People argue they use social media to keep in touch with family and friends. Luckily, there is something called email and the telephone. It is only in two-way mediums, where we must contend with the reality of another person, that real relationship forms and grows. Passive one-way consumption of someone’s life only creates the illusion of... See more

The transformative moments in my life only came when the pain of staying the same finally became greater than the pain of changing.

those are the qualities screens reward, we lose the capacity to think in paragraphs, to think hard about the same thing for half an hour, to practice any kind of sustained attention.

The goal isn’t entertainment. The goal isn’t even distraction. The goal is addiction4.

“At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people

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Suffer until you get sick of your suffering.

Most of a good life is simply refusing to do what is bad.

This, mind you, is the best definition of addiction I’ve come across: something that makes you feel terrible, but the only way to feel better, it seems, is to do it again.

I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much time he is willing to spend being passively entertained.