“The psychoanalyst Erich Fromm had made this point more than fifty years earlier: “Modern man thinks he loses something—time—when he does not do things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the time he gains except kill it.”
19 Mar 2023 at 9:59 pm
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Lori Gottlieb
“People want to be understood and to understand, but for most of us, our biggest problem is that we don’t know what our problem is. We keep stepping in the same puddle. Why do I do the very thing that will guarantee my own unhappiness over and over again?”
5 Mar 2023 at 9:45 pm
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Lori Gottlieb
“In idiot compassion, you avoid rocking the boat to spare people’s feelings, even though the boat needs rocking and your compassion ends up being more harmful than your honesty.”
27 Feb 2023 at 9:07 pm
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Lori Gottlieb
“During my training, a supervisor once told me, “There’s something likable in everyone,” and to my great surprise, I found that she was right. It’s impossible to get to know people deeply and not come to like them.”
23 Feb 2023 at 9:24 pm
Maybe You Should Talk to Someone
Lori Gottlieb
“Almost all studies of child development emphasize the role of childhood stimulation and activity in promoting mental development, and stress the irreversible mental stunting associated with reduced childhood stimulation.”
8 Feb 2023 at 9:59 pm
Guns, Germs, and Steel
Jared Diamond
“Historically, Koreans have measured their success in life by their proximity to power”
4 Feb 2023 at 10:07 pm
Nothing to Envy
Barbara Demick
“The old class structure drew heavily on the teachings of the Chinese philosopher Confucius, who believed that humans fit strictly into a social pyramid. Kim Il-sung took the least humane elements of Confucianism and combined them with Stalinism”
24 Jan 2023 at 9:26 pm
Nothing to Envy
Barbara Demick
“In all rich countries, available estimates indicate that the total value of durable household goods is generally between 30 and 50 percent of national income throughout the period 1970–2010, with no apparent trend. In other words, everyone owns on average between a third and half a year’s income
worth of furniture, refrigerators, cars, and so on”
17 Jan 2023 at 9:30 pm
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty
“in a quasi-stagnant society, wealth accumulated in the past will inevitably acquire disproportionate importance.”
8 Jan 2023 at 7:23 pm
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty
“When a country is largely owned by foreigners, there is a recurrent and almost irrepressible social demand for expropriation.”
27 Nov 2022 at 10:02 am
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty
“To sum up, historical experience suggests that the principal mechanism for convergence at the international as well as the domestic level is the diffusion of knowledge.”
26 Nov 2022 at 12:50 pm
Capital in the Twenty-First Century
Thomas Piketty
“An example of this is the famous “veil of ignorance” proposed by philosopher John Rawls in his influential Theory of Justice. In order to figure out the most fair and equitable way to structure society, he proposed that the designers of said society operate behind a veil of ignorance. This means that they could not know who they would be in the society they were creating. If they designed the society without knowing their economic status, their ethnic background, talents and interests, or even their gender, they would have to put in place a structure that was as fair as possible in order to guarantee the best possible outcome for themselves.”
19 Sep 2022 at 9:37 pm
The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts
Shane Parrish
“In life and business, the person with the fewest blind spots wins.”
5 Sep 2022 at 9:26 pm
The Great Mental Models: General Thinking Concepts
Shane Parrish
“The most effective way to sap distraction of its power is just to stop expecting things to be otherwise – to accept that this unpleasantness is simply what it feels like for finite humans to commit ourselves to the kinds of demanding and valuable tasks that force us to confront our limited control over how our lives unfold.”
31 Aug 2022 at 10:02 pm
Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman
“The alternative approach is to fix a hard upper limit on the number of things that you allow yourself to work on at any given time. In their book Personal Kanban, which explores this strategy in detail, the management experts Jim Benson and Tonianne DeMaria Barry suggest no more than three items.4 Once you’ve selected those tasks, all other incoming demands on your time must wait until one of the three items has been completed, thereby freeing up a slot. (It’s also permissible to free up a slot by abandoning a project altogether if it isn’t working out. The point isn’t to force yourself to finish absolutely everything you start, but rather to banish the bad habit of keeping an ever-proliferating number of half-finished projects on the back burner.)”
31 Aug 2022 at 9:45 pm
Four Thousand Weeks
Oliver Burkeman
“From then on, goaded by the big industrialists and landlords, who stood to gain though the masses of the people were financially ruined, the government deliberately let the mark tumble in order to free the State of its public debts, to escape from paying reparations and to sabotage the French in the Ruhr.”
12 Jul 2022 at 9:52 pm
The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich
Shirer, William
“When we travel, breaking from our everyday routine can allow us to develop new sides of ourselves. And when we return, we feel the lingering effects of those changes.
Why, then, don’t we do this all the time? Perhaps it is because deliberately constructing ritual moments in our “real” lives feels contrived.
But as-if moments can lead to tremendous movement.”
7 Jun 2022 at 10:04 pm
The Path
Michael Puett
“The eternal problem of the human being is how to structure his waking hours. In this existential sense, the function of all social living is to lend mutual assistance for this project.”
29 May 2022 at 9:31 pm
Games People Play
Eric Berne
“ I like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I spend a lot of time on social media.”
28 Apr 2022 at 10:01 pm
Stolen Focus : Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again (9780593138526)
Hari, Johann
“But we told ourselves we could have a massive expansion in the amount of information we are exposed to, and the speed at which it hits us, with no costs. This is a delusion: “It becomes exhausting.” More importantly, Sune said, “what we are sacrificing is depth in all sorts of dimensions…. Depth takes time. And depth takes reflection. If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there’s no time to reach depth.”
25 Apr 2022 at 9:59 pm
Stolen Focus : Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again (9780593138526)
Hari, Johann
“It was designed to see what you could do to data to make it rise and fall at faster and faster rates in ways that resembled the decline in collective attention they had been documenting. What they discovered is there is one mechanism that can make this happen every time. You just have to flood the system with more information. The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.”
25 Apr 2022 at 9:57 pm
Stolen Focus : Why You Can't Pay Attention--and How to Think Deeply Again (9780593138526)
Hari, Johann
“Teams with fewer than four individuals are a sufficiently leaky abstraction that they function indistinguishably from individuals. To reason about a small team’s delivery, you’ll have to know about each on-call shift, vacation, and interruption.”
12 Apr 2022 at 9:55 pm
An Elegant Puzzle: Systems of Engineering Management
Will Larson
“a world where seekers satisfy their spiritual desires with a hodgepodge of nonreligious rituals practiced largely online. It’s a world where our closest confidantes can be found on Beyoncé fan forums and private Peloton Facebook groups, and where one’s ethics and identity are wrapped up in the influencers they follow, targeted ads they click through, and memes they repost.”
11 Apr 2022 at 9:14 pm
Cultish
Amanda Montell