a haunted house but every room has a project manager asking for a status update

If you haven’t read Amusing Ourselves to Death by Neil Postman, you don’t understand what your phone is doing to you. He wrote it in 1985, before the internet, and it is still the best book on the subject. Postman’s point is simple. Nobody has to ban books to make people stop thinking. You just have to give them something more fun to look at. Do that long enough and they lose the ability to pay attention to anything that isn’t entertaining. The news. Politics. Their own lives. He saw it happening with television. Now it is happening in your pocket, every day. Read it and you will finally understand why you can’t focus.

The purpose of productivity books/podcasts is to quell the guilt of being unproductive in the past with the dream of being productive in the future, productivity itself doesn't enter the equation, because the answer would be to start by closing the book/turning off the podcast

I watched a river for an hour and understood that it's never the same water yet always the same river, and then I understood I am exactly that. Every cell, every belief, every mood has been replaced since childhood, and still something continuous calls itself me. I am not a thing. I am a pattern that water passes through. That dissolved my fear of change entirely, because change was never the threat to my identity. Change is the only thing my identity has ever been made of. I am the shape, not the water.

Think not of the books you’ve bought as a “to be read” pile. Instead, think of your bookcase as a wine cellar. You collect books to be read at the right time, the right place, and the right mood. — Luc van Donkersgoed

Real luxury is waking up without a war in your head. Nervous system calm. Body healthy. Mind quiet. That’s wealth most people never touch.

I still think about this quote from Carl Jung. "The world is full of people suffering from the effects of their own unlived life. They become bitter, critical, or rigid, not because the world is cruel to them, but because they have betrayed their own inner possibilities. The artist who never makes art becomes cynical about those who do. The lover who never risks loving mocks romance. The thinker who never commits to a philosophy sneers at belief itself. And yet, all of them suffer, because deep down they know: the life they mock is the life they were meant to live."

This might sound crazy. But one of the skills you NEED to learn is how to deal with a more and more illiterate society full of emotionally dysregulated people. If you keep getting frustrated every day over how "ďumb" everything/everyone seems, the stress of it is going to wreck your mind.