Powerful tools can do powerful things

Powerful tools can do powerful things. If you want to make handmade wooden furniture, you must cut wood. Your desire to have limbs and your desire to have furniture are not at odds if you learn to use tools safely. There is a limit to how safe a tool can be before its function is crippled. We should not stop making powerful tools because they are dangerous. Rather, we should empower people to use powerful tools safely.

Some events can only be understood in the moment

Pleasures accumulate anywhere you can build attention to detail. If you love someone long enough, if you cultivate attention in each other for years, you will reap the harvest of sweet memories in common. Some events can only be understood in the moment, but others can only really be understood long afterwards. There is a great pleasure in understanding these things in retrospect, a long-distance pleasure.

There is an endless collection of secrets to be discovered

There is sometimes a temporary disenchantment that follows discovery. We meet someone new or find a new place and become infatuated. But after some time, we realize that the city we longed to live in is in fact just a city, or some unattainable girl or boy, so hard to get their attention before, is not so otherworldly after all. This delusion is often our fault. People or places exist in our minds first as a projection of our desires, and only later as the real thing. First, we shed the projection, and here many people stop. But if you persist, you might find that there is no such thing as “just a city”; there is an endless collection of secrets to be discovered, and the same with people. It is our fault if we crave novelty, forget detail, and then find only surface, unstudied pleasures.

Stop being so available

If you respond to every text instantly and show up for everyone without hesitation, you’re communicating that your time isn’t valuable and that you don’t have much going on. Have things going on in your life, genuinely, and people will treat your time like it matters. More importantly, you will too.

Make something every day

People who like themselves tend to create things, even if it’s just a few paragraphs of writing or a sketch on the back of a receipt. Creating puts you in a position of agency rather than consumption. It has you contributing. You can scroll for two hours and feel hollow, or you can make something - even something ugly - in twenty minutes and feel like a human again.

Serve people well

What you say about yourself is forgotten. What you do for others compounds. Serve people well, and their word about you will travel further than yours ever could.

Tip for tap

There is plenty of unintentional harm in our world. We’ve all been bruised or derailed by someone who had no ill intent. We often respond with intentional harm to make a point and to teach a lesson. The alternative is clarity. Shared understanding instead of intentional pain. Tap is going to keep coming. It’s the tip that’s up to us.