Alex Dobrenko

Under these conditions, in which strategy is constantly privileged over passionate feelings and deeply felt principles are constantly misread as strategy, emotional divestment from public life becomes not just tempting but unavoidable.

Taking notes, I’ve come to realize, is a form of collecting. I’ve never been interested in collecting physical things, but when it comes to beautiful literary quotes, I have thousands of notebook entries.

Tidying is the act of confronting yourself

“The problem with things that release a lot of dopamine all at once is that our brains have to compensate. But this is really the key point — our brains don’t just then bring our dopamine firing back to baseline level,” she said. “It actually pushes dopamine levels below baseline. We go into a dopamine deficit state. That’s the way the brain... See more

His answer was original and counterintuitive: To Schrödinger, the essence of our aliveness is not that we eat, drink, and bonk.

This is what I do for everything I post:

1. Write all of my thoughts on a subject.


2. Argue against those ideas.


3. Explore different angles until I’m sick of it.


4. Leave it for a few days or years, then repeat those steps.


5. Hate how messy these thoughts have become.


6. Reduce them to a tiny outline of the key points.


7. Post the outline. Trash the rest.