What does it really mean to be in charge of your own mind? In many aspects of life, it’s easier to say what we don’t want than it is to say what we do. We don’t want to be screen-addled, apocalypse-minded nervous wrecks, incapable of reading for more than a quarter-hour at a time—fair enough. But who do we want to be? Maybe we just want to be... See more

In her book “Tiny Experiments: How to Live Freely in a Goal-Obsessed World,” the writer Anne-Laure Le Cunff identifies “the self-consistency fallacy” as “the assumption that ‘I have always acted in a certain way; therefore, I must continue to act in this way.’ ” She suggests making adventurous “pacts” with yourself and seeing where they lead.... See more

All of which is to say that cultivating a healthy, creative digital life can easily become an absorbing pursuit unto itself. It’s a little like setting out to clean your house, and then growing interested in interior design. You might start re-cluttering your house with new, tasteful objects.

Impersonality is one of those big ideas that scholars can elucidate forever. It sounds abstract, but on some level it has a simple meaning: seeing yourself less as a fixed point and more as a container.

Modernists like Woolf developed an attitude, which T. S. Eliot called “impersonality,” meant to reclaim their mental lives from the habits they unknowingly followed. The philosopher Raymond Geuss has a story that captures the idea nicely. Geuss recalls a mentor—a school teacher of his—dispensing advice about becoming a visual artist. “Set aside... See more