big secret to happiness is just liking stuff. finding more stuff to like. finding ways to like stuff you didn’t before. recognizing what it feels like to like something and doubling down on that. what feels frivolous is actually the whole ballgame

But busyness has a way of stealing creativity from you. Generative work, like art and writing, requires long periods of nothingness: it’s only in that wide empty space that ideas emerge. Long runs, hot showers, commutes that don’t involve harried Slack messages and listening to podcasts at 2x speed. Sitting at the edge of a dock, listening to the o... See more

quote from American Childhood (Annie Dillard):

There was joy in concentration, and the world afforded an inexhaustible wealth of projects to concentrate on. There was joy in effort, and the world resisted effort to just the right degree, and yielded to it at last. People cut Mount Rushmore into faces; they chipped here and there for years. People sl

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It seems to me that, through the way Reddit and YouTube and social media work, there’s such an emphasis on creating distinctions and communities, and it’s just created an explosion of interest in ideological sub-groupings that had been completely forgotten. I started in politics in the early ‘00s, and it just didn’t have this flavor. If you were a ... See more

Something else happens in a world of superabundance, and an attention economy. Because you can’t find what you want, you start to dig yourself into very specific niches, and join sub-groups. Everyone atomizes into millions of groups connected by very specific interests. In more benign ways, it can be great – you find your fellow travelers, and I ca... See more

Great questions don't appear

suddenly. They gradually congeal in your head. And what makes

them congeal is experience. So the way to find great questions is

not to search for them — not to wander about thinking, what great

discovery shall I make? You can't answer that; if you could, you'd

have made it.