Zoë > Recent Status Updates

"Who knew the origins of the word [panic]? ... But no one raised a hand.

She explained. It came from the Greek god Pan: the god of the woods. He liked to trick people, to confuse and disorient them until they lost their bearings, and their minds.

To panic, T.J. said, was to make an enemy of the forest. To stay calm was to be its friend."

"You could have all this technology... but not design it to be maximally distracting. In fact, you could design it with the opposite goal: to maximally respect people's need for sustained attention, and to interrupt them as little as possible. You could design the technology not so that it pulls people away from their deeper and more meaningful goals, but so that it helps them to achieve them."

" 'What started to really concern me over the years,' he told me, 'was just watching my friends who had originally gotten into this business because they thought they could make the world better, [and now] were caught in this arms race to manipulate human nature.' "

My takeaway from this was to check my phone time, and try to reduce it. I already got rid of the Instagram app in August, and I know Facebook should be next.

"I looked at social media and thought, I don't want this. I flicked through Twitter and felt like I had stood on a termites' nest. When I looked up, three hours had passed.

I left it behind & went to eat. When I got back, people had started replying to my texts and emails, and despite myself, I felt a little rush of affirmation. In the next few weeks, I started to post... and I felt myself become cruder and meaner"

"I realized that email breeds email, and if you just stop, it stops. I would like to say I felt calmed and soothed by this. In truth, I felt affronted—like my ego had been poked by a knitting needle. All this mania, all these demands on my time, I realized, made me feel important. I wanted in a sudden rush to send emails in order to get emails back—to feel needed again."

Unrelated to the message of this book, I find this sentence so interesting as an example of how the direct-object pronoun is changing to "who" while the indirect object remains "whom"!

"It still impacts where they can live and work, who they can trust, with whom they can be their full selves."

I've only just started this latest book for our faculty book discussion, but I love it so far! Gooblar manages to address both the big picture and the nitty-gritty details of student success. There's historical background about EOP programs, and discussion of the broader inequities that impact students, and teaching of course, and institutional policy, all in a very readable format.

Our bodies think that lack of sleep is an emergency, so they prepare by raising blood pressure, wanting more fast food, wanting more sugar for quick energy, etc.

Keeping that in mind, I paid attention to how I felt when I did get enough sleep, and I really did seem to eat healthier without effort, just because I felt like it.

It should go without saying, yet needs to be said: "you are more efficient when you are rested... it takes you less time to do things."

Rest is not the opposite of productivity; it's in many ways the prerequisite. Now if only I could learn to implement this in practice.

"One day I woke up w/o any alarms after sleeping for nine hours and realized that I didn't want any coffee. This was such an alien sensation.... Then it finally occurred to me what I was feeling—I had awoken from my sleep feeling fully refreshed. My body didn't feel heavy. I was alert. As the weeks passed, I realized that I felt like this every day. The last time I remembered feeling like this was when I was a child"

"After three months in Provincetown, I had written 92,000 words of my novel. They might be terrible, but in one sense, I didn't care.... I placed my deck chair in the ocean so the sea was lapping at my feet and I finished the third volume of War and Peace.... I had been sitting there for most of the day. I had been reading like this, day after day, for weeks. And I thought suddenly: It came back! My brain came back!"

"It was hard. I didn't particularly enjoy it. But the next day, conscious that I had to retrain my habits, I made myself do the same. And so it went on, day after day. I struggled. I disciplined myself.

By the end of the fourth week, the flow states started to come... and soon, I was hurrying to my laptop, hungry to do it."

"Once I knew [about flow], I understood why, when I felt constantly distracted, I didn't just feel irritated—I felt diminished. We know, at some level, that when we are not focusing, we are not using one of our greatest capacities. Starved of flow, we become stumps of ourselves, sensing somewhere what we might have been."

Oof. A bit harsh for those of us with young children.

"We now live in a world dominated by technologies based on B.F. Skinner's vision of how the human mind works. His insight—that you can train living creatures to desperately crave arbitrary rewards—has come to dominate our environment. Many of us are like those birds in cages being made to perform a bizarre dance to get rewards, and all the while we imagine we are choosing it for ourselves—"

"Picture a rock climber who has medium-ranking experience and talent. If she clambers up any old brick wall at the back of a garden, she's not going to get into flow bc it's too easy. If she's suddenly told to climb Mount Kilimanjaro, she won't get into flow either because she'll freak out."

Fun fact, Kilimanjaro is a hike, not a technical climb at all, and can be done by someone with zero rock-climbing experience.