Who profits from our constant state of dissatisfaction? The answer, of course, is painfully obvious. Every industry that sells a solution to a problem you didn’t even know you had. Every influencer who monetizes your insecurities. Every corporation that convinces you your worth is tied to your productivity. They thrive while we spiral. And the…

• No more struggle: “Whatever arises, train again and again in seeing it for what it is. The innermost essence of mind is without bias. Things arise and things dissolve forever and ever. Whatever happens, we can look at it with a nonjudgmental attitude. This is the primary method for working with painful situations.” •…

the shifts have been in place for awhile. A certain kind of book—say those reviewed in the NYRB—will become like opera, or theater, or ballet, and their readers like their patrons. Source: My Friends Aren’t Reading – Anne Trubek Also on: website

The real problem, in my mind, isn’t in the nature of this particular Venture-Capital operation. Because the whole raison-d’etre of Venture Capital is to make money for the “Limited Partners” who provide the capital. Since VC investments are high-risk, most are expected to fail, and the ones that succeed have to exhibit exceptional revenue growth…

. The EU invokes a mechanism called the precautionary principle in cases where an innovation, such as GMOs, has not yet been sufficiently researched for potential harms. According to article 191 of the Treaty of the European Union, if a given policy or action might cause harm to the public or the environment and if…

And so instead of asking how to summon the energy or motivation or self-discipline to do something that matters to you, it’s often more helpful to ask: What if this might be a lot easier than I’d been assuming? I talked about it with J, the man I live with, and he suggested three hours.…

That’s the convenience paradox: the more we optimize our lives, the less we actually live them. We’re becoming masters of arrangement rather than action, curators instead of creators. Life risks turning into a series of frictionless transactions where we’re always efficiently arriving but never really traveling. Source: In Praise of Inconvenience: The Hidden Costs of…

The antidote to all of this, in the broadest terms, is *more reality*, more immersion in the finite here and now: more writing on paper; more gathering in person and in public; more looking strangers in the eye; more scruffy hospitality; more queueing for the supermarket checkout that’s staffed by a human, if there even…

Spain’s unity at this moment is from the bottom up. Or, as Spanish professional soccer player Ferran Torres wrote on social media, “The people are the ones who save the people. … Long live Spain.” Source: Mud Boots of Empathy in Spain – the Monitor’s Editorial Board Also on: website

his latest work, *Program or Be Programmed*, the 15th anniversary edition, Rushkoff proposes four methods to avoid being programmed by digital technology, and to instead become the programmers of our world. What we require is to: 1. Denaturalize power by revealing social constructions which are ideas we merely invented, and are not pre-existing laws we…