David Pennington

Sometimes when I’m parenting alone, I slip into a mental state I call “idling.” It happens when my toddler’s nearby but playing on her own, meaning I only need to pay her half of my attention.

Said differently, we try to measure what we value.

But we inevitably end up valuing what we measure.

In every organisation, whether in the public or private sector, a great inversion has taken place where the people who do actual, useful work (from surgeons to call-centre staff) find themselves working at the behest of a vast army of box-tickers and pen-pushers who demand that they must conform to a host of metrics and proxy targets so their... See more

The randomness of physical space and human recommendation created collisions between existing preferences and unfamiliar possibilities.

1 The new tool should be cheaper than the one it replaces.

2 It should be at least as small in scale as the one it replaces.

3 It should do work that is clearly and demon-strably better than the one it replaces.

4 It should use less energy than the one it replaces.

5 If possible, it should use some form of solar energy, such as that of the body.

6 It

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Today’s Young People Need to Learn How to Be Punk

The pleasure of this depraved human state lies, I think, in the contradiction: Resting in the literal physical sense, persisting in the toxic spiritual one. It’s a state that suggests a low tolerance for understimulation, a common modern condition.

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

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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.”