Sarah Owen

Thus we stumble across a new standard for productivity: non-self-coercion. If you wouldn't vociferously berate your coworkers or roommates for their various foibles and inefficiencies, why do you keep behaving as if it’s acceptable to do it to yourself?

“The digital architecture of social media privileges the expression of emotions. It privileges the audiovisual over the written, the controversial over the moderate. All of this makes us more emotional.”

In a famous paper, ‘Are ideas getting harder to find?’, Nicholas Bloom and collaborators found that research productivity has been falling quite dramatically since the 1970s. Their data suggests that it now takes 18 times as many resources as it did then to work out how to double the number of transistors on a microchip.

- at age 26, 30% of Americans live in the census tract they lived in at 16

- 58% live less than 10 miles away- 80 percent live less than 100 miles away- 90 percent live less than 500 miles away

"We are constantly negotiating with the pesky figure of the algorithm, unsure how we would have behaved if we’d been left to our own devices. No wonder we are made anxious"

Solastalgia is a new concept developed to give greater meaning and clarity to environmentally induced distress.

"Can I just say though that I hate the word metamodernism? If we’re going to try to define this era of literature I’d rather keep the Enlightenment going."