Thomas

Theoretically, a social media feed should heighten awareness and memory, and dilate time, because it selects for content that’s exciting, outrageous, and scary. And yet we seldom remember such content. The reason for this discrepancy is simple: when every post is alarming, your brain quickly becomes desensitised, and starts to interpret alarming co... See more

‘The food is wet and crunchy, and tastes of all the cutting-up she just did to it,’ Brown writes: a sentence that stops the reader in their tracks.

Grow a Garden recently blew past the Epic Games shooter Fortnite to set a record for most users playing simultaneously, at more than 20 million. Cumulatively, Grow a Garden has already been played more than 12 billion times.There are Roblox games that have been played more, but they took years to get where they are, versus a few months for Grow a G... See more

“Children don’t see the world, don’t observe the world, don’t contemplate the world, but are so deeply immersed in the world that they don’t distinguish between it and their own selves.” - Karl Ove Knausgaard, Autumn

What did Huxley believe would bring about this dystopia? Not a global world order or a charismatic despot: “The change will be brought about as a result of a felt need for increased efficiency.”

“By paying a certain kind of attention, you can humanise or dehumanise, cherish or strip of all value. By a kind of alienating, fragmenting and focal attention, you can reduce humanity – or art, sex, humour, or religion – to nothing. You can so alienate yourself from a poem that you stop seeing the poem at all, and instead come to see in its place ... See more

Equanimity helps us see the world with spacious awareness – and that is a world from which we feel less divided. When we feel most separate from the world, that is when we experience most profoundly all the limiting conditions from which we seek relief: anxiety, depression, anger, loneliness, boredom and meaninglessness. Equanimity offers a path th... See more

Wandering is thus intrinsic to the operation of equanimity. One opens toward being affected by things as yet unexperienced or unknown. The world becomes an expansive horizon of possibilities.