David Pennington

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.

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 decline of polymathy... is a crisis of too much information.

“People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.”

"The Chinese say you need three things for paintings: the hand, the eye and the heart,” says the painter David Hockney. “I think that remark is very, very good. Two won’t do. A good eye and heart is not enough, neither is a good hand and eye.”

If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today’s internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart. The consumer isn’t winning when they are addicted to a product that makes them unhappy, and when they are spending hours each day using products they would pay money to make disappear.

Instantaneous access to everything obviously comes at a cost. The cost being that we all behave like demented Roman emperors, at once bored and deranged, summoning whatever we want at any time.

The more I heal, the less ambitious I become.