Alex Dobrenko

“All depression has its roots in self-pity, and all self-pity is rooted in people taking themselves too seriously.”

At the time Switters had disputed her assertion. Even at seventeen, he was aware that depression could have chemical causes.

“The key word here is roots,” Maestra had countered. “The roots of depression. For most people, self-awareness... See more

if I wanted to use the web in a personal way, it seemed better to do so through social media. But this felt like a job too! Everything in social media is explicitly quantified with likes and shares and retweets. All the platforms have a notification bar to show you which random utterance of yours was gaining in popularity, implying that you could... See more

I don’t think back on those days too often, but with Matthew Perry’s death, the memories have coiled around me because of how honest he was about his own addiction. I want to tell you something about addiction: No matter who it is or what substance that person is hooked on, loneliness is at its root. For whatever reason — and I have no theory as to... See more

The sense of danger must not disappear:

The way is certainly both short and steep,

However gradual it looks from here;

Look if you like, but you will have to leap.

~W.H. Auden, “Leap Before You Look,” December 1940

“If there is such a thing as human perfection, it seems to emerge precisely from how we handle the imperfection that is everywhere, especially our own.”

—Richard Rohr

Nature is full of patterns and we humans love finding them, creating them, repeating them. That’s at the core of language, math, music, and even ritual, which is the repetition of words or actions deemed worthy of representing something bigger than ourselves. Some rituals are very private, some are very public. Some are so commonplace we don’t even

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Take the Light Phone for example. The dumb phones trend might be making a comeback, but the realization that led to the Light Phone occurred somewhere in 2014, ironically in a Google incubator that sought to find ideas for new apps.

The $300 “dumb phone” wasn’t set to improve the smartphone as a form factor. Moreover, it didn’t follow the expected... See more