Thomas

“When we are deprived of green, of plants, of trees, most of us (though evidently not all of us) succumb to a demoralization of spirit which we usually blame on some psychological or neurochemical malady, until one day we find ourselves in a garden or park or countryside and feel the oppression vanish as if by magic.”

➪ Robert Harrison

It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the... See more

You could say paradigms are harder to change than anything else about a system, and therefore this item should be lowest on the list, not second-to-highest. But there’s nothing physical or expensive or even slow in the process of paradigm change. In a single individual it can happen in a millisecond. All it takes is a click in the mind, a falling... See more

When you wake up each morning, do you think: what apps do I want to use?

Or do you wonder instead: what goals do I want to achieve?

For the last decade, our smartphones — the most important computers in our lives — have forced us to think about life in a pretty specific way. “There’s an app for that!” Apple proclaimed, as they laid out the very... See more

Well, one explanation I liked quite a bit was recently written by Wall Street Journal columnist Christopher Mims, who argued that social media isn’t dying, but changing into broadcast media. The majority of the content we see on a daily basis is now made or shared by a small professional class of users, known as the creator economy. Which is making... See more

‘Metaphoric thinking is fundamental to our understanding of the world, because it is the only way in which understanding can reach outside the system of signs to life itself. It is what links language to life.’ – Iain McGilchrist