"My mind begins to seem like a video game: I can either play it intelligently, learning more in each round, or I can be killed in the same spot by the same monster, again and again."
That’s what commitments are—alternatives to self-obsession. Commitments free us to dedicate ourselves to something bigger than ourselves—to something beyond our shells. The French philosopher Jacques Maritain said that the meaning of life is “self-mastery for the purpose of self-giving.” This is the challenge of growing up—to turn the corner from... See more
people building tech products so often miss the point
the point is to help people live a good life, not an efficient life
the point is resonance, not scale
the point is to deliver comfort, not just convenience
the goal is not... See more
Hamish McKenzie: On social media, posers are often given the most status points, and so we’re left with a misleading idea of authority; it seems the people who are loudest in their claims to be experts — the ones we hear from most on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube — are the ones to be most wary of. When self-proclaimed experts are ultimately... See more
In this essay, I question some of the consensus beliefs about sleep, such as the need for at least 7 hours of sleep for adults, harmfulness of acute sleep deprivation, and harmfulness of long-term sleep deprivation and our inability to adapt to it.It appears that the evidence for all of these beliefs is much weaker than sleep scientists and public... See more