juarry

Second Machine Age, written by the MIT economists Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee.

grew to know many of the people around me better than they knew themselves, but in that process, I lost me

When it comes to belonging, I asked: What are people trying to achieve? What are they worried about?

In the shadow life, we live in denial and we act by addiction.

The stopwatch starts when they decide to find a replacement for you, and it stops when they find one that meets their new standard. Boom. That amount of time is a direct measurement of how compelling your positioning is. If you are positioned well, then they find very few substitutes.

The amateur fears, above all else, becoming (and being seen and judged as) himself. Becoming himself means being different from others and thus, possibly, violating the expectations of the tribe,

“Our main leisure activity is, by a long shot, participating in experiences that we know are not real.”

The more we reduce our experiences—transcendent, fraught, delightful, frightening, whatever they may be—to a series of stark data points and engineered touch points, the more we chase the magic out of them.

They did, however, commit to assessing their lives and forming their opinions of people based on their actual, in-person experiences