Jenna Guarascio

Every time you choose the summary over the story, you're performing surgery on your own brain. You're cutting away the neural pathways that let you sit still, that let you stay curious, that let mystery work its slow magic on your bones. You become a creature of surfaces, skimming endlessly across the water but never learning to breathe underwater.... See more

We've built temples to the lie that you can skip the line on your own life, that growth is just another thing you can Amazon Prime to your doorstep.

We want the wisdom without the patient work of becoming wise.

This compression culture doesn't just change how we think, but I argue it changes what we expect from every aspect of human experience! We've trained ourselves to believe that complexity can always be whittled down, that difficulty can always be optimized away, that transformation should be instant and effortless.

We've created a culture that treats depth like inefficiency. One that wants love without awkwardness, wisdom without confusion, transformation without the growing pains that crack us open and rebuild us from the inside out. And in doing so, we've accidentally engineered away the most essentially human experiences: the productive confusion of not kn... See more

But somewhere along the way, perhaps with the rise of industrial efficiency, perhaps with the commodification of education, perhaps with the acceleration of information capitalism, we began to mistake information for knowledge, and knowledge for wisdom. We began to believe that the value of an experience could be separated from the experience itsel... See more

Depersonalisation is what happens when people feel not exactly lonely, but rather profoundly invisible. What is missing here is what scholars call ‘recognition’, ‘mattering’ or ‘being seen’ – the notion that you are seen and heard, even emotionally understood, by the people around you, as opposed to feeling insignificant or invisible to others.

We need strategic investments in creation over extraction while acknowledging that the attention economy is a part of that. But it doesn't have to be the dominant logic of resource allocation. It doesn’t need to be so extractive.

Treating attention as infrastructure rather than a market to be optimized. Right now, we treat attention like a commodity. It’s something to be mined, optimized, and sold to the highest bidder. But attention is infrastructure! It’s the invisible highway that ideas, identities, and institutions travel on. We have to invest in it like we would a high... See more