To feel creatively and intellectually alive, you have to stop mindlessly consuming the Internet and start mindfully curating it.

By portraying our opponents as beyond persuasion, social media sorts us into ever more hostile tribes, then rewards us, with likes and shares, for the most hyperbolic denunciations of the other side, fuelling a vicious cycle that makes sane debate impossible. We mustn’t let Silicon Valley off the hook, but we should be honest: much of the time... See more

But if the deep roots of boredom are in a lack of meaning, rather than a shortage of stimuli, and if there is a subtle, multilayered process by which information can give rise to meaning, then the constant flow of information to which we are becoming habituated cannot deliver on such a promise. At best, it allows us to distract ourselves with the p... See more

In an age of distraction, nothing can feel more luxurious than paying attention.

This stems from the structure of the web — it’s a tangle of links, a jumble of interconnected ideas. It fractalizes our attention, nudging us to leave fragments of our mind trapped in open tabs like a thousand tiny horcruxes — open loops feeding off our attention until they wither away, replaced by our latest distraction.

There’s a bottleneck here:

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Now I’m trying really hard to slow down. Pay complete attention. Lately I’ve internalized there’s something so sacred about focus, rather than constantly deliberating between monitor screens and plans and side hustles. Depth rather than breadth. In a world that is increasingly accelerating — social media eyeballs and immediate gratification and a p

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