Debbie Foster

She was asking me to describe myself as if I was a horse I owned when actually I was more like a radio program, an ongoing narration that I could barely recall.

The nature of user-generated content means that anyone can have a platform, removing agency from the prescriptive powers that be and kick-starting an entirely new decolonization of language.

there's a particular fulfillment that we only get from narrativizing reality, from the satisfaction of familiar procedure and familiar if incorrect facts, from reducing public institutions and individuals into something we can easily grasp. This, I think, holds the key to why this kind of story takes up so much space in most of our lives, and why

The human brain really likes simplicity, and algorithms appeal to the brain's subconscious desires, so naturally the algorithm will push stories and categories that feel satisfyingly simple to us. Readily understandable labels and explanations are not only easier to consume; they feel better to consume.

trend away from describing natural phenomena in terms of causes and effects to instead describing them in terms of information and its transformations.

Knowing is not enough. Knowing too much can encourage us to procrastinate. There's a certain point when continuing to know at the expense of doing allows the mess to grow further

Success is the lifelong experiment of discovering what makes you feel most alive.

A central tenet of Buddhism is that the self is illusory. We are more than our conscious minds and we are wrong to think of our autobiographical self as a 'true self'. Freud's 'ego' is also illusory, insofar as it generates a misleadingly comprehensive sense of selfhood, whereas in reality it is only a small part of a much larger, opaque totality.

… we'll even add an extra opening strategy called the Gen Z shake. As soon as a creator starts their video with the phone in their hand, they'll set it down on a surface, causing the viewer's perspective to suddenly shake. This is a very deliberate, planned tactic meant to visually disrupt scrolling patterns and capture attention at the beginning