Reclaim The Brain

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.

THE POORLY DEFINED PROBLEM OF BEING ALIVE

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... See more

But boredom is when life happens.

In 1938 humans were offered three global stories to choose from, in 1968 just two, and in 1998 a single story seemed to prevail. In 2018 we are down to zero. No wonder that the liberal elites, who dominated much of the world in recent decades, are in a state of shock and disorientation. To have one story is the most reassuring situation of all.

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

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.

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

“We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them,” she insisted, “but by waiting for them.”3