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Greater Los Angeles

It doesn’t matter.
Los Angeles is where you confront the objective fact that you mean nothing; the desert, the ocean, the tectonic plates, the clear skies, the sun itself, the Hollywood Walk of Fame – even the parking lots: everything there somehow precedes you, even new construction sites, and it’s bigger than you and more abstract than you and indifferent to you. You don’t matter. You’re free.

A friend recently reminded me of this beautiful BLDGBLOG essay. It’s almost 2 decades old and is still a great primer on the unique culture in LA and how its physical spaces shape that culture.

If New York is the city that never sleeps, LA is the city where you don’t matter—and because you don’t matter, you are free.

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There Is No “Right Time.” There Is Only Now, Plus Courage.

As a self-professed over-thinker, this one feels targeted at me.

The emotional core of delayed action is fear dressed up in strategic language. Fear that if you move too soon, you’ll fail; fear that if you wait long enough, the risk will dissolve. But risk is a structural feature of reality, not a glitch to be patched. No amount of waiting will unroll the future into a safe and navigable map. You can’t hedge your way into certainty.

“[Courage is] the refusal to defer your life to the imaginary committee of ‘later.’” I often find the things I want in life too easy to defer based on (supposedly) well-reasoned analysis.