that keeps the platform in the payments flow.

3. Substack Press. A co-publishing model where Substack partners with a creator to produce and distribute a book. The key difference from traditional publishing: production only begins after a minimum number of pre-orders are confirmed by the creator’s subscriber base, confirming demand and compressing risk before a dollar is spent on printing. The creator gets a revenue split significantly better than the typical 10–15% royalty.

4. Festival stages. Rather than building a festival from scratch, Substack sponsors panels of its creators at existing literary and cultural festivals. Cheaper to run and puts writers in front of audiences who aren’t on the platform yet.

Printing magazines and running events will not carry software margins. The offline programming is a moat and brand investment. While profitability isn’t essential, costs must remain lower than the value generated. The goal is to drive growth and retention within Substack’s core revenue model. Subscribers who purchase the magazine or attend a workshop are less likely to churn compared to those who only engage with emails.

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I would love more feedback on this idea. I suspect someone inside Substack has been making a version of this. I’d love to talk to them.

I’d also like to hear from creators. What do they want? And if they have already extended their Substack into a real-world form, find out how they did it, what Substack helped with, what they had to figure out on their own, and who they partnered with on the other end.

Please get in touch! Comment below or DM me.

In 1958, Hannah Arendt categorized human activity into three types: labor, work, and action. Those three interacted with each other differently throughout history.

She starts by situating them in ancient Greek frameworks. She noted that in Athens, labor was confined to the household (the oikos) and represented biological maintenance, the repetitive tasks of staying alive that produce nothing lasting. Work, by contrast, involves creating durable objects (buildings, furniture, tools), things that outlast their makers. It sat somewhere between oikos and polis.

The polis is the public realm, and it contains Action. Action meant appearing before other people, in public, as yourself, part of a network, in a situation where their response has consequences you can’t anticipate or control. An example she gives is Socrates, who spent his life stopping strangers in the marketplace to question what they believed, never knowing where the conversation would go, being genuinely changed by it, until the day it killed him.

The Greeks kept these separate. Economic life, labor, and work stayed inside the oikos. It was private by design. You handled the necessity behind walls so you could freely enter the polis where Action happened. Action was vital to Hannah Arendt. Animals labor and machines work, but she believed Action was very human and our only way to achieve true freedom, and express our unique identities.

Arendt traces several shifts before we arrive at the 16th century and the emergence of the nation-state. It treats the entire nation as a single household to be managed. The king was, in effect, the household head writ large. Even when monarchies fell, the government’s job is what the household head’s job used to be: feeding people, managing resources, keeping the organism alive. Economics is literally “household law”. Production, consumption, and survival crowded out everything else. Eventually, managing necessity became public life.

Arendt calls this “the social realm”. Managing necessity requires predictable, conformist, measurable behavior. Behavior replaced Action.

Arendt’s historical narrative stops here. So I want to pick it up. I believe that Action, as she defines it, made a comeback. When Arendt was writing the book, corporations were rigid hierarchies designed for predictability. Work was behavior by definition. But starting in the 1970s, work changed. Stable employment gave way to flexibility and individual judgment. The modern knowledge worker is given the freedom to solve problems without predetermined answers, in teams where the outcome depends on what each person actually thinks. And where views differ, you have to defend your position or change your mind. That’s not the polis. But it shares something with it: a genuine encounter between people exposed to each other, with shared stakes and no way to walk away. Work accidentally kept Action alive.

Ok, now let’s come back to the one-person company. Because I’m still trying to understand why I’m uncomfortable with it. The one-person company removes the last accidental site where Action happened. So we will end up rich in products, but poor in Action.

A solo company has no intellectual friction, no Action. One person, making money, alone. If these are isolated cases, it wouldn’t matter. But if everyone becomes a solo worker, there’s nothing between people anymore. The social realm and the traditional company, for all its flaws, at least put people in a room. It had other people in it, even if they were only behaving. The one-person company removes even that. Each person manages their own necessity, alone, connected to others only through transactions and consumption.

That’s the pessimistic scenario. But there may be another: if the solo entrepreneur handles necessity efficiently (or some UBI emerges), then economic life is mastered. And we have the desire to appear before others, and the courage to do it, to cross the threshold into genuine Action.

Studs Terkel wrote his book “Working” fifty years ago. He described work as being about “a search for daily meaning as well as daily bread”. He interviewed people about their work. What they do all day, and how they feel about it.

Today, the technologies, structures, and vocabularies of labor have changed a lot since the book was written. So maybe it’s worth writing an update? I’m interviewing people about their work, meaning, exhaustion, pride, humiliation, boredom, and identity. Most of the people I interviewed so far have been strangers I found on Reddit. This below is the first interview I did.

When people hear “ceramics,” they think pottery, a wheel, maybe a mug. But for me, it was actually a sculpture. I’m interested in art in the broadest sense. I did two years at community college as an art major, getting a little taste of everything, and then I transferred, planning to do printmaking. Woodblock prints, that kind of thing. And then I took a pottery class because I had to.

And that was it.

Clay felt different. As an artist, you interact with it directly. Whereas with paint, for example, you’re separated by the brush. In photography, you’re separated by the camera. But with clay, you are hands in. You get messy. You get clay in your hair, in your face. It’s impossible not to feel that connection to the material. I get really excited talking about it, because it’s so visceral. It feels communal. It feels like getting in touch with the ancestry of humanity. People have been making little clay figures since the dawn of time.

That feeling took me from the East Coast to the Midwest, which is, weirdly, where it’s at for ceramics! I moved there for an artist residency and lived on the property for a year. There were three of us, living and working side by side. We each had our own rooms and spaces. The other two were definitely closer to each other, but I’m generally a person who keeps to myself and prefers that. So I was doing my own thing. There, I helped fire kilns, taught classes, and used the studio for my own work. I was teaching wheel-throwing, the kind of pottery people usually imagine. It was good. It just wasn’t my favorite. After a while, I got burnt out on it.

After a couple of years, I just thought, this doesn’t feel as alive and energizing. I need to do something that feels more fulfilling. At first, I thought maybe art therapy. Maybe I’d work with elderly folks. It felt like a forgotten group, and I was interested in it. But the more I looked at art therapy, the more I realized it wasn’t really the work I wanted to do. A lot of the time, it was more like, okay, we’re going to do our coloring sheets for an hour. And that’s not therapy where I come from.

So I went back to school for counseling.

Now I’m a mental health counselor, provisionally licensed, which means doing the full-work but still under supervision. The license process takes between two and five years, 3,000 hours of clinical practice. I started seeing clients in January 2024. I get paid now, but less than a fully licensed clinician. Before that, in grad school, during the last three semesters, I was seeing clients in internships and not getting paid at all.

I work in a private practice. That means more freedom, more control over my schedule, more private insurance and private pay. It’s different from the community agencies, which are more government- or state-funded and tend to see more severe issues: more psychosis, more substance use, more lower-income folks, more Medicaid. We do some pro bono work where I am, but mostly it’s private insurance or private pay.

People sometimes are a little iffy because I’m new. They will say “You’re so new to this, you don’t have that much experience”. However, in my short time practicing, I have seen some very interesting, varied, and sometimes dramatic cases.

I work with teens and adults, fourteen and up. There are many cases I work with: anxiety, trauma, family dynamics, and career uncertainty. (This is related to your research).

But if I’m honest, my favorite population is young women. Girls, college-age women, women in their twenties, trying to figure out how to be humans. We don’t always get taught that. I deal with trauma recovery and I’d discuss family dynamics. Boundaries with men is an important thing to talk about with my patients. There are so many issues that are really specific to young women, and a lot of the time we just don’t have guidance on those things. We don’t. So when someone sits down with me and says, “I haven’t ever been able to tell anybody this,” that means everything to me. Truly. Nothing makes me feel more fulfilled than being a safe person. What a privilege, to be trusted with somebody’s deepest fears.

And maybe that’s connected to why I answered your reddit post. Because I think about work a lot. I think about how people choose it, how they get trapped in it, how they survive it. My dad had the most classic version of work you can imagine: finance, salary, desk, forty-hour weeks, for forty-five years. He was unhappy. Stressed all the time. Chained to his desk. He just retired, and I think I grew up watching that and deciding, very early, I’m not going to do that.

My mom was different. More creative. She worked in nail art, crafts, little business ideas, and office jobs too, but she moved around more. I definitely took after her. My mom was always like, yeah, go to art school, do what you want to do. My dad would say you should get a real degree so you can get a good job. And I would respond, let me do me. Now I’m a therapist, so here we are.

There’s a theory in career counseling called planned happenstance, and I love it. The basic idea is that you never know what’s going to happen, so when an opportunity comes up, you might as well say yes because you don’t know what it’s going to lead to. That feels like my whole career. Community college leads to printmaking, printmaking leads to clay, clay leads to Missouri, Missouri leads to a fiance, but also burnout (that is not from the fiance though!!!!), burnout leads to counseling, counseling leads to this deeply meaningful work of sitting in a room with another person and trying to help them make sense of their life.

Most of what I do is traditional talk therapy. Somebody on a couch, and we’re chatting and going into the deep stuff. But my art background still shows up. Sometimes I’ll bring out drawing materials, especially with teens. I like having them draw a picture that represents their family dynamics. Then you can literally see how mom relates to dad relates to sibling, who is close, who is far away, who is looming over everything. Sometimes they’ll look at what they made and say, “I didn’t even think about that.” That’s the good stuff. That’s when a door opens.

Art school prepared me for therapy in another way, too. Critique. You make something deeply meaningful, something autobiographical, something that feels like it came right out of your own insides, and then you put it in front of a room and people critique it. You learn very quickly that a critique of the work is not a critique of you. That has been so useful as a therapist. Because sometimes clients leave. Sometimes they come for a few sessions, I start pushing a little deeper, and they realize they’re not ready. They stop coming. And I have to remind myself: it’s not because I did something wrong. They were not in a place to receive what I was doing for them.

The training is broad. Multicultural counseling, crisis counseling, diagnosis, and treatment planning. The license varies by state. Not all states let mental health counselors diagnose, but Missouri does. So in an intake, I can listen to what’s going on and start narrowing things down: okay, this sounds like anxiety, let’s look closer. I like that part. I really do. Diagnosis is kind of fun for me. Problem-solving, mystery-solving, that’s how it feels sometimes. How can I best help this client? I’ll think about it after work, do some research, and come in with a plan.

And the sessions themselves, they are never exactly what you think they’re going to be. It varies. I see seven clients max in a day, though I can’t do more than four back-to-back or my brain turns to soup. Mostly in person, but I offer some virtual if needed. Every hour is its own weather system. Sometimes somebody comes in, and it’s a chill little yap session and you think, okay, this will be easy, and then suddenly it’s, oh my God, my entire life has collapsed. Sometimes it’s the opposite. Sometimes you have what we jokingly call a “crisis of the week” client, where every single session there’s a brand-new emergency, but then there is that rare week when they are relaxed and you can do deep work with them.

And then there are doorknob lines, which I love as a phrase and hate as a phenomenon. That’s when the session is ending, your hand is practically on the doorknob, and the client says, “Oh, by the way, my car got broken into last weekend and I’ve been having nightmares ever since.” Wow. Really wish we had started there. Time management is a skill. We have big clocks in locations where the patient and I can see them.

I prefer in-person sessions. There’s just so much more information in the room. Body language, energy, all the little clinical things you can observe. If someone is self-harming, for example, that’s a lot easier to notice in person than on Zoom where maybe you can’t see their arms. But also it’s not just about assessment. It’s about sharing space. Sitting in a room with somebody is different.

I write notes after sessions, but they’re very minimal. Confidentiality. You never know. I put in just enough that I can glance back and remember: right, grandma was in the hospital, we talked about this six weeks ago, let me ask how that’s going. It takes me about five minutes per note, and I usually do them during lunch. There are so many therapist memes about being six weeks behind on your notes. I am not that therapist. I refuse.

I share an office with my supervisor, and sometimes the clinic owner. There are pros and cons. I can keep my stuff there, and it does feel like mine, too. But when my supervisor is using it, I’m bouncing around. Still, I like that I’m not alone. I like collaboration. I like being able to say, “hey, I’m stuck on this case. have you worked with something like this before?” I don’t think I would want to be one of those clinicians just seeing people virtually out of my house, one-person business, no one to bounce ideas off of. I need a little more community than that.

In most clinics, you have the freedom to decorate your room with your style. Just keep it calm. Stress balls, plants, and room spray are fine. Skip the loud stuff, definitely no heavy metal posters on the wall.

We have a few stereotypes in the space. For example, the most common one: Everything comes back to Freud (laughing). Everything somehow comes back to childhood. Also, cardigans. It’s so real. I wear more cardigans than I ever thought I would. And every time I hear myself say, “And how does that make you feel?” a small part of me dies, but also, sometimes, that really is the question.

I think that’s what I love about the work. It’s serious, and strange, and intimate. It asks you to think on your feet and to stay humble. It asks you to meet people where they are, even when that’s nowhere near where they said they’d be when they sat down. It asks you to be present for pain without taking all of it home.

I think I do a pretty good job of compartmentalizing. Some clients are dealing with really heavy stuff, and sometimes it’s hard to leave that at the office. There are days when I think about the work all the time. But never the way my dad did, dread and a desk I’m chained to. More like a mystery or a conversation, that’s hard to leave.

This is the second essay in my “500 words for 5 days” series. It was much harder to write than I expected. I assumed I had all the thoughts clear in my head and would just type them out, but I was wrong. I apologize if it’s not entirely clear. I’ll come back to edit it later. Feedback welcome.

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I work in tech and venture capital, so I’m naturally excited by the potential of technology. Also, a trained investor, I’m constantly evaluating how capital-efficient and strategically positioned founders are. But despite these two things, I find the glorification of AI-powered solo unicorns, one-person one-billion-dollar companies, strange.

In early April, everyone celebrated the first one-person billion-dollar company, Medvi. Sam Altman wanted to meet the founder. It’s very impressive, and I applaud that founder. But I don’t like how it was quickly adopted and pitched by AI CEOs as the pinnacle of what people can do now that AI will take our white-collar jobs. It is presented as a radical leverage and individuals reclaiming agency. We will have millions of people selling millions of products to millions of people. It might signify abundance, freedom, or choice. But most likely it’s just a promotion of universal hustle. It seems to me like an acceleration of more of the same, not of human flourishing. This vision works for a few, but it can’t be a serious, major alternative to employment as AI companies propose.

The reason the “solo unicorn” glorification is irritating is that it exposes how the market captured and infiltrated all desires*, but having done so, seems unable to envision anything beyond its own infinite replication. It’s running out of creative ideas, and we need to fix that.

One of Silicon Valley’s genuine achievements has been to fuse compelling visions (curiosity, world-building, freedom, exploration, even transcendence) with capitalist form. The lineage runs back to the 1960s counterculture, which might have been the alternative, but it lost out and was absorbed and repackaged within tech instead. The early Bay Area technologists fused libertarian individualism, technological utopianism, and the rejection of traditional institutions. That fusion proved enormously useful. So, beginning in the 1970s, stable lifelong employment and hierarchical corporations gave way to flexibility, individual self-management, and aesthetics. The new structure attracted rebels and misfits who would never have tolerated a Fordist world, perfectly captured in Apple’s first ad mocking IBM. Those people went on to build some of the largest companies today.

So the problem isn’t that those companies have captured our desires. It’s that we have framed all desire in capitalist forms. And now that the most important AI CEO is pitching us a very boring desire, we are accepting it. After breaking through massive technological bottlenecks, is this really the best we can imagine for people? This is a flat horizon that reveals capitalism may have run out of desires to pitch to us. Where do we look to find better desires to chase? The other visions of the world we have historically proposed suppress our desire. Nothing built on the suppression of desire sustains itself. Other visions lack desire altogether. Heaven, by all reports from my ancestors who have made it there, is boring. Utopia is desirable as a concept, but the way we pitch it today means we won’t have desire once we get there. And our civilization and history have been built on our desire for change, our desire for more. ​​Desire is not just about lack; it’s also a creative, productive force, and we need that.

How to navigate through the current capitalist framework to carry these massive technological gains toward a more expansive vision of human flourishing?

Footnote:

*Mark Fisher calls this capitalist realism, not just an economic system but a foreclosure of the imagination, in which capitalism comes to feel like the only possible horizon for what a human being could want. In this case, when we are asked to picture its best possible future, the answer comes back: more companies, more markets.

The journey from the first word in the first draft to the last word in the perfect version is vast and confusing. It’s a deadly journey through the wild west. Many have crossed it and arrived victorious. But many more have died trying. Ride out far enough into the territory, under a sky bleached white by the heat, and you’ll see what’s lining the road: dry canteens with their caps unscrewed, tumbleweeds blowing past, a revolver unfired with the chamber still full, and then the skulls (picked clean) of writers who never published.

They didn’t die in shootouts like legendary cowboys. They could’ve been victorious cowboys publishing perfect novels. Instead, they died intimidated before their first shitty drafts. If you’re one of them, helpless, thirsty, dying on the side of the road, get your act together.

We don’t have weak people on this Substack. We are strong, independent, mildly caffeinated cowboys who don’t write with AI. We are here for a battle, and the battle (sadly) is harder than a duel at high noon. A duel takes ten seconds. This takes five days. Every month. For the next 12 months? Top-tier Western cowboys write every day for the rest of their lives (Mark Twain, Margaret Atwood, Salman Rushdi). We are not that. We are bougie Brooklyn Heights 2026 cowboys that are just trying to survive, and our ambition is calibrated accordingly — at least in the short term.

Here is my plan: I’ll publish 500 words a day for the next five days, and I’ll try to do this every month. In a year, I’ll end up with sixty short shitty first drafts. I have higher ambitions than that, but I don’t want to die a perfectionist. “Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism.” I read that in Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, which I finished last month and loved. It’s full of gentle advice that soothes the harshness of the self-doubt and self-loathing that come with writing. I plan to put it into practice as I build a writing habit here. Some of the advice that feels most relevant to me in this phase:

I don’t need to have a clear idea before I write. I write to gain clarity along the way. And I’ll build that clarity one short paragraph at a time. This is true for both fiction and non-fiction. Lamott quotes E. L. Doctorow here: “Writing is like driving a car at night. You can see only as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way”. She says, “This is right up there with the best advice on writing, or life, I have ever heard,” and I agree.

Can I sit down at my desk and imagine that I’m just fingers acting as a typist for my brain? A good typist just listens. That’s easy. I can just let my fingers listen to my brain, and voila, myself with her ego and self-judgment all disappear, and instead appear my first shitty draft. This shity first draft is “the down draft – you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental, where you check every tooth to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.” I’ll try as much as possible to only post third drafts here. And I expect that today I’m a dusty cowboy on foot, taking a few slow steps at a time. In six months, maybe I’ll have a horse.

The ney is a musical instrument made from bamboo (reed flute). But Rumi uses it to explain the human condition. The voice of the ney is the voice of every human soul that has ever felt the ache of longing for home. And that home is Ney-stan. This is how Rumi’s Masnavi (6 books/25,000 verses) starts.

Ney-stan is the country of the ney (ney = the instrument, -stan = place of, like Afghanistan where Rumi was born, which is just so cute that he names a country like that). Ney-stan is the spiritual homeland where the soul originally belonged in unity with Allah (or the universe). It’s where the soul was universal before being cut away into individual existence. A place before separation, where we might live “as if you and I never heard of you and I”, beyond the illusion of dividedness.

The choice of using a reed/ney as the narrator is significant. When we’re born, the reed stalk is separated from the reedbed. Being cut off from Ney-stan, from the universal company, is a sad experience. It dulls our soul to be separated from its core. We forget who we really are. Our hearts fill up with ego, attachments, fears, the constant noise of “I, me, mine.”

For a reed flute to produce music, it must first go through a surgery. A surgery of emptying the stalk, punching holes in it, to transform it into a ney that creates music, an instrument that allows breath to move through it. This is in the same way that Sufis believe you must empty yourself of all egocentric tendencies before you can experience the divine. That transformation can be painful. But don’t let your heart break; instead, let it break open.

One of my favorite philosophers, Iris Murdoch, referred to this as “unselfing”:

The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness. This is the non-metaphysical meaning of the idea of transcendence to which philosophers have so constantly resorted in their explanations of goodness. “Good is a transcendent reality” means that virtue is the attempt to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is. It is an empirical fact about human nature that this attempt cannot be entirely successful.

Another quote from Bertrand Russell:

Make your interests gradually wider and more impersonal, until bit by bit the walls of the ego recede, and your life becomes increasingly merged in the universal life. An individual human existence should be like a river — small at first, narrowly contained within its banks, and rushing passionately past rocks and over waterfalls. Gradually the river grows wider, the banks recede, the waters flow more quietly, and in the end, without any visible break, they become merged in the sea, and painlessly lose their individual being.”

All three of them understood the same truth: the self, with all its grasping and defending, is the primary obstacle to clarity and connection.

For the journey back to Ney-stan, we need to empty ourselves so the music of the universe can flow through and guide us home.

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Art by Ramesh Pachpande

We tend to locate innovation in the output, the new product, or the finished piece of art. This is sometimes called revolutionary, breakthrough, or disruptive!

But long-term value lives elsewhere. Long-term value is endurance. It comes from what we keep doing: the craft, the process, the maintenance. It’s evolutionary!

A simple analogy (from the book Breakneck by Dan Wang): the dish isn’t the innovation; it’s the outcome. The innovation is the input: the kitchen tools, the recipe, and the practice of cooking well every time.

You see this product/process concept in other places beyond the kitchen. Below are some related thoughts:

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China’s Factory vs. Silicon Valley’s Lab

The same book, Breakneck, mentions that Andy Grove once warned the United States must “focus less on the mythical moment of creation” and more on scaling because when invention is separated from production, technology ecosystems rust.

In Silicon Valley, innovation is a novelty, a moment (we all remember the iPhone launch). That is the dish.

In China, it’s a process, a system of reproducibility. The dense network of engineers, suppliers, and factories? Those are the recipes and the kitchen tools.

Single innovation in a lab without a learning loop from the production process goes nowhere.

When Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, it was a breakthrough. What changed the world wasn’t Fleming’s Petri dish; it was the process that came later. During World War II, scientists and engineers learned how to mass-produce penicillin, turning a fragile mold into an industrial medicine. The discovery was the spark. But the process, scaling, refining, and reproducing, was the revolution (where the value happened).

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“Low-road” vs. “High-road” Buildings

Just like technologies must learn production, buildings must learn construction. From Breakneck to Simon Leys’s The Hall of Uselessness to Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn, a similar idea surfaces.

Builders everywhere have attempted to overcome the erosion of time. Ancient Egypt and medieval Europe built great pyramids and cathedrals out of stone: the “high road.” These buildings were designed to project permanence, to stand against time itself. But rigidity is a kind of fragility. When Notre-Dame burned in 2019, the world realized how little of the medieval process survived. Western permanence preserved the object but lost the method.

The “low road,” as Brand describes it, is the opposite approach: modest, flexible, easy to repair or rebuild. It prizes adaptability over monumentality. Japan’s Ise Grand Shrine has been rebuilt every twenty years for over a millennium, a structure that survives precisely because it is dismantled.

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Another way to think about this is in terms of development vs. maintenance.

In her 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles drew a clean line between: “development,” the high-status work of creation, and “maintenance,” the repetitive, sustaining work that keeps things alive.

“Two basic systems: Development and Maintenance. The sourball of every revolution: after the revolution, who’s going to pick up the garbage on Monday morning? Development: pure individual creation; the new; change; progress, advance, excitement, flight or fleeing. Maintenance: keep the dust off the pure individual creation; preserve the new; sustain the change; protect progress; defend and prolong the advance; renew the excitement; repeat the flight.”

Maintenance, construction, and production aren’t glamorous. It doesn’t have a launch date or a press release. But it’s the reason I have electricity, listen to Bach, and type on a QWERTY keyboard.

Readings that inspired me:

1. Breakneck by Dan Wang

2. Simon Leys’s The Hall of Uselessness, which Dan Wang references in his book (mainly this essay)

3. Stewart Brand’s How Buildings Learn

4. 1969 Manifesto for Maintenance Art, artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles

Among the many things I track in my reading are extraordinary things described in extraordinary ways. I have a collection of them, which I’ll share in three or four quotes at a time.

But I’m starting with just one today because it’s so stunning. The reason I’m sharing this alone is that the more I read it, the more I realize it’s a Godly paragraph.

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Ladies and gentlemen, here comes the paragraph by Halldor Laxness from Independent People

SLowly, slowly winter day opens his arctic eye.

From the moment when he gives his first drowsy blink to the time when his leaden lids have finally opened wide, there passes not merely hour after hour; no, age follows age through the immeasurable expanses of the morning, world follows world, as in the visions of a blind man; reality follows reality and is no more– the light grows brighter. So distant is winter day on his own morning. Even his morning is distant from itself. The first faint gleam on the horizon and the full brightness on the window at breakfast-time are like two different beginnings, two starting-points. And since at dawn even his morning is distant, what must his evening ber Forenoon, noon, and afternoon are as far off as the countries we hope to see when we grow up; evening as remote and unreal as death, which the youngest son was told about yesterday, death which takes little children away from their mothers and makes the minister bury them in the Bailiff’s garden, death from which no one returns, as in grandmother’s stories, death which will call for you, too, when you have grown so old that you have become a child again.

Today, while chatting with my friend Andri, I confirmed what I’d been sensing: this is actually a paragraph that describes day, life, death, childhood, and old age (and there’s probably much more). So it’s one paragraph that describes all of humanity, which is anything but ordinary, despite what some people might believe.

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I also learned another thing about Laxness. He initially moved to Hollywood and wrote Salka Valka (another favorite of mine) for a silent movie. For an extraordinary writer to write for a silent movie is also so beautiful in its own way.