I have noticed that when all the lights are on, people tend to talk about what they are doing – their outer lives. Sitting round in candlelight or firelight, people start to talk about how they are feeling – their inner lives. They speak subjectively, they argue less, there are longer pauses.

To sit alone without any electric light is curiously crea... See more

There was an interesting note in Alexander Obenauer’s lab notes about notifications, and this line stuck out to me: “fundamentally, the way notifications work in modern OSes is backwards: someone else decides when (and how often) my device wakes up to interrupt what I’m doing.” In the earlier internet days, you went to a fun website or read the lat... See more

I used to know someone with epilepsy who told me that sometimes, after a seizure, he felt like everyone he saw looked familiar. I find that fascinating. It suggests that “meaningful adjacencies” might be a kind of error, a useful error. When I’m starting an essay, if it seems to only be about one thing, there’s often a kind of inertness to it. But ... See more

We like to pretend that our generous impulses come naturally. But the reality is we often become our kindest, most ethical selves only by seeing what it feels like to be a selfish jackass first. It's the reason... we have to get burned before we understand the power of fire; the reason our most meaningful relationships are so often those that cont

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 Attention is a finite resource, and how we choose to spend our attention online is, in some ways, a direct reflection of where human culture has gone in an era where access to information is basically unlimited. We are very much in our teenage years—that is, we suddenly have all these new capabilities and it’s really easy to just run wild. Bu... See more

Anything that I’ve ever been successful at has taken at least 10 years of hard work and anonymous toil to get to that place. I’m an ultra-endurance athlete as an athlete, but also in the way that I’ve approached doing anything in life. There are no shortcuts to mastery. Although there are tips and tricks that people do to accelerate growth, I’m not... 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.

Now I’m trying really hard to slow down. Pay complete attention. Lately I’ve internalized there’s something so sacred about focus, rather than constantly deliberating between monitor screens and plans and side hustles. Depth rather than breadth. In a world that is increasingly accelerating — social media eyeballs and immediate gratification and a p... See more

There are two ways to make the world more mesmerizing: to seek out new and increasingly intense experiences, or to loosen the filters that make ordinary experience “ordinary”. You can go skydiving, or you can meditate for long enough that walking feels like skydiving. Either way, I think what we’re seeking is an escape back into what we used to be,... See more