Debbie Foster

Finally, here was the world's constantly broken promise of transcendence, the cosmic wonder I'd chased impatiently ever since I was a child, rounding every corner with an eager smile that faltered just as quickly. I'd been waiting my whole life to find a feeling this big. It was a religious conversion.

our brains have evolved this quick-acting system to examine mood and energy, which provides a general sense, in a split second, of someone’s emotional state. That’s usually enough to figure out how to align, and whether we should feel safe or alarmed.

Just as lateral roots are essential for a plant’s growth and resilience, branching out beyond your primary area of expertise can help you thrive in today’s rapidly evolving world.

Karma is a natural consequence. Badness accrues. It affects the way you live your life, how you perceive the world. When you do evil things, you see the world as petty and selfish and cruel. And what you experience in Hell is just the final ripple effect of your original evil. You get precisely what you asked for. And I think the whole point of

Fiction may represent and inform a changing reality: it can contribute to the disruption of that feedback loop. But it can't change reality on its own, by itself.

The algorithm never really "knows" you. It gives you content it thinks you'll engage with, which doesn't initially reflect your identity. Once you consume that content, though, it can and will subtly change you. You may connect more with the niche community in your filter bubble, find that you like certain memes, or start using certain catchy

Reality drizzles, then pours in. Greyness floods the skylights of the mind.

regardless of its content, the thinking process presupposes the identity of the thinker, and thereby imposes the parameters of selfhood on whatever it addresses.

If there’s anything the Enlightenment thinkers had in common, it was an insistence that we energetically apply the standard of reason to understanding our world, and not fall back on generators of delusion like faith, dogma, revelation, authority, charisma, mysticism, divination, visions, gut feelings, or the hermeneutic parsing of sacred texts.