feature or a bug?
how advantages can be disadvantages and strengths can be weaknesses
feature or a bug?
Our cognitive apparatus is designed, at least in part, to sustain us in the long term rather than balm us in the near term.
Daniel H. Pink • The Power of Regret: How Looking Backward Moves Us Forward
We should accept that our brains are strange, delicate instruments that evade our direct commands and are perplexingly talented at warding off the very ideas that might save us or help us flourish.
The School of Life • How to Think More Effectively: A guide to greater productivity, insight and creativity (Work series)
I developed the governing impression that our minds are wonderful explanation machines, capable of making sense out of almost anything, capable of mounting explanations for all manner of phenomena, and generally incapable of accepting the idea of unpredictability.
Nassim Nicholas Taleb • The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable (Incerto Book 2)
“Contrary to popular belief, time does not heal, time does not fly, time does not do anything. Time has no consciousness. It does nothing for you. The key to happiness now is what you choose to do with your time right now. Are you, right now, making the most valuable use of your time? This moment is, after all, the time of your life. Your choices... See more
The human mind is a remarkable contraption, great at keeping us psychologically buoyant in periods of chaos and allowing us to pay the price later, once the storm has settled.
Rob Henderson • Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class
II.
Writer and activist James Baldwin on the power of reading:
"You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read. It was Dostoevsky and Dickens who taught me that the things that tormented me most were the very things that connected me with all the people who were alive, or who ever had been
... See morehuman belief systems are good at absorbing contradictions into their thinking.
Richard Holloway • Stories We Tell Ourselves: Making Meaning in a Meaningless Universe
Nobody ever figures out what life is all about, and it doesn't matter. Explore the world. Nearly everything is really interesting if you go into it deeply enough.
Richard Feynman
“Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be cumbered with your old nonsense.”
— Ralph Waldo Emerson
— Ralph Waldo Emerson