24/6: The Power of Unplugging One Day a Week

Albert Einstein: “I prefer an attitude of humility corresponding to the weakness of our intellectual understanding of nature and of our own being.”

Evolutionarily speaking, the prefrontal cortex is more recent than the amygdala, which is sometimes called the reptilian part of the brain.

Buddha said (for real this time): “Improve your character through mindful striving. Or let your character worsen through negligence and obliviousness.”

The right to two days off each week has been around for only a hundred years or so, and a lot of people campaigned tirelessly to establish it. We need it. We earned it. So why are we giving it up so easily?

nepreryvka (“continuous workweek”), weeks would now be five days long, and days off would be staggered. You might rest on day one, while your spouse rested on day three and your parents on day four. The idea was that this would let factories run continuously, with the side benefit of preventing church attendance or family gatherings. Even though th

The default mode network can take us to magical places. But we also have to get things accomplished, and when we do, the brain’s other primary process takes over. This is called the task positive network, and it switches on whenever you’re focused on a project. While the default mode network gets activated when we let our minds wander, the task pos

Each generation’s task is finding the parts of society that are good and leaving behind what’s harmful.

Social media can be very useful, but as media theorist and author of Team Human Douglas Rushkoff has argued, with good reason, it can also be antihuman, antisociety, and antisocial, driven by commercial agendas whose priorities don’t align with our own.

Later, Christian sects like the Puritans would embrace the Sabbath too. The Sabbath fit well with their overall work ethic (since the command to rest one day was complemented by the need to work the other six). In her book The Sabbath World, culture critic Judith Shulevitz posits that the Sabbath would lead, in part, to the founding of the United S