Stefan Drashan

performer Laurie Anderson’s

It’s not a penalty to spend time alone. It’s an opportunity—to exist totally free of anyone else’s expectations, or your smartphone.

One of the final challenges—“observe something else”—urges readers to go somewhere (“a park, a mall, a gas station, a café”), sit awhile, and just look. “Pause and imagine what a single person is thinking,”

“The best way to complain is to make things.”

IMAGINE WHAT SOMEONE IS THINKING

There’s no reason to learn how to show you’re paying attention, if you are in fact paying attention. —CELESTE HEADLEE

You must devise a story whose ending you’ll never know, even though you are the one telling it.

Barry Schwartz, a Swarthmore psychology professor and the author of The Paradox of Choice—argue