Pay attention to what you’re paying attention to
There are two modes of experience: appreciative, and evaluative.
Concrete example: let's say you're listening to a piece of music. Are you sinking into it, awash in emotions? You're in the appreciative mode.
Are you the mixing engineer, listening to the snare hits to make sure they're consistent? You're in the evaluative mode.
Much of sanity, and
... See moreA large percentage of people’s problems in work, love and life are due to some combination of vagueness and passivity. You don’t know what you want to spend your time on; you don’t know what kind of person you really get along with; you don’t know what kind of clothing looks good to you; you don’t know what you value in a city; you don’t know how... See more
Ava • Why You Should Write More
The Sublime Beauty That Airplanes Leave Behind
nytimes.com
Cognitive endurance refers to the capacity of independent engagement with a challenging problem, in the presence of accessible solutions. For example, a student’s cognitive endurance regulates how long they struggle with a math problem before looking up the solutions in the textbook’s appendix.
Like athletic endurance, cognitive endurance can be
... See moreBut this isn’t really about the software. It’s about what software promises us—that it will help us become who we want to be, living the lives we find most meaningful and fulfilling. The idea of research as leisure activity has stayed with me because it seems to describe a kind of intellectual inquiry that comes from idiosyncratic passion and
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Who gets to write shapes what gets to be written, which shapes what is remembered — that is the making of the collective selective memory we call history, and it is made of words. We invented words to name the world and invented power to apportion the named. It is our inventions that tell the fullest story of our nature. The range of them — the... See more