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Having had over the last few months the occasion almost daily to sit in silence for a few brief moments, I came to describe the experience as the feeling of silence carving away at my interiority like a sculptor chipping away at stone, as if silence were stripping me of all that was not essential.
The Thing That Is Silence
The Convivial Society
A lot is wrong with the internet, but much of it boils down to this one problem: We are all constantly talking to one another. Take that in every sense. Before online tools, we talked less frequently, and with fewer people. The average person had a handful of conversations a day, and the biggest group she spoke in front of was maybe a wedding reception or a company meeting, a few hundred people at most. Maybe her statement would be recorded, but there were few mechanisms for it to be amplified and spread around the world, far beyond its original context.
People Aren’t Meant to Talk This Much
Ian Bogost
You can waste a lot of time trying to decide whether your thoughts are actually true; again and again your mind will try to suck you into that debate. But although at times this is important, most of the time it is irrelevant—and wastes a lot of energy. The more useful approach is to ask, “Does this thought offer anything useful? If I let it guide me, will it take me toward or away from the life I want?” If this thought is offering something helpful, then make good use of it; allow it to guide what you do. But if it’s not offering anything of value, unhook.
The Happiness Trap
Harris, Russ
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