Aryan Agrawal

wannabe flaneur

[ANMOL JAMWAL @jammypants4]

COMING SOON:-

Sacred Games The Movie (GAITONDE prequel)
Family Man The Movie (pick a state)
Scam The Movie (Pick any year)
Panchayat The Movie (Sachiv ji finally proposes)

[Raj Shamani @rajshamani]

You don't fear the task itself as much as the moment right before it. Once you start, the dread drops fast in your brain. That’s why waiting for motivation before taking action almost never works. You have to move first.

[Nassim Nicholas Taleb @nntaleb]

Surgeons should not look like surgeons.
h/t @Satyaki_R

[Bryan Johnson @bryan_johnson]

I did a 40 hr and then a 70 hr social media fast.
I’ve come to believe that social media is pollution. 

Not a vice or guilty pleasure.
It’s closer to water toxins, air pollution and microplastics.

Social media has been on my mind because I can feel how bad it is for me. For my health and agency. I am a professional rejuvenation athlete. For five years, I’ve engineered my life around biological renewal and the elimination of decay. After hundreds of experiments across food, sleep, exercise, therapies, and toxins, I’ve developed both data and intuition about what strengthens or degrades my system.

I can viscerally feel that social media is bad for me.  It erodes my autonomy and increases cognitive entropy.
Like other toxins, it accumulates. You can’t unsee or unfeel what you’ve consumed. It settles into mental tissue like heavy metals, producing chronic low-grade inflammation.  Evidence suggests even after you stop scrolling, attentional fragmentation and emotional priming persist. Your thoughts begin to mirror the algorithm’s incentives. Independent cognition quietly erodes and you don’t notice the loss.

Time away and getting lost in deep focus is the only remedy.

When something erodes your agency, the rational response is elimination. The problem is, elimination isn’t realistic. “Just put the phone down” is as practical as telling someone in 19th century London to stop breathing coal smoke.

You need to know what’s happening in the world, be in touch with your friends and be part of the tribe.

That necessity is what allows companies to harvest your emotions, intellect and time for their profit. You are their raw material they exploit. Then in an ironic twist, the system gets you to exploit yourself by engineering an environment where it takes more effort to stop than to continue scrolling.  Pollution exposure by default.

What specifically makes social media toxic is that value and poison are inseparable by design.  You go to hear from friends and you leave an hour later absorbed in outrage that serves no biological interest of yours. The water is real. The lead is in the pipes.

The performance metrics (likes, views, etc.) bleed you of independent thought. They create quantified social proof, triggering ancient hierarchy reflexes. You no longer evaluate signal from noise; the engagement metrics do it for you.

Like all toxins, the damage is cumulative. We live inside the exposure long enough that it feels normal.  The 40 and 70 hour social media fasts did that for me. Gave me just enough separation to feel and diagnose the poison. The obviousness of it feels like when I went to India and saw their humanitarian crisis of air pollution which no one sees anymore.

So what do we do?

Neither platforms nor individuals are likely to change on their own. AI may be the countermeasure. An AI layer between you and the feed. Filtering rage, removing vanity metrics and translating sensationalism into calm, factual language. Preserving signal and eliminating noise.

I want social media to become a longevity intervention, not a longevity threat. I never want to see the raw feed. I want an AI agent to read it for me, strip the engagement metrics that hijack my judgment, filter the rage, and return only what I actually came for.

Every generation faces its pollutants. When cholera spread through London's water, the answer wasn't telling people to drink less. It was building filtration. The same logic applies here. Best next move is to design the filter to avoid being the raw material.

[Sagar @sagarcasm]

When Arijit Singh takes retirement at the age of 38

[Aryan Agrawal @arypag_]

@sagarcasm We got Arjit’s entire career before gta 6

[Reads with Ravi @readswithravi]

What do you use as a bookmark?

[Aryan Agrawal @arypag_]

@taran_adarsh Association vs causation

[Aryan Agrawal @arypag_]

@birdabo What a line !!!!

[Ray Dalio @RayDalio]

Perfectionists spend too much time on little differences at the margins at the expense of the important things. There are typically just five to ten important factors to consider when making a decision. It is important to understand these really well, though the marginal gains of studying even the important things past a certain point are limited. #principleoftheday

[Molly O’Shea @MollySOShea]

Thiel Fellowship upped the stakes this year.

$100,000 → $200,000. 2 Years.

These are the 15 names under the age of 22 you're going to want to watch.

From Anchorage, AK to Hong Kong, Tokyo to Germany, Miami to Colombia, Luxembourg to Waterloo, the Thiel Fellow Class of 2025 are disrupting biotech, hardware, AI, crypto, & more.

Ferdinand Dabitz @FerdiDabitz
Jackson Denka @jacksondenka
Juan Ebrath @RealJPGE
Colton El-Habr
Elias Fizesan @Eliasfiz
Fabian Gruber
Carlo Kobe @CarloWKobe
Jennifer Lin @Jlindig0
Koki Mashita @koki_mashita
Soren Monroe-Anderson @soren_ma
Steven Pang @thewildstevenp
Hooman Reza Nezhad @hoomanrenezhad
Aidan Smith @aidanmantine
Teddy Warner @WarnerTeddy
Sigil Wen @0xSigil

“Per the Roman dictum “corruptio optimi pessima” - the corruption of the best is the worst - higher education is the worst institution we have. For these exceptional fellows, we are providing an alternative,”

Peter Thiel, Chairman of the Thiel Foundation.

[Aryan Agrawal @arypag_]

@ANI Why is this relevant news ?
I mean he isn’t even a celebrity for godsakes ?

[lavitalenta @lavitalenta]

Most aura I’ve ever seen

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

RFK Jr is systematically turning the USA from THE leader in science to an ideologically anti scientific backwater of quackery and pseudoscience

It will take years to come back from it.

[T.C.P. @techceopepe]

Summer vacation in Europe! Time to lose ten pounds and draw sweeping generalizations about an entire continent’s politics and economy from brief conversations with service sector employees in tourist areas

[M. @IxonicKohli]

Objects in the mirror are closer than they appear.

[vishal dayama @VishalDayama]

I have a treadmill in my bedroom. We bought it a few months ago because, as a couple, we had convinced ourselves that this was an investment our bodies would thank us for a few months down the road. As I’m typing these sentences with a lower back pain that now visits me as regularly as an unwanted elaichi in an otherwise kheer-esque skeleton, I can safely say my body isn’t thanking me. I don’t know about my wife. She still has an office to go to every morning, where she completes her quota of minimum steps required by the watch to not assume she’s dead and call the cops.

The treadmill works fine. We know this because, on the day it arrived, we unwrapped it and checked if it worked fine. Both of us ran 3 km and unanimously agreed it works fine. We were, however, left breathless and decided to let the treadmill enjoy some solitude until we were fit enough to use it again. The irony writes itself, possibly because I’m too lazy to write it.

The whole process reminded me of the air fryer we bought a year ago. We made potato wedges once and marvelled at the miracle of oil-free snacks. We haven’t had oil-free snacks since. If someone offered me 50 litres of oil in exchange for the air fryer, I would seriously consider it.

The treadmill, despite not being used for its actual purpose, has found meaning. It serves as a cloth-stand, laptop stand, lipstick-eyeliner stand (I experiment), blanket stand for when we change the sheets, but never for standing-on-it-stand. I think we would run 3 km every day if someone sent us a brand new treadmill each morning, just so we could unwrap it and check if it works. I hope that’s not asking for too much. We could even review treadmills professionally. Unfit but passionate.

I used to walk a lot. Whenever I had too much to say about situations I couldn’t control, I chose not to say it and walked instead. I walked furiously if something didn’t go my way. I walked if I fought with a teacher who cut marks for handwriting. It was maths, why does handwriting matter? I’d confront him. He’d shut me down. So I’d walk.

I used to love maths. This can be proven by one example: I once failed chemistry by a single mark, and instead of begging the chemistry teacher for a grace mark, I spent my time arguing with the maths teacher, who had cut two marks because I skipped two steps while solving a problem. A thing one often does when preparing for engineering entrances. I was fuming for not scoring full marks. I walked all the way home from school. Then once I calmed down, I returned in a rickshaw to pick up the cycle I had left behind. Then walked back home again, this time pushing the cycle. I was not a bright bulb.

I walked to vent. I walked to celebrate. I walked to distract. But I never walked just to walk. Now that I’m approaching my mid-30s, health practitioners have started recommending that I take walks. And if they tell me this in a condescending tone, I end up taking a walk, out of their office, straight to Practo, where I leave them a bad review. I imagine them furiously walking while reading it. It’s good for their health.

But yes, sometimes, I still take long walks. Sauntering, as Thoreau calls it in Walden. Long, directionless walks to break the monotony of life. I feel that with the advent of technology, we’ve lost the art of feeling lost. There are too many choices. I can become this, or that, or even the President. Perhaps Vice President, in the current context. I can take this road, or that road, or this lane, or that flyover. We have maps, examples, testimonials, videos, and blogs to check and cross-check and compare and find solace in our own mediocrity. I think the best explorers are usually the lost ones, rarely the confused ones. We, on the other hand, are mostly confused. Rarely lost. Possibly just bored.

And that is why I take these long, directionless walks without maps. To get the feeling of being lost. To make my brain work out a way on its own. To let it notice the trees as I walk into a forest. To have a rescue plan in case I do get lost. But the walk to the deep end of that forest feels important. The best things in life are always hidden. Or at least that’s what I like to believe. Every couple of years, I get bored with the current version of myself. I start despising my work, life, everything. So I look to reinvent, desperately. Like changing the layout of your living room furniture. Except the stakes are much higher. “It’s some neurosis,” my psych tells me. “Your mom is neurosis,” I tell him back. Like I said, I am not a bright bulb.

And so now I walk to resist the urge to change everything. It’s perfect, I tell myself. A lie. So I walk. And I learn piano. And I order a treadmill. And I change the layout. And the clothes I wear. And everything that has nothing to do with anything. Only to keep moving in some direction, even though I want to feel lost in that deep forest. I walk to convince myself there is no forest. There is nothing. But I hope there is. I hope for all of us to get lost one day. It will be beautiful, I think.