Learning to Love Difficult Beauty

Nicole Seah (X, Substack, LinkedIn), aka Nix, is a writer at Starting From Nix and investor at Costanoa Ventures. She recently launched New Ontologies, where she profiles founders and companies thinking ambitiously about the future. Her first piece is live now, on Ando: the team building a chat platform for the era of agents.

Nicole balances identities with poise, moving between the literary and the practical. I spoke to her about different kinds of beauty and how it takes us out of ourselves, Nietzsche’s case for tolerating strangeness, and choosing reality over fantasy. Then we discuss duality and balancing intensity and lightness, and talk through Borges, Hesse, Miyazaki, Alyssa Liu, and Joan Didion. Nicole argues that freedom comes from not collapsing yourself into a single identity. I asked her about the drive behind New Ontologies, her obsession with techne, and Rebecca Solnit's "cosmology of self.” We then skate across a range of ideas, including memory, appetite and desire, and friendship and why other people’s unknowability is part of what makes them wonderful.

I hope this conversation inspires you to look for and love what is real, to be patient with and attuned to the multiple people inside you, and to give freely with your creative life.

Full transcript and all links and references: dialectic.fm/nix.

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Timestamps:

• 00:00 - Opening Highlights
• 01:14 - Intro to Nicole
• 02:04 - Thanks to Notion
• 03:48 - Start: Beauty — Effort, Attention, Strangeness
• 19:59 - Fantasy and Reality
• 29:41 - Multiple Identities, Intensity, and Lightness
• 49:08 - New Ontologies: Profiling Founders Building the Future
• 1:08:57 - Memory, Lineage, and Process
• 1:18:41 - Appetite and Honesty
• 1:23:47 - Friendship, Proximity, and The Unknowability of the Other
• 1:41:18 - Closing Notes: Solitude, Noticing, and Generosity
• 1:53:40 - Thanks Again to Notion