Reclaim The Brain

When you reduce yourself to a product, you sacrifice the very essence of what makes you unique. Your quirks, your weirdness, your vulnerabilities, your authentic self-these are the things that resonate with others, not a polished, palatable persona. The impactful creators understand this.

One of the take-home lessons of Buddhist philosophy is that feelings just are. If we accepted their arising and subsiding as part of life, rather than reacting to them as if they were deeply meaningful, we’d often be better off. Learning to do that is a big part of what mindfulness meditation is about.

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.

If you do not deep read, you do not cultivate a capacity to think, imagine, and create; you therefore may not realize that anything more satisfying than a video game even exists.

Freud defined depression as anger turned inwards. There’s some truth to this for sure, but I think the great existential psychologist Rollo May defined it more accurately: “Depression is the inability to construct a future.”

Everybody wants to play in the Stream, but no one wants to build the Garden.

The point Klinenberg wanted to make was this: If there was no such thing as a library, and someone proposed it today, there's a 99.9% chance they and their “radical and crazy idea” would be laughed out of the room.

But, as we know, it’s not a crazy idea.