Boundless Reads: Ten Things Worth Reading

I’ve really been enjoying the first few weeks of being a dad. There’s a lot to learn but so far it’s been far better than I ever could have expected.

I’ve been doing a bit more reading in between naps and such so I wanted to share some things that I have been enjoying!

And if you haven’t read the guest essays yet, they’ve been fantastic:

Jonny Miller

on nervous systems and recklessness vs. courage,

Sam Sager

on intuition, fitness, and uncertain journeys, Alice Lemee on skipping the 9-5 and her freelance writing journey, and

Michelle Varghoose

on parental expectations and being a grown woman.

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#1 Indie Reflections

Andrew Bartholemew has thoughtful reflections on Indie life:

Being indie for 18 months has reinforced my core motivations. It has definitely pulled me further from the base assumptions of a typical employee or manager. I’m more interested in autonomy than belonging. I’m more interested in excellence than recognition. I’m more interested in getting tested than in getting coached.

You can read them here

#2 Winding Journeys

Heather Joelle Boneparth

on her journey I found this part about how she sort of stumbled into becoming a lawyer interesting. It’s pretty wild how many people end up in careers in their 20s due to minor decisions and then just more or less stay on that path

My closest brush with these feelings came from a weeklong trip to the Andes in northern Ecuador. I was a senior in the journalism college, bestowed with this huge honor of being selected for the program. But truthfully, I was afraid, completely out of my comfort zone in the sense of placing my safety – and all of my trust – into strangers who I needed a translator to communicate with. It was the purest form of human connection, and the experience was difficult but deeply transformative. When we came home, I sank. I felt emotionally disoriented, like the nonsense I spent four years worrying about was completely insignificant. I was also angry at myself for playing it safe, spending my week with local artisans talking about wool, while braver classmates slept on the floor of a women’s jail. I thought, I squandered it – whatever it was I went there looking for. So I dissociated. I turned away from becoming a journalist and sold myself on a rich notion that my words mattered more as a lawyer. (Narrator: They do not.) That one week changed the trajectory of the next decade of my life.

After the climb

#3 Post-Meme: The Vibe Economy

Peter N Limberg

on how we’ve shifted into a new vibe-first reality. I think he makes an interesting case that we’re seeing a shift away from minds with bodies and toward people that see themselves as wholes:

In her The Hollow series at The Stoa, organizational futurist and philosopher Bonnitta Roy introduced the phrase “sensefulness.” She argues that we are moving away from the myth of being in an information commons, with shared explanations with our minds via propositional knowledge, toward a shared understanding with our bodies via relational intimacy, or what she calls “senseful co-presencing.” Those following The Stoa for the last three years should not be surprised by this prediction: a sensefulness movement will supersede the mindfulness movement.

If my read of the nascent “wisdom commons” - a place that attempts to make wisdom more common - is accurate, sensefulness-based practices focusing on the sensate body over the construal mind are gaining traction and will soon surpass mindfulness-based practices in popularity. An argument for sensefulness-based practices is that they provide all the benefits of mindfulness-based interventions while avoiding the top-heaviness of being mind-full, embodying the truth that we are animals with “bodyminds,” not mind’s with a body.

The move from mindfulness to sensefulness will occur because a full-bodied experience is needed to be a whole human animal. Like most things, divides such as sensefulness and mindfulness will blur with more practical interaction. The overarching movement with such interaction, to quote Bonnitta, is that we will be “putting the mind back in the body and the body back in nature.”

Meme to Vibe: A Philosophical Report

Peter was a few years ahead of the culture war drama that played out over the past seven years. I think he has some powerful ideas here as well.

#4 Dan Wang on China

Dan Wang’s annual letter is a fun peek into the day-to-day realities of living in China. It is sort of sad that most people only see China through the lens of geopolitical drama and don’t really get much opportunity to appreciate it’s history and diverse landscapes and food. Here is a sample:

They are towering in the north. These are Tibetan areas home to a meaningful chunk of the Himalayas: Yunnan’s highest peak is Kawarkapo, one of Tibetan Buddhism’s most sacred mountains. This region is unbeatable for snowy beauty. The roads around them are strewn with fluttering prayer flags and studded with impassive yaks. Something in the thinness of the air produces more vivid light, which fires up white peaks in brilliant red when the sun is low. I went on several hikes around Kawarkapo and Tiger Leaping Gorge, which offer gorgeous treks through tough terrain.

Northern Yunnan is a site of improbable mixings. Missionaries made headway into these lands in the 19th century, establishing not just a Christian population but also vineyards that continue to produce wine grapes. In a remote valley, I passed by a vineyard owned by LVMH to produce Cabernet, which retail for US$300 per bottle.

The most stimulating parts of this region are not the cities of Lijiang or Shangri-La, but the more remote Tibetan areas. Tibetans have been subject to decades of forced assimilation to Han culture, but they still find room to practice small acts of subversion. One guide told me, for example, that monks have slipped a portrait of the Dalai Lama behind the portrait of the Panchen Lama in their monastery, allowing them to pray in good conscience. These rounds of control and evasion continue to grind on.

#5 Life Reflections

Nat Eliason

30 reflections. I most resonate with this one and wish I knew it earlier. I think this might be one of the hidden secrets of life

You do your best work when you’re not working. Your brain needs downtime to connect the dots like your body needs rest to strengthen itself for the next workout. If you’re always working, always trying to download information, always trying to be productive, you’re stifling your best insights from bubbling up. 

I also liked this one:

Remote relationships cost you real relationships. Every minute you spend cultivating relationships with people through a screen is a minute you’re not deepening relationships with people you can actually see and touch and smell.

This is part of why I moved back to the US. I missed the camaraderie of optimistic, exuberant weirdos, of which there are many (including Nat) in Austin. I get more joy out of virtual friendships than most, but I try to meet them in person eventually.

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Kris Abdelmessih

also had some nice riffs on Nat's themes here

#6 Reflections on Work

A friend Edward has been writing some interesting things on work in

Edward Says

Are modern jobs very bad, or are modern workers simply snowflakes? In my field, medicine, almost everybody is trying to get out of it. My lawyer friends are trying to get out of the legal field, or at least to escape from corporate law. In tech, people earn high salaries, but it seems tech employees change jobs every couple of years or so, or, if they are hanging in there, it’s for a big payoff, for which end they are begrudgingly willing to keep on trudging.

In medicine, juggling medicolegal risk, patient expectations, and demoralising workloads has taken its toll. Satisfaction is low and bullying is rife, but due to the terrible optics of striking, we are checkmated into enduring unfair working conditions. Hence, the beating will continue until morale improves.

Oxen of the Sun

#7 Playing a Career Game You Actually Want to Win - Every

An interesting question about your relationship with work could be:

What game are you playing and what will you get if you win?

Simone Stolzoff

recently wrote about this and introduced the idea of "value capture" a good phrase to articulate something I slowly woke up to in my career - that our companies values will likely win out over our own:

Our careers are different. The games we play with our working hours also come with their own values and metrics that matter. Success is measured by how much money you make—for your company and for yourself. Promotions, bonuses, and raises mark the path to success, like dots along the Pac-Man maze.

These metrics are seductive because of their simplicity. “You might have a nuanced personal definition of success,” Nguyen told me, “but once someone presents you with these simple quantified representations of a value—especially ones that are shared across a company—that clarity trumps your subtler values.” In other words, it is easier to adopt the values of the game than to determine your own. That’s value capture.

#8 Seasonality of Life

Matt Yao

wrote a beautiful essay about the seasonality of life:

#30: Living and Working in Seasons 🌍

#9 On Getting Laid Off

This essay from

Sri Karnic

was raw, honest, and reflective

Exactly a year ago, I got on a quick meeting with the founder of the startup I was working at who took a while to get to the point but eventually let me know that they were downsizing & I was a part of that.

For someone who thought being laid off could not affect them, I left that meeting in tears, shut the laptop with shivering hands & had a very telling first thought; “What will people say?”

Indeed.

The Only Thing I'll Say About Being Laid Off

#10 On City Life

In Taiwan living in a city is a normal thing. When Angie first came to my hometown, one surrounded by trees, she had a hard time imagining living in such a place.

Paul Krugman recently wrote about how easy life is in New York:

Before I get to the politics, a few words about what living in a 15-minute city, and New York in general, is actually like.

What people who haven’t experienced a real urban lifestyle generally don’t get is how easy life is. Running errands is a snap; because you walk most places, you don’t worry about traffic jams or parking spaces.

And I agree. New York is one of the most walkable and liveable cities we have in the US. It’s a shame that we don’t have more cities like it. Downtown Austin is nice but if you go anywhere you quickly end up in a car-oriented sprawl which can be worse than both city living like New York AND more rural suburban life.

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