“There’s a model called the optimal stimulation model. It says that animals and we humans have a level of stimulation that we prefer. And when it gets below that, we search for stimulation.

So, yeah, we all care and are all affected by cues around our social rank and influence. But most of us suppress the revolutionary, Che Guevarra-like instinct this can incite. Instead, we feign that we’re above the subtle status reminders we face every day. We soothe ourselves and undercut the high-status people by telling ourselves things like,

We overreact more than we underreact—another tendency that helped us survive in the past. Like a smoke alarm. It rings the same whether the smoke is from lightly burnt microwave popcorn or a massive blaze.

If we know we’ll receive a reward but aren’t sure when, we get sucked in. We experience a sort of exciting, suspenseful anxiety as we wait to see whether this occasion will deliver the good stuff. Our brains hone in on unpredictability. They naturally suppress systems that take in other information, and we fixate on whatever is unpredictable. One

We prefer metrics. So our attention and values naturally shift toward what’s easily measurable at scale and away from all these other, more complicated things that matter more.”

The scientists call this the “overblown implications effect.” It’s a wing of the “spotlight effect,” which is how we overestimate how much other people think of us. It’s as if we believe we were living in our own prime-time television show—The [Insert Your Name] Show—with the spotlight always on us. But the reality is this: we’re usually too

By detaching from material things, the monks are freer to attach to a bigger thing. If everything is everyone’s, nothing takes on any special significance beyond another tool for the job. It’s gear, not stuff.

it doesn’t matter how much gas we give good new habits; if we don’t resolve our bad ones, we still have our foot on the brake. And I’d begun noticing a unique signature of the behaviors that hurt us most. We can quickly repeat them.

I realized my own “online brain” was acting like a middleman preventing me from having genuinely new experiences. We rarely enter completely unknown worlds anymore. Like, I can’t do anything without googling it first.