David Pennington

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.”

The internet doesn’t have to demand our presence the way it currently does. It shouldn’t be something we have to look at all time. If it wasn’t, maybe we’d finally be free to hang out. The first time I ever heard about Facebook, back in 2004, was from someone proudly declaring that she had just spent four hours using it. At the time, it was... See more

Stories don’t sell, they invite and inspire.

In the 1960s, psychologist Jerome Singer, the grandfather of daydreaming studies, identified three kinds of mind-­wandering: the productive, creative “positive constructive daydreaming,” obsessive “guilty–­dysphoric daydreaming,” and “poor attentional control.” Singer believed daydreaming was a positive adaptive behavior—­a bold departure from the... See more

Narrative medicine is the discipline of applying the skills used in analyzing literature to interviewing patients.[1] The premise of narrative medicine is that how a patient speaks about his or her illness or complaint is analogous to how literature offers a plot (an interconnected series of events) with characters (the patient and others) and is... See more

“Under the pretext of saving labor, the ultimate end of this technics is to displace life, or rather, to transfer the attributes of life to the machine and the mechanical collective, allowing only so much of the organism to remain as may be controlled and manipulated.”

So this is what’s happened to the world: optimization trumps human preference. The people who want to win the argument are effectively prepared to ignore human truths to preserve the integrity of the artificial model.