“If you’re spending a lot of your time not really thinking, but wasting it on switching, that’s just wasted brain-processing time.” This means that if your Screen Time shows you are using your phone four hours a day, you are losing much more time than that in lost focus.

I feel instinctively like I’ve done a good hard day of work when I have been sitting at my laptop, spotlight-focused on tapping out words—at the end of it, I feel a little Puritan rush of pride at my productivity. Our whole culture is built around this belief. Your boss wants to see you sitting at your desk every hour of the day; this is what she

we could redefine prosperity to mean having time to spend with our children, or to be in nature, or to sleep, or to dream, or to have secure work. Most people don’t want a fast life—they want a good life. Nobody lies on their deathbed and thinks about all that they contributed to economic growth. A steady-state economy can allow us to choose goals

I could see that the idea of breaking this numbing routine ignited something in him.

you need to radically limit your exposure to light before you go to sleep.

The third layer of your attention is your daylight. This is the form of focus that makes it possible for you to know what your longer-term goals are in the first place.

One day, James Williams—the former Google strategist I met—addressed an audience of hundreds of leading tech designers and asked them a simple question: “How many of you want to live in the world you are designing?” There was a silence in the room. People looked around them. Nobody put up their hand.

Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions.

we are all living through something like a denial-of-service attack on our minds.