Nayab

The opposite of suffering isn’t ease but emptiness because anything that will make something out of you is gonna push you to your limits. The transformation you’re looking for is in the suffering you’re avoiding: the person you want to become isn’t waiting idly on some “other end”, it’s what you gradually become by leaning into the resistance as you move towards it

After watching people close to me have kids, I've started to think that we were never meant to face the challenges of adult life alone. For most of human history, families stayed close, and generations lived together or near each other. Your parents have already made the mistakes you're about to make, and your grandparents have already survived the things you think might break you. You need that kind of knowledge, passed down not from a podcast but from someone who loves you and has lived it. Unfortunately, we've traded generational wisdom for independence.

I’m very serious about this. You need to be making your home a beautiful and orderly place. Your home, then your wardrobe, then your yard and garden, then the borders of your place, then your neighborhood, town, state, country. It all radiates outward. But you can’t think about all that. You can only control your immediate surroundings, where you live and what you wear. This orders your mind - and the way you dress sends signals to everyone who sees you, that you care, that people around them care. That we are fully formed adults whose actions in the world matter.

Sometimes I feel like everyone learns the exact same lessons in life but we all learn them in different orders and on different levels of seriousness and that’s actually why advice-giving or self-help content can be so messed up even when there’s good intentions

Whether you’re Persian or American or anything else, it’s objectively weird and sick to be gleeful about the destruction of innocent lives, and cities that hold some of the most beautiful achievements of mankind in art and architecture. This goes beyond geopolitics.

Art and morality are linked in serious ways. I’ve been trying to write about how and why exactly. This picture by Norman Rockwell captures a lot. One idea is hierarchy and order. Someone who want disorder for the sake of it in art, usually has similar principles in their moral views as well. Will be writing more on this long form soon.

I’ve spent several years ‘in the arena’ of slowing down, figuring out who I actually am & what I actually think in the absence of authorities, systems and institutions determining my objectives and where my energy “should” go. The result has been profound clarity around my own taste and values, as well as a deep sense of what it is that I uniquely want to create in this world. I cannot recommend this process enough; the process of taking the time and space to re-align with your own internal compass and sense of knowing. The world can wait. This is the most precious and urgent process available to you, at all times. While it is possible, it is extraordinarily difficult to do this without a catalyzing force or time period where it is your explicit intention to do so. External inputs and noise are relentless; there is always something you can feel behind on, or feel the pressure to do/know that seems more important than your own becoming, than your own discernment. But your path is independent of time. It is the same reason we often get the same ‘calling’ or intuition to do something, at various points in our lives repeatedly, despite ignoring it or trying to bypass it. If you feel genuinely called to open up a chapter like this in your own life, where you commit to the process of knowing yourself deeper and placing yourself on the path that is exactly right *to you*, for you, DM me. I am a container, co-regulator, partner, advisor, and vivid reflector on this path, helping you see, reach for and *actively choose* this highest version of yourself, the one that is bold, courageous, self-assured, and willing to do the necessary, inconvenient thing. Trusting yourself, being audacious, ambitious and aligned in where you place yourself time, attention and energy will always be confronting. It is a discipline. There will always be the temptation to defer to an easier path, or a more convenient one. The practice is to become stronger than the siren call of convenience, ‘productivity’ and urgency. If this resonates with you, and you feel a spark of desire to reach for this path inside of you, DM me. Let’s explore what the journey of stepping onto the path of your most aligned, independent, resonant, sovereign self would look like. I help people re-align and see themselves clearly. Often for the first time in their lives.

@demeteralexx Prompts

Fuck it Releasing 112 AI Prompts to instantly write website copy on >Homepages >Landing pages >Product pages >Pricing pages >Feature sections >Conversion CTAs Make your SaaS pages fucking PRINT Repost + Comment “PROMPTS” and I’ll DM (must be following)

Me: *drinking from a soggy straw to save the planet* World leaders:

In order for children to read well and enjoy it they need: beautifully written and illustrated books accessible, parents/family that likes to read around them even if not to them, free time to be bored with no screens available, a stomach full of nutritious food.

Living in anticipation steals your life from you. You spend your days waiting for the future to arrive. You place your hope in it, believing it will redeem the present. But when it does, it comes with new fears, new problems, new things to escape. So the waiting continues. A life on the run. Never present. Always wanting, waiting, for something to change. The solution is to stop postponing your permission to live. Don’t outsource your emotional state to an imagined version of tomorrow. Don’t romanticize the future. Learn to live fully in the middle. Because either way your life is passing you by, and every moment will bring something new to conquer. So you can wait for life to magically stop being difficult, or you can decide that the present, no matter how imperfect, is worth being fully here for.

10 books you need to read before you die - Anna Karenina, Leo Tolstoy. - The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoyevsky - In Search of Lost Time, Marcel Proust - Book of the New Sun, Gene Wolfe - Les Miserables, Victor Hugo - The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas - The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann - The Obscene Bird of Night, Jose Donoso - The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Milan Kundera - Moby Dick, Herman Melville. On a different note, if the above list is boring, then: - Name of the Rose, Umberto Eco - If On a Winter's Night a Traveller - Italo Calvino - The Dictionary of Kazars, Milorad Pavic - Demian, Herman Hesse - Cousin Bette, Balzac - The Tin Drum, Gunter Grass - Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov - Germinal, Emilie Zola - Master Christian, Marie Corelli - Zorba the Greek, Kazantzakis

To be a leader of your mind, you do not follow your thoughts, you lead them. It’s something I’ve been consciously working on lately. Especially when I realized how often the “algorithm” directs me to contemplate really useless and silly things.

What makes the Brothers Karamazov so good, in my opinion, is that Dostoevsky does not write with a single ideological voice. Ivan is not just atheism. Dmitri is not just sensualism. Alyosha is not merely faith. Each of them is internally coherent, emotionally persuasive, and intellectually dangerous in their own way. The novel doesn’t resolve them cleanly because life doesn’t resolve them cleanly. It’s closer to a courtroom of metaphysical claims than to a sermon. The books really does not really let you choose a side. Not that anyone consciously does it anyway, but deep down we unconsciously pick one anyway. But not here. This is what makes the book so unsettling. You can inhabit Ivan’s rebellion in the Grand Inquisitor chapter and feel its force. You can inhabit Zosima’s faith and feel its moral depth. The novel doesn’t tell you which is correct. It lets them collide and then steps back. That restraint is rare. As much as one finds Ivan much more appealing, I think the cream of Dostoevsky is Alyosha, who is more an evolved version of his earlier protagonists Raskolnikov and Prince Mysskin. He is spiritually since here like Mysskin, but not naive. He can engage with Dmitri's frenzy, Ivan's despair, and even Grushenka's cunning without being destroyed.

You don’t want the butterflies in your stomach. You want the cocoon era. You want to feel soft and comfortable and warm and safe. You want to become nature’s burrito. You want to feel like you’re evolving into a beautiful butterfly. And fly. Cocoon love for the win.

I gave this to a founder doing $100M+/yr. He said it changed how he treats his content forever. Sharing it publicly for the first time:

I cannot get enough of Proust. One of the few writers who can make you feel how you're rarely observant about most of the things in your life and enables you to notice everything in x0.25 speed.

“Edmond Dante does not become interesting because he is anxious. He becomes powerful because he endures. His transformation is not an inward spiral but an outward construction. He studies, waits, prepares. Knowledge replaces despair, discipline replaces helplessness. Suffering is not an identity but a phase of becoming.” Wow.

Reading cannot be “escape” because I have found in moments when I’m truly haunted, that I read words, in that I sound them out, but not a flicker of an image is conjured. A certain degree of baseline happiness and will to live is required to read.