Monday, December 25, 2023

透过泪水织就的棱角,在宝石红的远方

当火车驶离文森特童年的草地和溪岸时,思乡、愧疚和愤懑一股脑儿全涌上了文森特的心头。当时,他恰巧发现了一首能够完美捕捉当时心情的诗歌。他把这首诗寄给了提奥,表示“它深深打动了我”:

一个受伤的魂灵跌撞在……
人生第一个逍遥谷,在那儿,年少无忧的你,
总爱聆听自己沉默中的歌唱。

我的心,你是怀着怎样苦痛的热忱迷醉在
给予你生命的家园……
但妄念,你总生生把我们欺骗!

在你斑斓的幻境中,一个五彩的未来
正生成一张滑轮织就的网,好似一个灿烂的夏日,
那震颤的耳朵不就是无数个太阳吗?

你撒了谎。但这样的魅力谁人能挡,
透过泪水织就的棱角,在宝石红的远方,
依稀可见闪耀着霓虹的鬼魅。


取自:《梵高传》

Wednesday, December 20, 2023

阅读力

土耳其著名作家帕慕克对阅读文字的好处有过一番很有趣的理解,他在《白色城堡》一书里写道:“人生犹如单趟车旅,一旦结束,你就不能重来一次了。”“但是假如你能一卷在握,不管那本书多么复杂或艰涩,假如你愿意的话,当你读完它时,你可以回到开头处,再读一遍,如此一来就可以对艰涩处有进一步的了解,也会对生命有进一步的领悟。”阅读是一件多么美好的事情,它可以使得我们对生命有过很多次的体验和领悟。

对于识字的人,阅读很自然会成为自己生活的一部分。西班牙大文豪塞万提斯一直酷爱阅读,甚至连丢落在街道上的碎纸片他都会捡起来读。著名英国女作家弗吉尼亚·伍尔芙每年都要重读一次莎士比亚的《哈姆雷特》,而且都会将读后感记下来。“这实际上便是在记录自己的传记,因为我们对生命所知更多时,莎士比亚就会进一步评论我们对世界的理解。”

而识字的人一旦孤立独处,想到的第一件事情往往是阅读我国著名诗人、翻译家绿原先生,在20世纪50年代遭遇冤案入狱七年,他竟然借此孤独的遭遇在监狱里自学德语,出狱后翻译了德国文学经典名著《浮士德》和不少德语文学作品。奥地利著名作家茨威格有一部著名的中篇小说《象棋的故事》,写的是一个银行职员落入德国纳粹的监狱,监禁使他孤独得几乎发疯,一个偶然的机会他偷到一本书,却是他从不感兴趣的棋谱书,是国际象棋著名对局,在百无聊赖、孤苦无援下他只好用阅读这部棋谱度过牢狱中的日日夜夜,岂料从此陷入独自对弈的魔怔。

Tuesday, December 12, 2023

瓦尔特·本雅明:火警报警器

有关阶级斗争的观念会具有误导性。它所指的并不是决定“孰胜孰负”的力量抗衡,也不是指凭决斗的结果来定胜者为王,败者为寇。如此去理会,也就是以浪漫化的方式掩盖了实际所指。
 
因为,无论资产阶级在这场斗争中是输还是赢,它内在固有的矛盾都会使它走下坡路,这个矛盾在其发展过程中对资产阶级来说将成为其致命的灭亡因素。问题的唯一所在是:它是自行灭亡还是经由无产阶级之手。三千年的文化发展会持续下去,还是走向终结,将取决于这个问题的答案。
 
有关这两位斗士将永远争斗下去的糟糕假设是不会与历史相一致的。真正的政客只是从日期上来估算。如果消灭资产阶级直到一个几乎可以估算出的经济和技术发展的特定时刻(通货膨胀和毒气战争就宣示了这一时刻的到来)还没有完成,那么,一切就都完了。
 
要阻止爆炸,就必须在火花碰到炸药之前将燃烧着的导火索切断。政客们的干涉,制造险情和控制速度是操作技巧——而不是侠义之举。
 
 
- 瓦尔特·本雅明,《单向街》,中信出版社:2021.

瓦尔特·本雅明:教学用具

写作鸿篇巨制的原则,或者炮制厚书的技巧:
 
Ⅰ 整个写作必须从没有间断、语词丰富的叙述中生发出来。
Ⅱ 对概念术语的使用必须恪守它的定义,不能脱离这一定义而在全书中对之随意乱用。
Ⅲ 正文里费尽心思阐明的概念间差异,在对相应地方的注释中应该重新抹去。
Ⅳ 对只是在其一般意义上提及的概念必须举例,比如在一般意义上提到机器的话,就应当列举出机器的所有种类。
Ⅴ 先验地具有某客观含义的一切东西都必须用大量例子来证实。
Ⅵ 能够用图形表示的关系一定要用词语去阐明,比如所有亲缘关系都必须加以陈述和阐释,而不是用诸如树状谱系图去展示。
Ⅶ 对持有相同论据的不同论敌,必须一个一个地驳倒。
 
当今学者们的平庸之作都愿意像目录索引那样被人阅读,但什么时候人们会像写目录索引那样去写书呢?假如糟糕的内容是这样挤渗到外面来的,那么,一部其观点无须阅读就会自己显露出价值的杰作就会以此方式诞生。
 
只有当规整形式准确地直接参与到了文人所写著作的内容构想中时,打字机才会使他们的手疏远笔。估计,那时将会需要一些字体造型具有可变性的新系统。在这样的系统里,给予指令的手指动作将取代迄今整个手的活动。
 
一个按诗韵学构想的、对韵律中唯一不协调的地方死死不放的时期,会造就出可以想见的最美篇章。穿越墙上裂缝的光束,就是这样射进了炼丹术士隐居的小屋,并使结晶体、球体和角形铁闪闪发光。
 
 
- 瓦尔特·本雅明,《单向街》,中信出版社:2021.

Tuesday, December 5, 2023

Leadership vs. Management: It’s All About Intent

The leadership vs. management question is answered when we look at the intent behind both terms. When we take the lead, we are:
  • At the front, showing the way.
  • Doing new things – going to places where nobody has gone before.
  • Making change, instead of keeping things the same.

When we manage, we:
  • Make sure everything is under control.
  • Want to see stability and reduced risk.
  • Look at metrics to monitor and measure success.
Leading is about putting ourselves out there and carving a path. Management is more transactional, about stability, smooth operations and cutting out risk.

Tuesday, November 28, 2023

Wisdom Is Liberation

Wisdom is freeing precisely because it submits to authority outside the self. But in a world preoccupied with power dynamics—oppressors and oppressed, the hegemony, the patriarchy, intersectionality, cultural appropriation, and so forth—we are skeptical of this notion. And it’s true that many human authorities are oppressive and not conducive to our flourishing. But that doesn’t mean the very idea of authority should be dismissed.

At its best, external authority is for our growth, not our repression. Italian Catholic philosopher Augusto Del Noce observes that the etymological root of the word authority is about growth (auctoritas derives from augere, “to make grow,” which is tied to the words Augustus, “he who makes grow”). This is in direct contrast to how authority is popularly viewed today: as a stifling barrier to growth.4 Today’s world has reframed freedom as a defense mechanism: a freedom “from” rather than a freedom “to.” We are “free,” our society declares, insofar as we are subject to no external authority or objective reality outside the self. But is this really freedom?

Jesus did not say “total autonomy will set you free.” He said the truth will set you free (John 8:32). True freedom is always hitched to truth—an objective, true-for-everyone truth that gloriously exists outside of our opinions, moods, and fickle temperaments. Without the truth, we are locked into a prison of our own making. But thanks be to God, the truth is out there and not in an abstract sense. It’s there in the form of a person, Jesus Christ, who said “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” (John 14:6), and who calls every exhausted digital wanderer to sit at his feet and find rest:

Come to me, all who labor and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and lowly in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light. (Matt. 11:28–30)

Notice the equation here: “come to me” + “learn from me” = “you will find rest for your souls.” If ever there was a simple equation for true freedom, it is this.

But when we are wise—feeding on the bread of life (John 6:35), abiding in the vine (John 15:4–5), and drawing upon God-given sources of truth—we become like a robust tree planted near water (Ps. 1:3), with green leaves and vibrant fruit even when drought comes (Jer. 17:8). Our roots deepen securely into the ground, drawing life from vibrant streams. And our branches keep growing upward—like hands lifted in praise to their Creator. When the winds come—as they inevitably will, sometimes with furious force—these branches of wisdom won’t break off. They will simply sway, as if clapping or dancing with joy, turning every storm into an opportunity to sing. Soli Deo gloria.

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Monday, November 13, 2023

Three Marks of Wisdom

1. Discernment in a "Too Much" World
In today’s world of information gluttony, wisdom looks like intention—approaching the glut not haphazardly, but with a plan. Rather than being passive and pulled around by the cacophony of alluring voices of folly, beckoning us to veer off the straight path (Prov. 9:13–18), the wise man keeps his gaze fixed straight ahead, following the path of righteousness, not swerving to the left or the right (Prov. 4:25–27).

2. Patience in a “Too Fast” World
In today’s world of speedy information, wisdom looks like patience—a willingness to slow down and process things well rather than simply amassing information and experience as fast as you possibly can. Wisdom looks like going against the grain of the bite-sized, low-attention-span spirit of our age, opting instead for longer and deeper chunks.

3. Humility in a “Too Focused on Me” World
In today’s hyper-individualized iWorld, wisdom looks like humility—a recognition that, as much as technology puts us at the center of all decisions, we are not the best or highest authority. Wisdom looks like an eager willingness to seek guidance from others; a healthy skepticism about your own instincts and proclivities. Wisdom is an intellectual humility neither over-confident in one’s own grasp of truth, nor under-confident in the fact that God reveals truth. Wisdom is knowing that, as Packer puts it, “our own intellectual competence is not the test and measure of divine truth.” He goes on:
It is not for us to stop believing because we lack understanding, or to postpone believing till we can get understanding, but to believe in order that we may understand; as Augustine said, “unless you believe, you will not understand.” Faith first, sight afterwards, is God’s order, not vice versa; and the proof of the sincerity of our faith is our willingness to have it so.
- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Wednesday, November 1, 2023

Three Orientations of Wisdom

1. Looking to God
There is much to look at in life. Our eyes flutter back and forth faster than they can properly process. Wisdom is focusing our gaze on God: looking to him, praying to him, zealously seeking after him. The Psalms constantly reinforce this:
“My eyes are ever toward the Lord” (Ps. 25:15).
“For your steadfast love is before my eyes” (Ps. 26:3).
“Those who look to him are radiant” (Ps. 34:5).
“Our eyes look to the Lord our God” (Ps. 123:2).
The author of Hebrews calls us to “[look] to Jesus, the founder and perfecter of our faith” (Heb. 12:2).
 
Tozer describes faith as “the gaze of a soul upon a saving God . . . a redirecting of our sight, a getting out of the focus of our own vision and getting God into focus.” This orientation of sight is where wisdom, and life generally, thrive. Look to Jesus for peace instead of your circumstances. Look to Jesus for affirmation instead of Instagram. Look to Jesus for truth instead of yourself. Look to Jesus for wisdom before you look anywhere else.
 
2. 
Listening to God
Wisdom is quieting ourselves in a noisy age and tuning our ears to God’s speech through Scripture, his creation, and his church. Just as we are inundated with visual stimuli in today’s world, so are we overwhelmed with voices beckoning us to hear their rant or sales pitch. What voices are we listening to? Are they trustworthy, consistent with the divine voice of wisdom (Proverbs 8)? This book has largely been about guiding us through this question.
Proverbs is constantly associating wisdom with listening:
“A wise man listens to advice” (Prov. 12:15).
“The ear that listens to life-giving reproof will dwell among the wise” (Prov. 15:31).
“Listen to advice and accept instruction, that you may gain wisdom in the future” (Prov. 19:20).
“Cease to hear instruction, my son, and you will stray from the words of knowledge” (Prov. 19:27).
Our age is unwise in large part because we are going deaf from the cacophony, losing our ability to listen well, if we listen at all. Wisdom means pressing mute on the voices speaking lies, and then opening our ears to the voice of God, listening intently to his every word. As Jesus said repeatedly: “He who has ears to hear, let him hear” (Matt. 11:15; 13:9, 43; Mark 4:9; Luke 8:8; 14:35).
 
3. Loving God
Wisdom is not just intellectual knowledge of God. It’s a deep longing for God. More than a desire to know the world like God, wisdom is the desire to know the world with God. Wisdom is a relentless pursuit of God’s presence. It is a desperate hunger and thirst for God, the bread of life and living water. Wisdom is worship.
“Do not be content to have right ideas of the love of Christ in your mind unless you have a gracious taste of it in your heart,” wrote John Owen. “Christ is the meat, the bread, the food provided by God for your soul.”

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Monday, October 30, 2023

The Nature of Love

That all true Christian love is one and the same in its principle. It may be various in its forms and objects, and may be exercised either toward God or men, but it is the same principle in the heart that is the foundation of every exercise of a truly Christian love, whatever may be its object. It is not with the holy love in the heart of the Christian, as it is with the love of other men. 

Their love toward different objects, may be from different principles and motives, and with different views; but a truly Christian love is different from this. It is one as to its principle, whatever the object about which it is exercised; it is from the same spring or fountain in the heart, though it may flow out in different chan- nels and diverse directions, and therefore it is all fitly comprehended in the one name of charity, as in the text. That this Christian love is one, whatever the objects toward which it may flow forth, appears by the following things:

First, it is all from the same Spirit influencing the heart. It is from the breathing of the same Spirit that true Christian love arises, both toward God and man. The Spirit of God is a Spirit of love, and when the former enters the soul, love also enters with it. God is love, and he that has God dwelling in him by his Spirit, will have love dwelling in him also. The nature of the Holy Spirit is love; and it is by communicating himself, in his own nature, to the saints, that their hearts are filled with divine charity. Hence we find that the saints are partakers of the divine nature, and Christian love is called the “love of the Spirit” (Rom. 15:30), and “love in 
the Spirit,” (Col 1:8), and the very bowels of love and mercy seem to signify the same thing with the fellowship of the Spirit (Phil. 2:1). It is that Spirit, too, that infuses love to God (Rom. 5:5); and it is by the indwelling of that Spirit, that the soul abides in love to God and man (1 John 3:23, 24; and 4:12, 13). 

Second, Christian love, both to God and man, is wrought in the heart by the same work of the Spirit. There are not two works of the Spirit of God, one to infuse a spirit of love to God, and tile other to infuse a spirit of love to men; but in producing one, the Spirit produces the other also. In the work of conversion, the Holy Spirit renews the heart by giving it a divine temper (Eph. 4:23); and it is one and the same divine temper thus wrought in the heart, that flows out in love both to God and man.

Third, When God and man are loved with a truly Christian love, they are both loved from the same motives. When God is loved a right, he is loved for his excellency, and the beauty of his nature, especially the holiness of his nature; and it is from the same motive that the saints are 
loved—for holiness” sake. And all things that are loved with a truly holy love, are loved from the same respect to God. Love to God is the foundation of gracious love to men; and men are loved, either because they are in some respect like God, in the possession of his nature and spiritual image, or because of the relation they stand in to him as his children or creatures ­ as those who are blessed of him, or to whom his mercy is offered red, or in some other way from regard to him. Only remarking, that though Christian love be one in its principle, yet it is distinguished and variously denominated in two ways, with respect to its objects, and the kinds of its exercise; as, for example, its degrees, etc.

- Jonathan Edwards, Charity and Its Fruits

Friday, October 20, 2023

How to be Wise

If we are to become wise, our information diet must begin with the Bible. It must be our solid foundation, as well as the grid through which all other sources are tested. In a world of information overload, the Bible is graciously concise and yet comprehensive.
 
The Bible is our most important source of wisdom because it is literally the eternal God—the standard and source of all truth—revealing himself. What a miraculous thing!
 
When God speaks, we are obligated to obey. His speech, and only his, is supremely authoritative. And Scripture is his speech… But we humans hate authority. We don’t like subjecting ourselves to anyone other than ourselves. Adam’s original sin was a proud intellectual self-sufficiency, what J. I. Packer describes as the “ability to solve all life’s problems without reference to the word of God.” True faith, argues Packer, means giving up the notion of intellectual autonomy and recognizing that “true wisdom begins with a willingness to treat God’s Word as possessing final authority.” Man is not the measure of all things. God is.
 
- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Saturday, October 7, 2023

What Wisdom Is and Isn’t

Wisdom is not knowledge. Nor is it information.
 
Wisdom is not a matter of mere data processing; there’s no algorithm for it. Wisdom is also not necessarily the end result of education (though it certainly can be). Wisdom is knowing what to do with knowledge gained through various means of education: how to apply knowledge and information in everyday life; how to discern if something is true or not; how to live well in light of truth gained.
 
Wisdom is not merely knowing the right answers. It’s about living rightly. It’s about determining which right answer is best. It’s a moral orientation: a developed sense and intuition for discerning right and wrong, real and fake, truth and falsehood; the ability to weigh greater and lesser goods and make complex decisions involving multiple, sometimes competing truths. Wisdom is not something you can Google or download in one fell swoop. It is accumulated over time and through experience.
 
Wisdom and knowledge do have a symbiotic relationship. We can become more or less wise depending on the good or bad knowledge we take in. But the more wisdom we have, the better we become at filtering out bad knowledge and turning good knowledge into spiritual nutrition. Wisdom is sort of like a healthy kidney: it retains what is nutritious as it filters out the waste
 
As James puts it in the Bible, true wisdom is “from above,” not below (James 3:17). It is the God-created (Prov. 8:22–32), God-given (Prov. 2:6), God-fearing (Prov. 1:7), God-oriented (Prov. 3:5–8) ability to synthesize, filter, evaluate, and apply information in ways that lead to right judgments and overall flourishing. We cannot be wise apart from God. God is the standard, the definition, the source, and the keeper of wisdom. But he’s not greedy with it. He’s happy to give it to us if only we ask (James 1:5).
 
This, however, is the struggle. Asking requires humility, and we want to believe we can be wise without God. To bypass God in pursuit of wisdom, however, is a fast track to folly. Just ask Adam and Eve. Only when we acknowledge God and submit to his sovereign rule can we begin to be wise.
 
- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Wednesday, September 27, 2023

Our Changing Brains

In The Shallows, Nicholas Carr calls the Internet “a technology of forgetfulness” and describes how, thanks to the plasticity of our neural pathways, our brains are literally being rewired by digital distraction:
 
The more we use the Web, the more we train our brain to be distracted—to process information very quickly and very efficiently but without sustained attention. That helps explain why many of us find it hard to concentrate even when we’re away from our computers. Our brains become adept at forgetting, inept at remembering.
 
Though we are reading a ton on our devices and screens—we actually read a novel’s worth of words every day—it is not the sort of continuous, sustained, concentrated reading conducive to reflective thinking. Maryanne Wolf argues: “There is neither the time nor the impetus for the nurturing of a quiet eye, much less the memory of its harvests.”
 
Google offers quick answers to any query we might have. But wisdom is not about getting to answers as fast as possible. It’s more often about the journey, the bigger picture, the questions and complications along the way.
 
- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Wednesday, September 20, 2023

Involuntary Attention

Commentators who spend a lot of time fretting about the modern-day “crisis of distraction” rarely seem to grasp the full implications of this. For example, you hear it said that attention is a “finite resource,” and finite it certainly is: according to one calculation, by the psychologist Timothy Wilson, we’re capable of consciously attending to about 0.0004 percent of the information bombarding our brains at any given moment.
 
But to describe attention as a “resource” is to subtly misconstrue its centrality in our lives. Most other resources on which we rely as individuals—such as food, money, and electricity—are things that facilitate life, and in some cases it’s possible to live without them, at least for a while. Attention, on the other hand, just is life: your experience of being alive consists of nothing other than the sum of everything to which you pay attention. At the end of your life, looking back, whatever compelled your attention from moment to moment is simply what your life will have been. So when you pay attention to something you don’t especially value, it’s not an exaggeration to say that you’re paying with your life. Seen this way, “distraction” needn’t refer only to momentary lapses in focus, as when you’re distracted from performing your work duties by the ping of an incoming text message, or a compellingly terrible news story. The job itself could be a distraction—that is, an investment of a portion of your attention, and therefore of your life, in something less meaningful than other options that might have been available to you.
 
The proper response to this situation, we’re often told today, is to render ourselves indistractible in the face of interruptions: to learn the secrets of “relentless focus”—usually involving meditation, web-blocking apps, expensive noise-canceling headphones, and more meditation—so as to win the attentional struggle once and for all. But this is a trap. When you aim for this degree of control over your attention, you’re making the mistake of addressing one truth about human limitation—your limited time, and the consequent need to use it well—by denying another truth about human limitation, which is that achieving total sovereignty over your attention is almost certainly impossible. In any case, it would be highly undesirable to be able to do exactly as you wished with your attention. If outside forces couldn’t commandeer at least some of it against your will, you’d be unable to step out of the path of oncoming buses, or hear that your baby was in distress. Nor are the benefits confined to emergencies; the same phenomenon is what allows your attention to be seized by a beautiful sunset, or your eye to be caught by a stranger’s across a room.
 
Neuroscientists call this “bottom-up” or involuntary attention, and we’d struggle to stay alive without it. Yet the capacity to exert some influence over the other part of your attention—the “top-down” or voluntary kind—can make the whole difference between a well-lived life and a hellish one.
 
All of which helps clarify what’s so alarming about the contemporary online “attention economy,” of which we’ve heard so much in recent years: it’s essentially a giant machine for persuading you to make the wrong choices about what to do with your attention, and therefore with your finite life, by getting you to care about things you didn’t want to care about. And you have far too little control over your attention simply to decide, as if by fiat, that you’re not going to succumb to its temptations.
 
- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

Wednesday, September 13, 2023

The Folly of Distractibility

In Proverbs, the opposite of wisdom is often personified in a character known as “the forbidden woman.” A woman of “smooth words” (Prov. 2:16–17) whose lips “drip honey” (5:3), she is “loud,” “seductive,” and “sits at the door of her house,” “calling to those who pass by” (9:13–15). A. W. Tozer describes her as “moral folly personified” who “works by the power of suggestion.” 

In today’s world, we see the “forbidden woman” at work through “watch this next!” algorithms that lure us into constant distraction by putting “suggestions” into our minds. Here’s Tozer:
 
Many are brainwashed from nine o’clock in the morning or earlier until the last eyelid flutters shut at night because of the power of suggestion. These people are uncommitted. They go through life uncommitted, not sure in which direction they are going.

The antidote to dangerous distractibility is purpose, focus, and intention. Proverbs 4:25 says, “Let your eyes look directly forward, and your gaze be straight before you.” This is wisdom in contrast to the unwise woman of folly, who “does not ponder the path of life; her ways wander, and she does not know it” (Prov. 5:6).
 
When you go online, ask yourself what you are going online to do. Is there a specific goal? When you open YouTube, is it to watch a specific thing? When you reach for your phone as you wait in line or walk from one place to another, is it for a purpose or just out of habit? When we aren’t going somewhere, we’ll go anywhere—and the “anywheres” of the Internet are rarely good for us. 

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Wednesday, September 6, 2023

An Unwise Age

Our world has more and more information, but less and less wisdom. More data; less clarity. More stimulation; less synthesis. More distraction; less stillness. More pontificating; less pondering. More opinion; less research. More speaking; less listening. More to look at; less to see. More amusements; less joy. There is more, but we are less. And we all feel it.
 
Our eyes are strained, brains overstimulated, and souls weary. We’re living in an epistemological crisis. It’s hard to know if anything can be reliably known. We are resigned to a new normal where the choice seems to be: trust everything or trust nothing. Or maybe the choice is: trust nothing or trust only in yourself—a seemingly logical strategy, but one that sadly only inflames our epistemological sickness.
 
Generation Z, or iGen as psychologist Jean Twenge has dubbed them, are living their lives through phones. And they are not happier. With lives characterized by ever-present screen time, texting, and social media, iGen has subsequently been defined by rising rates of depression, loneliness, anxiety, sleeplessness, and suicidal ideation.
 
- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Thursday, August 31, 2023

The Devil Delights

It’s easy to imagine the devil delighting in all this: angry tribalism, addictive triviality, amusing ourselves to death. As humans become more stressed, numbed, disoriented, distracted, and paralyzed by the impenetrable glut of information, chaos reigns. As chaos reigns, sin thrives.

It’s interesting that the fall of man in Genesis 3 came about because of temptations of knowledge: fruit from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. In our age too, the lure of infinite, godlike knowledge wreaks havoc. I sometimes ponder that the logo on my iPhone—a device that approximates godlike knowledge if ever there was one—is an apple with a bite mark. A nod to Eve’s original sin? An ode to humanity’s insatiable hunger for infinite knowledge? Perhaps. But just as for Adam and Eve in Eden, so it is for us: the desire to know everything only leads to grief.
 
Good reporting takes time. Sources must be verified. The fuller picture of out-of-context quotes, images, and videos must be sought. But the “fortune favors the fast” nature of journalism today often skips these essential steps. Further, we consumers are often eager to share things on the spot. Our quick-draw posture on social media is often “post first, think later” (if we think at all). This is disastrous—not only because it makes us easy to manipulate, but also because it erodes our credibility and can do great harm to others.
 
- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Thursday, August 24, 2023

A Healthier Information Dietary

The world needs wisdom desperately, truth that is unshakable and foundations that are solid. Only Christianity provides this sort of wisdom, and it’s exactly the medicine our ailing culture needs. In order to bring the light of Christian wisdom to the darkness of our unwise age, however, Christians must recover habits of wisdom in their own lives. We need a diet built around knowledge intake that actually cultivates wisdom. We need for our mental and spiritual health what the Food Pyramid was for our physical health: guidance for what to eat and what not to eat and in what proportions, so we can become more healthy and strong.
 
From cradle to grave, we are formed by others. Contrary to what a “look within” world would suggest, the world outside our heads defines our existence in ways we are foolish to ignore. Rather than seeing this as oppressive, or simply pretending (foolishly) this isn’t the case, we should accept this situation as a gift: truth comes, in large part, from outside ourselves. We can choose the sources of where we look for truth. We can choose how we synthesize truth and apply it as wisdom in everyday circumstances. But we don’t get to choose whether or not something is true. We don’t invent truth. We don’t determine it. We search it out and accept it with gratitude, even when it’s at odds with our feelings or preferences.
 
One of the most valuable areas of biblical wisdom we need for our day is the taming of the tongue. Before we sound off online, we should remember proverbs like:
“Whoever guards his mouth preserves his life; he who opens wide his lips comes to ruin” (Prov. 13:3).
“Whoever is slow to anger has great understanding, but he who has a hasty temper exalts folly” (Prov. 14:29).
“Whoever keeps his mouth and his tongue keeps himself out of trouble” (Prov. 21:23).
 
Or there is James 1:19—a verse that, if heeded, would prevent all manner of grief in today’s world (but would also probably put social media out of business): “Let every person be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger.” The problem, of course, is that today’s media economy is fueled by “quick to speak” rants, mobs, and pile-ons that create traffic spikes and trending topics. To resist this temptation is one of the most challenging yet subversive things a wisdom-seeking Christian can do.
 
- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid:
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Sunday, August 13, 2023

Sickness of Information Gluttony

Today’s frenetic information landscape is making our brains busier than ever: the information triage that our over-burdened brains must constantly perform naturally drains huge amounts of energy. Constant multitasking also drains energy… notes neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, overstimulates and stresses our brains:
 
Asking the brain to shift attention from one activity to another causes the prefrontal cortex and striatum to burn up oxygenated glucose, the same fuel they need to stay on task. And the kind of rapid, continual shifting we do with multitasking causes the brain to burn through fuel so quickly that we feel exhausted and disoriented after even a short time. We’ve literally depleted the nutrients in our brain. This leads to compromises in both cognitive and physical performance. Among other things, repeated task switching leads to anxiety, which raises levels of the stress hormone cortisol in the brain, which in turn can lead to aggressive and impulsive behaviour.

 In addition to causing cognitive dizziness, this indistinguishable array of information erodes our ability to distinguish between the trivial and the truly important. Over time we come to value information more for its spectacle—infotainment—than for the complex realities it signifies. Our news feeds are the amusement parks, penny arcades, and vaudeville stages of the digital era.
 
Ironically, as much as the information age (and its “global village”) promises to broaden our horizons and create healthy, integrated, well-informed global citizens, in reality it has had the opposite effect. The hyper-connection and over-awareness of a space-conquered world renders us fragmented and disconnected from place—the local contexts where we can know and be known and effect change to the greatest degree.
 
After the telegraph, Postman argues, “Everything became everyone’s business. For the first time, we were sent information which answered no question we had asked, and which, in any case, did not permit the right to reply.” Social media, of course, gives us permission to “reply”—but to what end? We may have a sense that our participation is meaningful action, that it is doing something, but more often than not we are only adding to the noise, getting needlessly angry, and contributing more irrelevant information to our already overloaded, exhausted brains.
 
Indeed, the stress of having to actively sift through viewing options tends to make us more passive, with little capacity for what Tony Reinke calls “spectacle resistance”: “Our lazy eyes and incurious gaze are happily fed by the spectacle makers. We no longer seek out new spectacles; new spectacles seek us out.”

- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Thursday, August 3, 2023

Three Habits Making Us Sick

We must examine our daily diet of knowledge intake. It can be nutritious, making us wise and shrewd, more able to ward off intellectual infections and spiritual afflictions. But it can also be toxic, making us unwise and more susceptible to the lies and snares of our age.
 
1. Eating Too Much
In the competitive landscape of the digital age, the “food” of information is not getting more nutritious; it’s veering in the direction of junk food. Doritos and Skittles will always get more clicks than spinach. And so we walk down the buffet line of social media snacks and online junk food, daily gorging ourselves to the point of gluttony. Unsurprisingly, it is making us sick.
 
The “limitless space” nature of online media has also created a situation where “news” channels must find content to fill 24 hours a day, seven days a week, resulting in a diminishment of what qualifies as “newsworthy” (e.g., filling an hour with live car chases). On the Web, not only is there the expectation of daily, fresh, “breaking news” content, but there is fierce competition for clicks. Desperate to stand out, websites are motivated to use incendiary headlines and other tricks to collect coveted clicks by any means necessary. The result is content that is often rushed (a hot take on yesterday’s controversy), random, reckless, or even distorted to spark short-term controversy rather than long-term wisdom.
 
2. Eating Too Fast
The Internet is a medium of now. Its memory is short; its shape ever changing. To navigate life online is to always be playing catch up: reading the article everyone is sharing on Facebook, following someone’s Instagram story before it disappears.
 
Scholars have found that the “junk food” nature of information intake online is rewiring our brains, such that our cognitive abilities to think carefully and critically are being eroded. “In a culture that rewards immediacy, ease, and efficiency,” writes literacy advocate Maryanne Wolf, “the demanding time and effort involved in developing all the aspects of critical thought make it an increasingly embattled entity.”
Over time our skepticism about all sources leads us to turn inward, trusting only in ourselves—which brings us to our third major bad dietary habit.
 
3. Eating Only What Tastes Good to Me
We might be tempted to consume only material we like and have a taste for, but that will leave us sickly. Sadly, this is exactly what many of us do in today’s hyper-individualistic, choose-your-own-adventure world.
 
First, when everything revolves around you and your tastes, it’s only going to be awesome if you know exactly what’s good for you. And we usually don’t… The second problem is that when every individual is living a totally unique, customized, perfectly curated “i” life, it is harder to find commonality with others. We start losing the ability to be empathetic, unable to connect with people because their experience of the world—the news they consume, their social media feeds, and so on—is different from ours in ways we can’t even know. We are all living in our own self-made media bubbles, and no two are the same. Part of the reason society is increasingly divisive is that we can’t have productive conversations when everyone comes to it with their own set of “facts,” “experts,” and background biases, having been shaped by an information diet completely different from anyone else’s. And when we can’t relate to others, we retreat further into our individualistic, self-referential bubbles, which is not an environment where wisdom can grow.
 
- Brett McCracken, The Wisdom Pyramid: 
Feeding Your Soul in a Post-Truth World, 2021

Friday, July 28, 2023

Learning How to Learn

In essence people have two fundamentally different modes of thinking: focused and diffuse. 
 
Focused Mode
- has tight spacing for the rubber bumpers, which seems to, in some sense help keep your thoughts concentrated
- is centered on the prefrontal cortex and it often seems to involve thinking about things you are somewhat familiar with. 
- stepping along the somewhat familiar pathways 
 
Diffuse Mode
- has more widely spaced bumpers that allow for more broad ranging ways of thinking
- to solve or figure out something new
 
When we find ourselves stuck on a problem, or even if we're unsure of a situation, the course of living our daily life. It's often a good idea once you've focused directly on the situation. To let things settle back and take a bit more time. That way more neural processing can take place, often below conscious awareness in the diffuse mode. The thing is it often takes time for neural processing to take place, and time, as well, to build the new neural structures that allow us to learn something new. 
 
It's through practice and repetition that we can help enhance and strengthen the neural structures we're building as we're learning something new. Practice and repetition is particularly important for more abstract topics. 

Working Memory vs Long Term Memory

Memory of course is an important aspect of learning. There are four slots in our working memory. Things can fall out of those slots unless we keep repeating them to hold them in mind. In that sense working memory is like a not very good blackboard. 

Long term memory, on the other hand, is like a storage warehouse. If you practiced and repeated something well enough to get it into long-term memory, you can usually call it up later if you need, although you may need an occasional bit of repetition to freshen the memory up. 

It's never a good idea to cram your learning by repeating things many times all in one day. Because that's like trying to build muscle by lifting weights all in one day there's no time for solid structures to grow. 

- Barbara Oakley, Learning How to Learn, by Deep Teaching Solutions.

Thursday, July 20, 2023

Future-focused Time Management

One way of understanding capitalism, in fact, is as a giant machine for instrumentalizing everything it encounters—the earth’s resources, your time and abilities (or “human resources”)—in the service of future profit. Seeing things this way helps explain the otherwise mysterious truth that rich people in capitalist economies are often surprisingly miserable. They’re very good at instrumentalizing their time, for the purpose of generating wealth for themselves; that’s the definition of being successful in a capitalist world. But in focusing so hard on instrumentalizing their time, they end up treating their lives in the present moment as nothing but a vehicle in which to travel toward a future state of happiness. And so their days are sapped of meaning, even as their bank balances increase.
 
This is also the kernel of truth in the cliché that people in less economically successful countries are better at enjoying life—which is another way of saying that they’re less fixated on instrumentalizing it for future profit, and are thus more able to participate in the pleasures of the present. Mexico, for example, has often outranked the United States in global indices of happiness. Hence the old parable about a vacationing New York businessman who gets talking to a Mexican fisherman, who tells him that he works only a few hours per day and spends most of his time drinking wine in the sun and playing music with his friends.
 
Appalled at the fisherman’s approach to time management, the businessman offers him an unsolicited piece of advice: if the fisherman worked harder, he explains, he could invest the profits in a bigger fleet of boats, pay others to do the fishing, make millions, then retire early. “And what would I do then?” the fisherman asks. “Ah, well, then,” the businessman replies, “you could spend your days drinking wine in the sun and playing music with your friends.”
 
- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

Monday, July 10, 2023

Standing Firm to Resist FOMO

In practical terms, a limit-embracing attitude to time means organizing your days with the understanding that you definitely won’t have time for everything you want to do, or that other people want you to do—and so, at the very least, you can stop beating yourself up for failing. Since hard choices are unavoidable, what matters is learning to make them consciously, deciding what to focus on and what to neglect, rather than letting them get made by default—or deceiving yourself that, with enough hard work and the right time management tricks, you might not have to make them at all. It also means resisting the seductive temptation to “keep your options open”—which is really just another way of trying to feel in control—in favor of deliberately making big, daunting, irreversible commitments, which you can’t know in advance will turn out for the best, but which reliably prove more fulfilling in the end. And it means standing firm in the face of FOMO, the “fear of missing out,” because you come to realize that missing out on something—indeed, on almost everything—is basically guaranteed. Which isn’t actually a problem anyway, it turns out, because “missing out” is what makes our choices meaningful in the first place.
 
Time pressure comes largely from forces outside ourselves: from a cutthroat economy; from the loss of the social safety nets and family networks that used to help ease the burdens of work and childcare; and from the sexist expectation that women must excel in their careers while assuming most of the responsibilities at home. None of that will be solved by self-help alone; as the journalist Anne Helen Petersen writes in a widely shared essay on millennial burnout, you can’t fix such problems “with vacation, or an adult coloring book, or ‘anxiety baking,’ or the Pomodoro Technique, or overnight fucking oats.” But my point here is that however privileged or unfortunate your specific situation, fully facing the reality of it can only help. So long as you continue to respond to impossible demands on your time by trying to persuade yourself that you might one day find some way to do the impossible, you’re implicitly collaborating with those demands. Whereas once you deeply grasp that they are impossible, you’ll be newly empowered to resist them, and to focus instead on building the most meaningful life you can, in whatever situation you’re in.
 
This notion that fulfillment might lie in embracing, rather than denying, our temporal limitations wouldn’t have surprised the philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome. They understood limitlessness to be the sole preserve of the gods; the noblest of human goals wasn’t to become godlike, but to be wholeheartedly human instead. In any case, this is just how reality is, and it can be surprisingly energizing to confront it.
 
None of us can single-handedly overthrow a society dedicated to limitless productivity, distraction, and speed. But right here, right now, you can stop buying into the delusion that any of that is ever going to bring satisfaction. You can face the facts. You can turn on the shower, brace yourself for some invigoratingly icy water, and step in.
 
- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021
 
 

Wednesday, July 5, 2023

Facing Our Finitude

For Heidegger, is the central challenge of human existence: since finitude defines our lives, he argues that living a truly authentic life—becoming fully human—means facing up to that fact. We must live out our lives, to whatever extent we can, in clear-eyed acknowledgment of our limitations, in the undeluded mode of existence that Heidegger calls “Being-towards-death,” aware that this is it, that life is not a dress rehearsal, that every choice requires myriad sacrifices, and that time is always already running out—indeed, that it may run out today, tomorrow, or next month. And so it’s not merely a matter of spending each day “as if” it were your last, as the cliché has it. The point is that it always actually might be. I can’t entirely depend upon a single moment of the future.
 
What most of us do, most of the time, instead of confronting our finitude, which is to indulge in avoidance and denial, or what Heidegger calls “falling.” Rather than taking ownership of our lives, we seek out distractions, or lose ourselves in busyness and the daily grind, so as to try to forget our real predicament. Or we try to avoid the intimidating responsibility of having to decide what to do with our finite time by telling ourselves that we don’t get to choose at all—that we must get married, or remain in a soul-destroying job, or anything else, simply because it’s the done thing.
 
Hägglund writes, “I could never take my life to be at stake, and I would never be seized by the need to do anything with my time.” Eternity would be deathly dull, because whenever you found yourself wondering whether or not to do any given thing, on any given day, the answer would always be: Who cares? After all, there’s always tomorrow, and the next day, and the one after that …
 
- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

Friday, June 30, 2023

Idleness Aversion: Inability to Rest

Social psychologists call this inability to rest “idleness aversion,” which makes it sound like just another minor behavioral foible; but in his famous theory of the “Protestant work ethic,” the German sociologist Max Weber argued that it was one of the core ingredients of the modern soul. It first emerged, according to Weber’s account, among Calvinist Christians in northern Europe, who believed in the doctrine of predestination—that every human, since before they were born, had been preselected to be a member of the elect, and therefore entitled to spend eternity in heaven with God after death, or else as one of the damned, and thus guaranteed to spend it in hell.
 
Early capitalism got much of its energy, Weber argued, from Calvinist merchants and tradesmen who felt that relentless hard work was one of the best ways to prove—to others, but also to themselves—that they belonged to the former category rather than the latter. Their commitment to frugal living supplied the other half of Weber’s theory of capitalism: when people spend their days generating vast amounts of wealth through hard work but also feel obliged not to fritter it away on luxuries, the inevitable result is large accumulations of capital.
 
It must have been a uniquely anguished way to live. There was no chance that all that hard work could improve the probability that one would be saved: after all, the whole point of the doctrine of predestination was that nothing could influence one’s fate. On the other hand, wouldn’t someone who already was saved naturally demonstrate a tendency toward virtuous striving and thriftiness? On this fraught understanding, idleness became an especially anxiety-inducing experience, to be avoided at all costs—not merely a vice that might lead to damnation if you overindulged in it, as many Christians had long maintained, but one that might be evidence of the horrifying truth that you already were damned.
 
To rest for the sake of rest—to enjoy a lazy hour for its own sake—entails first accepting the fact that this is it: that your days aren’t progressing toward a future state of perfectly invulnerable happiness, and that to approach them with such an assumption is systematically to drain our four thousand weeks of their value. “We are the sum of all the moments of our lives,” writes Thomas Wolfe, “all that is ours is in them: we cannot escape it or conceal it.” If we’re going to show up for, and thus find some enjoyment in, our brief time on the planet, we had better show up for it now.
 
- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021
 

Sunday, June 25, 2023

The Decline of Pleasure

Defenders of modern capitalism enjoy pointing out that despite how things might feel, we actually have more leisure time than we did in previous decades—an average of about five hours per day for men, and only slightly less for women. But perhaps one reason we don’t experience life that way is that leisure no longer feels very leisurely. Instead, it too often feels like another item on the to-do list. And like many of our time troubles, research suggests that this problem grows worse the wealthier you get. Rich people are frequently busy working, but they also have more options for how to use any given hour of free time: like anyone else, they could read a novel or take a walk; but they could equally be attending the opera, or planning a ski trip to Courchevel. So they’re more prone to feeling that there are leisure activities they ought to be getting around to but aren’t.
 
We probably can’t hope to grasp how utterly alien this attitude toward leisure would have seemed to anyone living at any point before the Industrial Revolution. To the philosophers of the ancient world, leisure wasn’t the means to some other end; on the contrary, it was the end to which everything else worth doing was a means. Aristotle argued that true leisure—by which he meant self-reflection and philosophical contemplation—was among the very highest of virtues because it was worth choosing for its own sake, whereas other virtues, like courage in war, or noble behavior in government, were virtuous only because they led to something else.
 
The Purpose of Rest
 
We have inherited from all this a deeply bizarre idea of what it means to spend your time off “well”—and, conversely, what counts as wasting it. In this view of time, anything that doesn’t create some form of value for the future is, by definition, mere idleness. Rest is permissible, but only for the purposes of recuperation for work, or perhaps for some other form of self-improvement. It becomes difficult to enjoy a moment of rest for itself alone, without regard for any potential future benefits, because rest that has no instrumental value feels wasteful.
 
The truth, then, is that spending at least some of your leisure time “wastefully,” focused solely on the pleasure of the experience, is the only way not to waste it—to be truly at leisure, rather than covertly engaged in future-focused self-improvement. In order to most fully inhabit the only life you ever get, you have to refrain from using every spare hour for personal growth. From this perspective, idleness isn’t merely forgivable; it’s practically an obligation. “If the satisfaction of an old man drinking a glass of wine counts for nothing,” wrote Simone de Beauvoir, “then production and wealth are only hollow myths; they have meaning only if they are capable of being retrieved in individual and living joy.”

- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

Thursday, June 15, 2023

Time as a Resource

From thinking about time in the abstract, it’s natural to start treating it as a resource, something to be bought and sold and used as efficiently as possible, like coal or iron or any other raw material.
 
Previously, laborers had been paid for a vaguely defined “day’s work,” or on a piecework basis, receiving a given sum per bale of hay or per slaughtered pig. But gradually it became more common to be paid by the hour—and the factory owner who used his workers’ hours efficiently, squeezing as much labor as possible from each employee, stood to make a bigger profit than one who didn’t.
 
Once time is a resource to be used, you start to feel pressure, whether from external forces or from yourself, to use it well, and to berate yourself when you feel you’ve wasted it. When you’re faced with too many demands, it’s easy to assume that the only answer must be to make better use of time, by becoming more efficient, driving yourself harder, or working for longer—as if you were a machine in the Industrial Revolution—instead of asking whether the demands themselves might be unreasonable. It grows alluring to try to multitask.
 
- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021
 
 

Saturday, June 10, 2023

The Delusion of ‘Billable Hour’

One vivid example of how the capitalist pressure toward instrumentalizing your time saps meaning from life is the notorious case of corporate lawyers. The Catholic legal scholar Cathleen Kaveny has argued that the reason so many of them are so unhappy—despite being generally very well paid—is the convention of the “billable hour,” which obliges them to treat their time, and thus really themselves, as a commodity to be sold off in sixty-minute chunks to clients. An hour not sold is automatically an hour wasted. So when an outwardly successful, hard-charging attorney fails to show up for a family dinner, or his child’s school play, it’s not necessarily because he’s “too busy,” in the straightforward sense of having too much to do. It may also be because he’s no longer able to conceive of an activity that can’t be commodified as something worth doing at all. As Kaveny writes, “Lawyers imbued with the ethos of the billable hour have difficulty grasping a non-commodified understanding of the meaning of time that would allow them to appreciate the true value of such participation.” When an activity can’t be added to the running tally of billable hours, it begins to feel like an indulgence one can’t afford. There may be more of this ethos in most of us—even the nonlawyers—than we’d care to admit.
 
We choose to treat time in this self-defeatingly instrumental way, and we do so because it helps us maintain the feeling of being in omnipotent control of our lives. As long as you believe that the real meaning of life lies somewhere off in the future—that one day all your efforts will pay off in a golden era of happiness, free of all problems—you get to avoid facing the unpalatable reality that your life isn’t leading toward some moment of truth that hasn’t yet arrived. Our obsession with extracting the greatest future value out of our time blinds us to the reality that, in fact, the moment of truth is always now—that life is nothing but a succession of present moments, culminating in death, and that you’ll probably never get to a point where you feel you have things in perfect working order. And that therefore you had better stop postponing the “real meaning” of your existence into the future, and throw yourself into life now.
 
- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021

Thursday, June 1, 2023

Life on the Conveyor Belt

In 1930, in a speech titled “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren,” the economist John Maynard Keynes made a famous prediction: Within a century, thanks to the growth of wealth and the advance of technology, no one would have to work more than about fifteen hours a week. The challenge would be how to fill all our newfound leisure time without going crazy. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes told his audience, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem—how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.”
 
But Keynes was wrong. It turns out that when people make enough money to meet their needs, they just find new things to need and new lifestyles to aspire to; they never quite manage to keep up with the Joneses, because whenever they’re in danger of getting close, they nominate new and better Joneses with whom to try to keep up. As a result, they work harder and harder, and soon busyness becomes an emblem of prestige. Which is clearly completely absurd: for almost the whole of history, the entire point of being rich was not having to work so much. Moreover, the busyness of the better-off is contagious, because one extremely effective way to make more money, for those at the top of the tree, is to cut costs and make efficiency improvements in their companies and industries. That means greater insecurity for those lower down, who are then obliged to work harder just to get by.
 
We’re obsessed with our overfilled inboxes and lengthening to-do lists, haunted by the guilty feeling that we ought to be getting more done, or different things done, or both.
 
Recently, as the gig economy has grown, busyness has been rebranded as “hustle”—relentless work not as a burden to be endured but as an exhilarating lifestyle choice, worth boasting about on social media. In reality, though, it’s the same old problem, pushed to an extreme: the pressure to fit ever-increasing quantities of activity into a stubbornly nonincreasing quantity of daily time.
 
- Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, 2021