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Marty Supreme (2025) and Smashing Machine (2025) – Why do anti-hustle movies fail?
The Smashing Machine (2025) and Marty Supreme (2025) are very similar movies – directed by a Safdie brother, the movies follow an American hero (whose name starts with M) who is almost at the top in an unpopular sport (at the time), who plays in Japan, who suffers a defeat from a foreign player, experiences…
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Actors cry, real people try not to cry
A few weeks ago, I was watching Matt Damon and Ben Affleck on Joe Rogans podcast talk about acting and AI and how human emotions aren’t easily replicable by AI generated videos because humans are creative in how they feel emotions. They talked of Dwayne Johnson in Smashing Machine adopting certain characteristics to reflect the…
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Bad Bunny
In 15 years, Bad Bunny went from a supermarket cashier in Puerto Rico to performing at the Super Bowl and winning a Grammy for the Best Album in America. It’s crazy to me how magical life can be. But underneath all that is some form of causality – each action has an effect and there…
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The skill of wanting something
What happens when we achieve goals ? You become free of them. You experience the feeling of freedom. That is all. You can be happy and have fun without any goals. In fact, it’s entirely possible that your goals bring you difficulties – more work, more uncertainty, less time for what you used to be.…
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In defence of a traditional career path
Substack is filled with a call to abandon the traditional job in favour of creating your own work – the “portfolio career” as it’s being called. This is not an exhaustive essay, just a few points that I would make if someone wanted to raise the case that the traditional career path offers way more…
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Micro is macro – Morals and emotions are the same thing on different scales
I’m interested in looking at how normative ideas around personal emotions are reflective of the macro stories around cultural morality. That is, stories around emotions are the micro version of the stories around morality. The similarity in emotions and morality essentially arises from the simple fact that they are regulators: emotions regulate human action and…
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Control
From the days of Ancient Greece and Socrates, there has been a valorisation of self-discovery: finding the person you are deep inside you and developing greater parts of you. The modern emphasis on self-improvement and self-development has self-discovery at its foundation. But, whereas self-discovery was about finding who I am originally, the modern approach to…
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There is no real alternative to patience
The idea of patience has been at the top of my mind recently. There are a lot of skills that really support the achievement of success. But a lot of those skills are replaceable with another apt skill. You dont have to be a high-stakes risk taker to be successful (even if it helps), you…
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Rushing and Patience
One of the most interesting nuances I have realised recently is the difference between having a great big goal as a means of expanding what you think is possible vs as a means of escaping the terribleness of the present. I was playing around with some astrology readings based on my birth chart and got…
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Simplifying goal achievement
The essence of almost all productivity and self-help books is the achievement of complex and grand desires by taking necessary action. They can all be broken down into two steps: All manifestation techniques, hustle culture, fitness culture, self development, law of attraction teachings, psychological techniques etc go to an aspect of these two steps –…
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Meru Sharma 