Reclaim The Brain

The scientific virtues are:

• Stupidity


• Arrogance


• Laziness


• Carefreeness


• Beauty


• Rebellion


• Humor

But boredom is when life happens.

But solitude and loneliness are not one and the same. “It is actually a very healthy emotional response to feel some loneliness,” the NYU sociologist Eric Klinenberg told me. “That cue is the thing that pushes you off the couch and into face-to-face interaction.” The real problem here, the nature of America’s social crisis, is that most Americans d... See more

Basic dynamic in life: there is nothing meaningful enough to make you happy that could not make you sad if you lost it. This is the paradox of feeling, and it’s inherent and existential. If things inspire real positive emotion in you then they are necessarily things in which you are sufficiently invested that you would feel negative emotions when t... See more

She thought about that for a moment. “But it’s so boring,” she said. “Yes, that’s true,” I said. “Boredom is not just boring. It can also be terrifying. It forces us to come face-to-face with bigger questions of meaning and purpose. But boredom is also an opportunity for discovery and invention. It creates the space necessary for a new thought to f

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Mary Oliver said, “Attention is the beginning of devotion.”

Key points – How to revive your sense of wonder

Wondering is rewarding. By embracing wonder – your drive to learn about the world – you can deepen your appreciation of the world’s richness and engage more fully with others.

Wonder commonly declines with age – but it doesn’t have to. A childhood boom in wondering often subsides as people grow up, yet ... See more

As a method, marginalia remind us that all annotation is allusive, that all literature is connected to everything else, that the reader influences the writer as surely as the other way around, and even if the later has been dead for centuries.