You Don't Need To Document Everything

Look at how we’ve changed the capturing of the passing of time. Before we rewired our brains to connect personal with commercial, down time as wasted opportunity, we used to talk about our accomplishments as memories. We remember the marathon we ran, the little moments that made that day feel so significant. That marathon included training, but we ... See more

Platforms like TikTok and Instagram are engines of distraction and cultural rot. They stand in front of the more difficult but more rewarding aspects of life: deep work, intimate connections with friends and loved ones, focused attention for hobbies with intrinsic rewards. By training users to crave constant novelty and the immediate approval of an... See more

So sometimes, it’s not about hoarding every moment as much as being able to value the experiences you’ve had. Because if you have one experience that is valuable that you could draw upon later on from the past week, that’s a whole lot better than mindlessly documenting everything you’ve ever done for the last week, right? And that’s going to be mor... See more

We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment. We frame... See more