First We Shape Our Social Graph; Then It Shapes Us
![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article0.00998d930354.png)
Metadata
Highlights
- I’ve been using the word culture so far, but that is not the exact word for what I am gesturing at. It is not the wider culture we internalize; it is the particular set of influences that surround us, what Tim Urban has called “our unique cultural intersection”
- To write what I was meant to write, I had to find another audience, which—because I didn’t know how to curate a milieu yet—meant I had to spend the better part of a decade isolated. It was bleak but necessary. Even now, having found you, I need to return to that solitude from time to time. Or else I lose myself.
- What you want to create is a distributed apprenticeship in the art of being you. You want to assemble a set of influences you can observe and imitate, and peers and mentors that can give you feedback on how well you converge with that model of yourself.
title: “First We Shape Our Social Graph; Then It Shapes Us”
author: “escapingflatland.substack.com”
url: ”https://escapingflatland.substack.com/p/first-we-shape-our-social-graph-then”
date: 2023-12-19
source: hypothesis
tags: media/articles
First We Shape Our Social Graph; Then It Shapes Us
![rw-book-cover](https://readwise-assets.s3.amazonaws.com/static/images/article0.00998d930354.png)
Metadata
Highlights
- I’ve been using the word culture so far, but that is not the exact word for what I am gesturing at. It is not the wider culture we internalize; it is the particular set of influences that surround us, what Tim Urban has called “our unique cultural intersection”
- To write what I was meant to write, I had to find another audience, which—because I didn’t know how to curate a milieu yet—meant I had to spend the better part of a decade isolated. It was bleak but necessary. Even now, having found you, I need to return to that solitude from time to time. Or else I lose myself.
- What you want to create is a distributed apprenticeship in the art of being you. You want to assemble a set of influences you can observe and imitate, and peers and mentors that can give you feedback on how well you converge with that model of yourself.