Category: Philosophy

Meditation is helping me not procrastinate

If you want your mind to be less distracted, you have to practice the skill of un-distracting yourself.

That is meditation. It is a technique for training the mind to return from distraction easily. That is different from trying to focus. Trying hard does not work very well to increase attention span. It sort of backfires. Meditation is more like accepting a certain amount of distraction, but practicing bringing the attention back. The mind inevitably becomes distracted and it takes a lot of practice to sense that when that is happening and gently correct it.

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College for Introverts – Socializing and Career Seeking

How should introverts approach their college experience and prepare for a career?

Over the next few weeks I am going to review a book called Quiet by Susan Cain. Ms. Cain writes very eloquently about the situation in which introverts can find themselves in today’s society. I hear echoes of Stephen Covey in her conception of the character ethic and the personality ethic. I do not know if she was influenced by Covey and I find the idea compelling that she came to the independent conclusion that we have moved toward a personality driven, surface oriented society. Ms. Cain has produced a TED talk which I find very informative. It was on the basis of this talk that I purchased the book. Here is the key question to which I hope the book suggests an answer – what sorts of goals and careers will sustain an introverted professional?

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Finance, Frugality, and Globalization

This is about saving money.

The Boomers had it uniquely good. If you worked in the United States from 1950 to 1980, you made especially good money. If you invested, you got especially good returns. This convinced people that working and saving at a modest rate was all it takes to have a comfortably affluent life.

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Using NaturallySpeaking for college and editing

How to edit for people who hate editing: I hate editing. It’s my least favorite part of the Academic Experience. Editing makes me really anxious because I miss little things like typos and misspellings. Editing for clarity and readability is hard, but it does not give me the same level of worry.

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Science, Futurism and Post scarcity

I want to talk about where science and utopian futurism overlap. There was a time when science fiction was a prediction as much as it was a warning. These days it seems like most science fiction that is popular is terrifying. Oblivion. After Earth. World War Z. Are we really that worried that our future is dystopian?

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