Hari Iyer

“In a post-Enlightenment world we have tasked ourselves to identify what’s meaningful and what’s not, an exercise that can seem arbitrary and induce a creeping nihilism. “The Enlightenment’s metaphysical embrace of the autonomous individual leads not just to a boring life,” Dreyfus and Kelly worry; “it leads almost inevitably to a nearly unlivable one.”
― Cal Newport, Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World

“It was our capacity to learn from the experiences of others that gave Homo sapiens an enormous local advantage, with new strategies and innovations built on a platform of prior discoveries. As a consequence, each generation had no need to reinvent the wheel, and a child could acquire an understanding of the world that a few generations back would have been available only to geniuses.”
― William Von Hippel, The Social Leap: The New Evolutionary Science of Who We Are, Where We Come From, and What Makes Us Happy