realized this is one of the crucial reasons why life has accelerated every decade since the 1880s: we are living in an economic machine that requires greater speed to keep going—and that inevitably degrades our attention over time.

A human being is part of the whole, called by us ‘universe,’ a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separate from the rest—a kind of optical delusion of consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest

A category mistake—erroneously assigning to something a quality or action that is properly attributable only to things of another category—is behind the frequent, but deeply mistaken, conclusion that in this new, electronically enabled world everything can, and will, move much faster.[36] Information and connections do so, and so does the adoption