The app for independent voices
This morning, after spending 1.5h agonizing about my future (for a statement of objective), I gave up and just read Henrik Karlsson’s and Rayne Fisher-Quan’s Substacks instead. They both talk about privacy, though in different senses. Crisis of faith is about grief, how tech surveillance is also a way we express love, and how the loss of that surveilled data tangles with the loss of the person. Henrik’s piece is on love, and how he found his most joyful love when it starts to feel private, unshareable, when he stops wanting to explain that love to other people.
It’s funny because writing a statement of objectives, I feel like having to explain my loves to a faceless board of Authority. It scares me both that they have the power to judge and that I don’t really know what to say to them. November has been a month of intense private joy. I stayed in 4 cities so far, and it’s only the 19th. It feels private because all decisions that led to these 4 cities are considered impulsive, or intuitive, if there’s a kinder way to put it. The thing is, none of these impulses have led to any reputational or material gains - I just sorta threw myself around. So it’s hard to even brag about it =)) (I wish I could). Part of the reason why this impulse/intuition feels scary is that it feels like I’m simply …living, that there’s no end or point to this. It’s exhilarating, but also foreign. I’m realizing that the advice “live with the flow” sounded appealing back when I was deep in tech because the flow still exists very much within an invisible structure. But now that I’m flow flow, everything seems pregnant with possibilities, which also means uncertainty. I find it both beautiful and overwhelming sometimes.
It’s funny because writing this Substack note is an attempt to make myself less private today, which is an attempt to make myself legible and stay a bit away from the flow flow, which is an attempt to feel in control of this overwhelmingly uncertain, beautiful stage of life I’m in.
