wisdom 📜

For all its chilled-out associations, the attempt to be here now is therefore still another instrumentalist attempt to use the present moment purely as a means to an end, in an effort to feel in control of your unfolding time. As usual, it doesn’t work. The self-consciousness you experience when you seek too effortfully to be “more in the moment” i... See more

All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working fr... See more

So much of social media is, by design, condensed information — it’s made to be bite-size. So the internet feels faster paced. It’s been really soothing to go to a space where I’m still meeting my desire to connect with people and talk with people, but in a digital realm that’s slower, and that is allowing for a bit more vulnerability, a bit more co... See more

Some Zen Buddhists hold that the entirety of human suffering can be boiled down to this effort to resist paying full attention to the way things are going, because we wish they were going differently (“This shouldn’t be happening!”), or because we wish we felt more in control of the process. There is a very down-to-earth kind of liberation in grasp... See more

Myself and people my age have been trained under the illusion that we can effectively eliminate any and all friction from our lives. We can work from home, Amazon prime everything we need, swipe through a limitless array of mediocre dates, text our therapist, and have a person go to the grocery store for us when we don’t feel like it, all while con... See more

But the informational value of the web has been nearly destroyed. Fake News isn’t even the biggest problem. It’s the digital ecosystem’s insistence on stifling curiosity by prioritizing ANSWERS over questions.

Most impactfully, the web has been systematically re-engineered to hinder discovery in order to drive people as quickly as possible to comme... See more

One of the fundamental choices that you face on Earth is the degree to which you’ll pursue deeper but riskier fulfillment or practice avoidance that exempts you from bad feelings but leaves you bereft of good ones.

The key to using optimism to enhance resilience is in rejecting black-and-white, either/or thinking. Resilient people use both optimism and pessimism strategically to gain the critical insights and information they need to adjust to change.