Keely Adler

Here are just a few examples of the brown rice and potatoes versus peanut M&Ms and Swedish fish tradeoff that most people face every day: junk food vs. nourishing food; deep-focus work vs. distraction; scrolling social media vs. reading a book; porn vs. intimate relationships; retweets and likes vs. building a deep community; heavy drinking vs.... See more

Selling out is usually more a matter of buying in. Sell out, and you're really buying into someone else's system of values, rules and rewards.

“The world is so huge now, it feels endless… When you go into a fantasy universe, it’s smaller, you can focus.”

All of this comes down to the capitalist belief that life should be a straight line that keeps going up. Every month, my Apple Watch entices me with a shiny badge if I exercise more than I did in the previous month, despite the inevita

bility of me eventually getting ill or tired or needing to take a break. So much corporate gamification sees that

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“For a very long period of time, our index of negativity in American news articles fluctuated around a stable average,” the UPenn economist J. H. van Binsbergen, a co-author on the paper, told me. But since the 1970s, negativity has gone haywire. “News coverage has just gotten more and more negative every decade in the last 50 years, especially

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"as I went on to discover, each time I wrote a book on some subject outside my immediate field it gave me courage and incentive to do another one that was perhaps even farther outside the narrow range of my training. As I did so, of course, I found that I had to educate myself. When the time came, I read biology, medicine, and geology. I collected... See more

To be a gardener is to give a fuck. To be a gardener is to be invested in a place—to know it, to protect it, to be present to it. How can we protect and heal ourselves and our planet if we’re not willing to step into, and value, the role of the gardener?

What is authenticity? Of course there’s no such thing, but that hasn’t stopped anyone from believing in it. Nearly 80 years of anthropology research on authenticity-seeking behavior reveal authenticity to be one of the stickiest modern superstitions. The bulk of the early research is about tourism, an activity frequently motivated by a search for... See more