“Almost every cognitive bias and flawed heuristic and logical fallacy I've written about for more than decade plummets in its impact on decision-making when people reason in groups, but only if those groups are allowed to argue freely without social costs for dissent or subversion.

A lot of arguing on the internet doesn't work that way. People retreat into like-minded enclaves where it seems like they are arguing, but it's mostly just people affirming one another that they chose the right group. What usually happens in those communities is that people who think of themselves as moderates will realize that the extreme is much farther along the spectrum than they thought, so to be a true moderate, they must shift their attitudes in the direction of the extreme, dragging their beliefs with them. If everyone is doing that in turn, after a few rounds, the whole group radicalizes.

This is how cults and political and conspiracy theory communities get catalyzed by the internet. It seems to them like they are arguing together while alone, but they are really arguing alone while together. It's a community of people arguing with themselves, coming up with reasons for their own feelings without contest, and when you argue with yourself, you win.”

~ David McRaney

“Do you remember?
that time and light are kinds

of love, and love
is no less practical
than a coffee grinder

or a safe spare tire?”

~ Tony Hoagland

Life is a beautiful thing.
Just take it all in and breathe,
breathe, breathe.

~ Creola Johnson

“An open question people are asking about meditation apps is: If you’re outsourcing attention to the technology itself, is it really attention that you’re developing as a skill for yourself?”

~ Rebecca Jablonsky

“I’m slowly learning how to bring anthropology and mindfulness together. I think they complement each other beautifully, but how to talk about it is a whole other thing. I think it comes down to excavation – what you do physically to understand where people come from. That’s a process of discovery and insight.”

Dr. Michael J. Kimball

“There usually isn’t a quick fix to what makes our lives so challenging, and that’s okay. A meditation practice, even as brief as a couple of minutes a day, can teach us how to accept the discomfort instead of trying to calm it down.”

~ Jinger Moore

“The enemies of liberal democracy, they have a method: They hack our feelings. Not our emails, not our bank accounts—they hack our feelings of fear and hate and vanity, and then use these feelings to polarize and destroy democracy from within.” 

~ Yuval Noah Harari

“If we don't become aware of our own reactions so that we can short-circuit precisely the kind of addictive and reflexive response that we have to these things, and if we're unwilling to turn them off, we will participate in the continuing debasement of our democracy.”

~ Brooke Gladstone

"At this moment in time we'd like to invite
First Class passengers only to board the aircraft."

~ Simon Armitage 

"It’s easier to live in the story you tell yourself about the world rather than the world itself."

~ Nate Staniforth

"Meditation practice supports mindfulness, but meditation is not mindfulness; meditation merely helps train the mind to be in a mindful state."

~ Manuel A. Manotas

While I’m waiting impatiently for the rest of the world to calibrate to my ideal technology habits, I’ve started to watch myself watch other people peer into their devices as they walk down the street, sit in coffee shops, and stand at urinals.

This impulse has grown into a challenging, but fascinating attention exercise that has lead to some liberating insights that have shifted my reactions to other people’s observable tech habits.  

Making sense is our second language.

Sensing comes first.

"Take a deep breath.

Do not smart off to a policeman.

Do not step off the curb until you can walk all the way across the
street. From the curb you can study the pedestrians who are trapped
in the middle of the crazed and roaring traffic.

Be good.

Walk down different streets.

Backwards."

~ Ron Padgett

"Holiness is reached not through effort or will, but by stopping; by an inward coming to rest; a place from which we can embody the spirit of all our holy days, a radical, inhabited simplicity, where we live in a kind of ongoing surprise and with some wonder and appreciation."

~ David Whyte

What does it mean to let our thoughts drift by like clouds?

Shifting our awareness from what our thoughts mean to how they fluctuate is an attentional exercise that develops liberating abilities over time. 

Observing the movement of clouds can provide a glimpse into how we can relate to mental activity more objectively, but it oversimplifies things when the analogy is taken too literally.

"The trouble with the present is
that it's always in a state of vanishing.
Take the second it takes to end
this sentence with a period – already gone."

~ Billy Collins

"My life is an open book. It lies here
on a glass tabletop, its pages shamelessly exposed,
outspread like a bird with hundreds of thin paper wings.

It is a biography, needless to say,
and I am reading and writing it simultaneously
in a language troublesome and private."

~ Billy Collins