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Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World

by CAL NEWPORT

I remember when I first encountered Facebook: It was the spring of 2004; I was a senior in college and began to notice an increasing number of my friends talk about a website called thefacebook.com. The first person to show me an actual Facebook profile was Julie, who was then my girlfriend, and now my wife.

“My memory of it was that it was a novelty,” she told me recently. “It had been sold to us as a virtual version of our printed freshman directory, something we could use to look up the boyfriends or girlfriends of people we knew.”

The key word in this memory is novelty. Facebook didn’t arrive in our world with a promise to radically transform the rhythms of our social and civic lives; it was just one diversion among many. In the spring of 2004, the people I knew who signed up for thefacebook.com were almost certainly spending significantly more time playing Snood (a Tetris-style puzzle game that was inexplicably popular) than they were tweaking their profiles or poking their virtual friends.

178 words read…

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The call of Cthulhu

by H. P. LOVECRAFT

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

Theosophists have guessed at the awesome grandeur of the cosmic cycle wherein our world and human race form transient incidents. They have hinted at strange survivals in terms which would freeze the blood if not masked by a bland optimism. But it is not from them that there came the single glimpse of forbidden eons which chills me when I think of it and maddens me when I dream of it.

179 words read…

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