Speculation, Inquiry, and a Quest for Purpose
The cognitive costs of context-switching are all about the brain work of choosing to ignore certain elements of your environment to focus on different ones. It's like having to go through everything in your field of view and review it for relevance whenever you change tasks without changing location. An immersive environment—be it for reading, writing, watching movies, making music—could reduce...
Trying to be productive, efficient, and organized is an Achilles’ Heel like no other—it suckers you into endless procrastination in the pursuit of a method to end procrastination once and for all, creating a vicious cycle of identifying a system for getting things done, implementing it to the best of your ability, then discovering a different potentially better system that requires you to...
In one year, my son will be old enough to start kindergarten, and I will have to decide what to do with myself. I could get a job, go back to school, double down on writing, or just curl into a ball and cry about how we're all doomed. What should I do?
Introduction As you can probably tell, I don’t post about my son with anything but the broadest of strokes, and there are no pictures of him on my social media profiles. This is both a difficult choice and a deliberate commitment. On the one hand, I think he’s beautiful and wondrous to behold, and I want to share everything he does with everyone I can. On the other hand, I think there are some...
The first question all of us kids asked each other when we were back in school was, "what did you get for Christmas?" If you or someone you know got a lot of awesome presents from Santa, it must be because you were good enough to deserve them. If you didn't get any presents, or you got bad, boring gifts, it must be because you deserved them as well—you must have been naughty throughout the year...
“How are you?” is often used as a filler in conversation, and it’s an extremely versatile question, but lately it’s been giving me trouble. It can mean: “How are you feeling?” “What have you been doing lately?” “Where are you headed?” and sometimes it’s just something we say after “hello” as a pleasantry. The sense that I’ve gotten stuck on is when the emphasis is placed on the verb, “How are you...
When I was in high school, I would try to punish people who crossed me by “excommunicating” them. Not from the Church—I lacked the papal authority for that—but from myself. I would refuse to talk to the individual either in person or online, ignore them whenever they tried to get my attention, and generally treat them as if they didn’t exist. Now, we call this practice...
I’ve been failing to meditate for over a decade. When I sit for zazen, I try for a half lotus each time, and the first several minutes are always about adapting to the discomfort. I guess I have bad posture, generally speaking, because I also strain to keep my spine straight. It always feels like I’m going to tip over. Instead of focusing on a mantra or koan, I try to just practice...
It’s been over a year, and I still don’t feel quite at home in this house. I still think of it as “The Murder House”. Not because of any actual murders—none that I know of, anyway,—that’s just what I called it when we first toured the property. My son had been born a week earlier and everyone was flipping out about it. My parents, my wife’s parents, and my grandmother were all in town for...
I’d like to say something to my friends who use Facebook because I feel like I’ve lost touch with nearly every single one of you due to my abstinence from this medium, what friendships remain have atrophied to being only echoes of the raucous chorus we used to share,— and I’d like to be better friends. There are few burdens or blessings that are not made better by sharing them...
Speculation, Inquiry, and a Quest for Purpose