The issue, just like exercise, is that each time you build, the high becomes slightly harder to achieve. Part of your hormonal reward is based on the fact the thing you just built has never been built before. It’s novel and your brain commensurately rewards the new because it has learned after millions of years of evolution that doing so is collectively good for our species.
~ Rands from, Busy is an Addiction
slip:4uraai5.
ɕ
Less well known is Prometheus’ second gift. In Aeschylus’ “Prometheus Bound,” the chained Titan is pitilessly interrogated by the chorus. They ask him whether he gave human beings anything else. Yes, he says, “I stopped mortals from foreseeing doom.” How did you do that, they ask? His response is revealing: “I sowed in them blind hopes.”
~ Simon Critchley, from Abandon (Nearly) All Hope
slip:4unyaa1.
ɕ
If you are thinking about buying a new car, you suddenly see people driving them all over the roads. If you just ended a long-time relationship, every song you hear seems to be written about love. If you are having a baby, you start to see them everywhere.
Confirmation bias is seeing the world through a filter, thinking selectively.
The examples above are a sort of passive version of the phenomenon. The real trouble begins when confirmation bias distorts your active pursuit of facts.
~ David McRaney from, Confirmation Bias
slip:4uyoco2.
ɕ
If you think you can buy your way to individuality, well, you are not so smart.
Since the 1940s, when capitalism and marketing married psychology and public relations, the market has been getting much better and more efficient at offering you something to purchase no matter your taste.
~ David McRaney from, Selling Out
slip:4uyose2.
ɕ
The short version is that as the climate degrades and fossil fuels become simultaneously more expensive and less useable, each generation inherits from its more prosperous ancestors an infrastructure that it can’t afford to maintain. Society muddles through from year to year — sometimes even seeming to advance — until some part of that poorly maintained infrastructure snaps and causes major destruction. The destroyed area may get rebuilt, but not to its previous level. The resulting community has less infrastructure to maintain, but is also less prosperous, and so the cycle continues into the next generation.
~ Doug Muder from, Infrastructure, Suburbs, and the Long Descent to Ferguson
slip:4uweia1.
He draws heavily from John Michael Greer’s The Long Descent.
ɕ
This is not to say that nostalgia is our inescapable fate. The lesson I am trying to draw from reflecting on the examples of Snowden and the N.F.L. is not that the thrill ends early. Rather, in their extremity these examples bring out something else. For most of us, as our lives unfold we simply do not, we cannot, know whether we have peaked in an area of our lives — or in our lives themselves — in ways that are most important to us. The past weighs upon us, not because it must cancel the future, but because it is of uncertain heft.
~ Todd May from, The Weight of the Past – The New York Times
slip:4unyte1.
ɕ
Self-perception theory says you observe your own behavior and then, after the fact, make up a story to explain it. That story is sometimes close to the truth, and sometimes it is just something nice that makes you feel better about being a person.
~ David McRaney from, The Overjustification Effect – You Are Not So Smart
slip:4uyote1.
ɕ
Everyone here has done this, of course. But it hasn’t yet been part of you graduates’ actual life routine, day after week after month after year.
But it will be. And many more dreary, annoying, seemingly meaningless routines besides. But that is not the point. The point is that petty, frustrating crap like this is exactly where the work of choosing is gonna come in.
~ David Foster Wallace
slip:4a799.
It occurs to me that I’ve no idea who gave the commencement address at my graduation. After a bit of digging…
Robert W. Galvin, chairman of Motorola, delivered the main address yesterday to the 1,150 graduates at the 125th commencement of Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pa.
Mr. Galvin received an honorary Doctor of Engineering degree.
~ from the May 31st NYT archives listing several school’s commencement addresses.
ɕ
Consider a hypothetical scenario. Suppose you knew that although you yourself would live a long life and die peacefully in your sleep, the earth and all its inhabitants would be destroyed 30 days after your death in a collision with a giant asteroid. How would this knowledge affect you?
~ Samuel Scheffler from, The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously.
slip:4unyte2.
ɕ
Over time, the ideal of craftsmanship was cordoned off to just the technical arts. Physicians and legislators no longer thought of themselves as craftsmen, but as philosophers and natural scientists who were more concerned with the theoretical as opposed to the practical. Such a shift is a shame, for the principles of craftsmanship truly do apply to every man, whether he makes furniture or crunches numbers. Below we take a look at how these overarching principles of the traditional craftsman can apply to all areas of your life, no matter your profession.
~ Brett McKay from, Measure Twice, Cut Once
slip:4uaome1.
ɕ