those who obsessively travel will tell you people are overwhelmingly good, while those who obsessively scroll will tell you people are overwhelmingly bad.

as someone who studies culture for a living, I can feel the violence of so easily dismissing people and places. The way it denies their humanity and creates false binaries. I know there is a lot of really important stuff to be vigilant against right now, but the best activists and leaders and researchers I know see issues as good and bad, but

Grief is so metabolizing, but we shouldn’t wait for death to access it. We should actively build grief rituals for ourselves like we would any other mental health practice.

Death and grief are great forcing functions that collapse all of your false narratives. It’s a vacuum cleaner for a messy mind, especially in a culture where we let nothing die, which means nothing can be reborn. It is a gift for the living in that way.

One of the keynote speakers on stage said that of all people who go on bereavement leave after a loved one dies, half of them will quit their jobs within one year .

Intelligence sits somewhere between channeling the future and creating it.

Woo-curious might be the best term for me. But I can stretch my mind to the idea of some sort of collective or universal intelligence. If there is a greater collective “brain”, I think it would have to be predictive, too.

As Mark Miller put it to us, the brain is not a passive receiver of sensory information. It’s constantly generating predictions about what the world should be, and using sensory input only to correct the errors in those predictions. You are not perceiving the world, you are perceiving your brain’s best guess.

The new scientific consensus is that the brain actually “sees” very little. Instead it constructs much of our reality through prediction. The vast majority of what we see and perceive is actually a predictive model.