Laura Pike Seeley

Emotional regulation is the process of experiencing an emotion, allowing the sensations to pass through the body (rather than trying to distract oneself with, say, drugs or alcohol or an iPhone or food), identifying it (‘I am angry right now’ or ‘I am sad’), and breathing through it until it eventually passes. The practise of emotional regulation

... See more

How many of these things we produce is not productivity. How you spend your life is.

Perhaps the most important insight is this: when we criticize our technology, we’re really criticizing ourselves. And when we try to imagine better systems, we’re really trying to imagine better ways of being human.

The more I think about it, the more I think this is why so many of us, myself included, are attracted to data-based optimization. We’re painfully aware that we are vulnerable, fallible creatures. Our shame about that is reflected in Western religious traditions: The Bible tells us that upon first creating the world, God “saw that it was good,” but... See more

We’re at the dawn of something big and unknown. New technologies are shaping the future in ways we haven’t even thought of yet. Some of them will have extraordinary benefits, while others, through unforeseen capabilities or even sinister intentions, may have unwanted consequences. But as designers, it’s up to us to explore them early, dive into

... See more

Your milieu is not the same as your sister’s. It is an ever-shifting, individual configuration of information flows. The Twitter feed you have curated is a milieu. Your friend group (which is not the same as the friend groups of the other people in that group!) is a milieu.

It is by changing your milieu that you change yourself.

one of the latest big theories in neuroscience says that humans are fundamentally creatures of prediction, and not only is creativity not at odds with that, but it actually goes hand in hand with improving our predictive power. Life itself, in this view, is one big process of creatively optimizing prediction as a survival strategy in a universe... See more

It's a complex mess that'll ultimately require a ledger of interventions to remedy in full -- but last week, scientists presented an intriguing way to help alleviate the burden.