What is the best $20 you ever spent?

Ramit Sethi is holding a contest asking that question. It seems deserving of some thought.

Here was my entry (and there are perhaps one or two more to come):

Although I will not do this, the best $20 I can imagine spending would be under the table to Ramit so that I might edge out the other contestants. iPad ≈ $600 → 2,900% ROI!

And that’s not the half of it. The accompanying fame and fortune would catapult me to a new level of stardom where I would strategically use my celebrityhood to close book deals (≈ $3M ± $3M), speaking engagements (≈ $75K per hit x 2 hits per week = $45M (give or take a few)), and hot dates (roughly the value of a book deal).

The only reason why I will not pay Ramit under the table is because integrity is worth more than all of those things combined.

Ahem.

The best answer I've heard to the question of when to use emotion vs. reason

In a Charlie Rose program about the neuroscience of decision-making, Harvard University moral psychologist/philosopher Joshua Greene delivered one of the simplest and most effective responses I have heard to the ancient question of when to trust emotion vs. reason:

This is where I think the camera analogy is very useful. If you think of emotions being like the automatic settings and you think of manual mode as being like reasoning, you can ask of a photographer, "What's better: the automatic settings or the manual mode?" And what the photographer will say is "different things are good for different circumstances" -- that if you are in a standard kind of photographic situation, the kind that the manufacturer of your camera could anticipate, then go ahead and use your automatic landscape setting or whatever. But if you're facing a fundamentally new kind of photographic challenge, then you are probably going to have to put your camera in manual mode.

I was extremely impressed by Greene -- he seems like the second coming of Haidt -- and I look forward to following his career (including his book The Moral Brain and How to Use It that comes out next year).

---

Here is a seven minute video of Greene talking about his research, including the camera metaphor:



(The site the video comes from is interesting itself. It's called Defining Wisdom and it's a project from the University of Chicago.)

Squibs – power, control, and pain edition

The difference in life-expectancy between CEOs and doormen, even controlling for other factors (like access to medical care and blah blah), can be explained almost entirely by how much choice they [perceive themselves to] have.
Having choice on the mind >> actually making choices. It is important to feel that you have choice, but you also don’t want too many.

People find it gratifying to exercise control – not just for the future it buys them but for the exercise itself.
Being effective – changing things, influencing things, making things happen – is one of the fundamental needs with which human brains seems naturally endowed, and much of our behavior from infancy onward is simply an expression of this penchant for control.
While gaining control can have a positive impact on one’s health and well-being, losing control can be worse than never having it at all.
(These are from Dan Gilbert's Stumbling on Happiness, I think.)

Power = Not having to make sense to be believed.
Powerless = Not being believed no matter how much sense you make.

“There’s really only one achievement so remarkable that even the most sophisticated machine cannot pretend to have accomplished it, and that achievement is conscious experience. Seeing the great pyramids or remembering the Golden Gate Bridge or imagining the International Space Station are far more remarkable acts than is building any one of them.” –Dan Gilbert

For groups to flourish we need authority, predictability, traditions, deviants punished, and laws enforced. In other words, we need to keep conservatives around.

Thomas Jefferson said that one of the secrets to life is the avoidance of pain. Not that I disagree, but I would also say that one of the secrets to life is using the force of pain to your advantage. You know you are an entrepreneur when you are excited to discover a new "pain".

Venn Diagrams using Google Suggest

Too cool.

Here's one for religious groups via Atheism soup. (Hat tip to the lady.)



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Earlier:
-- Twitter Venn
-- Everyday Venn
-- Best Venn Ever

When/where people do their best thinking [survey results]

Thanks to those who completed the Best Thinking survey. Raw data here. Summary and observations below.






Observations

-- People seemed to be fairly consistent in their average response, but quite diverse in the confidence in their responses. I did not know what to expect with people’s level of confidence, but it turns out that more than half were “quite confident”. People tend to think they are pretty good but imperfect judges of when/where they do their best thinking.

-- If I had to guess, I would have put showering and driving as 1 and 2. I was surprised to see three things ahead of them, especially ‘lying in bed at night’ – I would have pegged that as one of the lower ones.

-- I was somewhat surprised to see ‘early, early morning’ come in last place given how I often hear that people (namely, writers) do their best work in the early morning. But maybe it’s in part because we have a high percentage of night owls in this sample. Not sure if that is typical of the broader population.

-- Nobody said that they often have good thoughts at their office desk. That was the only question with no “often” responses. But almost everyone said that they at least occasionally have good thoughts at their desk. (I wonder if that’s only because they are at their desk so often.)

-- Nobody said that they never or rarely have good thoughts while reading a book. That was the only such activity.

RE: Correlations...

-- On average, morning people were a lot less confident in their responses. (Warning that this is a pretty small sample size, so probably means nothing.)

-- I wish I would have also asked whether people consider themselves introverts or extroverts. I suspect something could be going on there given the negative correlation between talking with another person and lying in bed at night.

-- People who were more confident in their responses were more likely to report doing better thinking while talking with another person, reading a book, driving, or in the early morning. They were less likely to report doing better thinking while eating or preparing food. (None of these were very strong correlations, however.)

-- People who do better thinking in the shower tend to report doing worse thinking at their office desk, but better thinking while eating or preparing food.

-- People who do better thinking while driving tend to report doing better thinking in places with lots of activity and when talking with another person.


You should read the qualitative responses, too. A couple of people said they do good thinking in their dreams. A handful of others said they do good thinking while walking or some other recreational activity. Commuting seems to be the most popular theme – walking or biking to or from someplace, or even on a plane. Others said they do good thinking when under time pressure or when bored.

The most interesting part to me – and this is something I have been thinking about for awhile – is that the two most popularly cited reasons for why people do the best thinking when/where they do are because (1) they are in a distractionless place with a focused, clear-headed mindset (e.g. shower or lying in bed at night), or (2) they are in an environment that exposes them to lots of stimulating thoughts or ideas (e.g. reading a book or talking with another person).

I will attempt to reconcile that seeming contradiction on another day...

Squibs - Pop Culture Edition

"We want to be connected, valued, and missed. We want people to know we exist and we don’t want to get bored." –Seth Godin describing why Facebook and Twitter are like crack cocaine.

On average, it takes visiting 3.32 friends of friends for Twitter users to find one of their followers. That means that with only a few re-tweets, messages can reach a Large audience.

The two things that people do most on Facebook are 1. put up and look at photos, and 2. play games.

The single most unifying cultural force is Wal-Mart. 138M Americans shop there each week.

Even people with bachelor’s or higher spend, on average, nearly 5x more time watching TV than reading books.

Horrifying book stats: There are about 550 books per day published in English. 10% make it to stores. 98% of books published are non-commercial, intentionally or not. The average book sells 500 copies, and the author gets 15% of the profits.

I think George Will was right when he called spectator sports "the great unobserved religious tradition." It speaks to the powerful human tendency to observe without participating.

In 2008, IBM, Yahoo, Amazon, and Dell made about $31,000 in profit per employee. Google, on the other hand, made $209,600.
Google made $18 of revenue per unique visitor per year. Facebook made $3.50, and Twitter $0.62.

20% of Google searches have never been done before.

Squibs

The briefest and most persuasive reason I’ve heard for becoming an entrepreneur: “You’re already self-employed.”

Try this experiment: When you receive a new text message or phone call or email, try not to check who it’s from. See how long you last, and what happens to you in the meantime.

Colin Marshall said this awhile ago, and I think about it often: “Action precedes motivation.”

It’s important to know who your audience is so that you know who to ignore.

“The easier it is to quantify, the less it’s worth.” (Because if you can put it in a spreadsheet, so can everyone else.) –Seth Godin

Charlie Rose asked this of a guest awhile ago, and I think it is a beautiful example of how a simple open-ended question can lead to fantastically interesting responses: "What makes you tick?"
The guest followed up for clarification, and Charlie responded "interpret that however you like."

A strongly bonded group depends on knowing not just what they stand for but also what they stand against.

“Consciousness is the hum of all our mental machinery working together.” –Dan Dennett

Self-tracking update

As I've noted before, the reason why I keep daily in-depth data on myself has nothing to do with finding hidden truths nor even testing hypotheses, but occasionally I will analyze a batch of data anyway just for pure geeky enjoyment. The latest batch includes 257 days between January and September, and while I can't say that I learned much, maybe something will surprise you in the correlation matrix below.



Consistent with past batches, the only real surprises are the lack of noticeable correlations. For example, the amount of exercise I get is apparently unrelated to my mood, how much or how well I eat, or even my wakefulness. And how much I sleep or eat also seems unrelated to any outcomes of interest.

If there are any specific things you think would be interesting to test (either with this data or with future data), let me know.

---

I have been keeping daily in-depth data on myself since September 2008. While the process for collecting data has remained basically the same (entering it into a Google Docs spreadsheet every night), the types of data I collect has changed considerably. You can read all about what I do, why I do it, and what I've learned by browsing the posts tagged as 'self-track', or feel free to ask questions.

Three blogs I highly recommend related to self-tracking are The Quantified Self, Seth Roberts, and Matthew Cornell.

When/where do you do your best thinking?

I am curious to see others' responses. Thanks for your participation!

(Will post the results next week.)

Alternate tennis realities

One of my hobbies is to imagine alterations to various sports’ rules, playing fields, or equipment. I’m not proud of it ... it’s just something my brain does for pleasure. Maybe you’d like to hear about it.

First let me dismiss the idea that we’ve settled on the optimum sports arrangements after many years of trial and error. There are uncountably many possible sports combinations in the universe, and we’ve got, what, a couple dozen mainstream varieties? If you honestly believe sports cannot be improved upon or new, more interesting sports invented, I pity your pessimism.

You know what else I pity? I pity people who have not experienced the feeling of hitting a tennis ball as hard as they can at a perfect 45 degree angle in the sweet spot of the racquet with just a little bit of backspin and watching that sucker sail. It is one of the finest pleasures in life. (I imagine it is similar to the feeling of ripping a drive 350 feet down the fairway, or launching one into the left field lights, but I don’t know why you would put yourself against those odds when it’s so much easier to hit a bouncy ball with an oversized paddle.)

The point is that the game of tennis does not reward launching balls as far or as high as you can. And if you ask me, that’s poor design.

So what’s a better design? Don’t worry. I’m here to help.

Some solutions include using tennis equipment in the games of golf or baseball. Those are too obvious.

Basketball probably would not go too well with tennis equipment unless maybe you played on a court twice the size and used a kiddie-pool-sized hoop way up high in the air ... but I like the idea of a team sport where you try to advance the tennis ball by dribbling or passing it. ...Maybe a soccer field?? They play on grass at Wimbledon, so it makes sense. It’d be like lacrosse, but a lot less manly. I like it.

But still, we need to think “outside the box” as unoriginal managers who wish they were original are apt to say.

Okay, how’s this. Imagine two tennis-court-sized rafts floating in a lake far enough apart that you can get the pleasurable sensation of launching the ball, but not so far apart that you cannot easily hit the target. It’s like extreme floating badminton. It might be fun to watch, but it’d be even more fun to play.

There is a more accessible version you can play if you don’t have tennis-court-sized rafts lying around, and my friend Pavs and I do this on occasion. Find some unused tennis courts where there are three or four courts in succession. Simply use the courts on the opposite ends as your playing surface. Everything else is out of bounds. That's it.

If you have five or more courts in succession, you can play a game that’s even better. In this game, there are no islands to defend. You use the fence behind your opponent as your goal. You just keep hitting it as far as you can to push your opponent farther and farther back so you can move up close enough to hit the ball into the fence and score a point. It’s a lovely game, but it’s tiring as hell, and your arm will be as good as paralyzed for the next two days.

And that’s just tennis. I have others. At least 50% of the time I am watching sports, I am thinking about this stuff. (And that ends up being a depressing amount of time.)

Sadly, most people I share such thoughts with are unamused. Apparently not everyone gets pleasure from fantasizing about alternate sports realities. I am sorry if you are one of those people.

---

Earlier:
Tennis ball + dog + chasing = lots of backyard fun and embarrassment

Everyday Venn

Everyday Venn is a new blog from my friend Rebecca Rapple. As the title implies, she posts a Venn Diagram everyday. Examples:




When I found out her process for creating them, I was astonished. I assumed she was constructing them based on quotes from ancient philosophers or psychology textbooks or something, but it turns out they are all original ideas, products of a nifty sort of brainstorming session. Here is her describing it in an email:

I generally start out by brainstorming an emotion or adjective. Sometimes they fly into my head out of no where -- like sophistication this morning. note: I was shocked when I looked up that word in the dictionary, as I hadn't been thinking of sophisticated as "advanced" or "specialized" (as in a sophisticated knowledge of vector mathematics) rather more like wine & cheese. * grin *

Then ideas start streaming from there. Well, sophistication, could I also do redneck? ignorance? class? (as in classy) education? learning? intelligence? erudite? aptitude? inclination? (btw - that was a live stream of consciousness creation coming off my fingers, I will likely use a couple of those...)

And I put 20-50 words down and then start going through the list (on paper) and start creating triangles of words that compose the idea. Sometimes I think I get a great one and then I think of how it could be very wrong in some situations, so I try to bend it a bit. Often, I come up with great words to surround a concept and end up using that surrounding concept as a new center.

As far as inspiration, I try to hold myself to one a day... but generally, I brainstorm en mass, create en mass and then edit / color one a day. Perhaps 30% of the en mass creations have made it to production.

It’s a useful reminder that the formula for "brilliance" is practice plus good filters.

I am excited to see how the project evolves.

###

If you like this stuff, you will probably also enjoy Indexed.

Possibly related:
-- Twitter Venn Diagrams
-- Best Venn Diagram Ever

The purpose of education and the counterproductivity of exams

In his autobiography, Vernon Smith discusses university policies requiring every course to have a final exam (a policy which he ignored for twenty-five years):

Administrative decrees like this are based on a false premise. Education is not about knowing things. It's about discovering and implementing what you can do with what you know.

He quotes Einstein for support:

Such coercion [cramming for examinations] smothers every truly scientific impulse. ... It is, in fact, nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of enquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wreck and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty.

Public Speaking: The illusion of the need for planning

Ever since I learned that Garrison Keillor’s approach to public speaking involves letting the story unconsciously assemble itself on stage, I have been shocked and somewhat disbelieving.

Can the brain really assemble such a beautiful poetic narrative on the spot without any preparation or planning? Well not the average person’s brain, of course, and certainly not my brain because I don’t have those poetic reserves in my neural library. But I was skeptical that even the stories of the great Garrison Keillor did not require a lot of advanced editing. He claims that the nervousness on stage facilitates the poetry, while I have a hard time viewing nervousness as anything more than paralyzing.

Well I stumbled upon a passage in Vernon Smith’s autobiography Discovery – A Memoir that (to me) convincingly describes the logic of how such brilliant unconscious assemblage is possible.

With lots of experience and practice, it may be possible for people to become less self-consciously aware of how they are coming off in public speaking. The mind is hell-bent on preparation for everything, including any oral presentation, by outlining in advance what it should talk about when the time comes. The mind fears that the brain cannot be trusted to organize its knowledge in real time. This is because the mind mistakenly and egoistically thinks the brain works incoherently in fits and starts, and requires executive control by the mind to keep it on track. It would be more accurate, however, to say that the brain develops the order that emerges and then deceptively proceeds to fool the mind into thinking the mind is in control of that emergent order.

[…]

Somehow, brain to mind to natural language is a monitoring/translation process that entails high transaction costs and interferes with communication with other brains/minds. But one can learn to skip the middleman we call the mind and let the brain do the talking.

[…]

The planning mind can operate only on the basis of memories of similar past experiences and try to anticipate a speech-delivery event in an imagined future. When that future arrives the brain is there. Nothing about the context and circumstances needs now to be imagined. All the mind has it the stuff it thought up earlier, on the basis of a forecast, and it has no current input unless it returns to the well. The brain can bypass all those stored prepared-paper notes, go directly to the primary input memory sources, and redo it all by directly translating its mentalese into natural language.

How I (might have) arrived at my life goal

Editor's Note: This post is not likely to be worth your time unless you have a creepy fascination with what I was like in high school, you creep.

---

I introduced yesterday a pretty sloppy theory for how people arrive at the goals they do. In this post, I'll psychoanalyze how I came to mine.

I think I am guilty of having a somewhat jumbled set of goals, as most people probably are. I admire Robin Hanson’s truth-seekage, but for me truth plays a much more reduced role of falsifying or vetoing constructs that I would like to be true, but aren’t. (At least I like to think so.) Judging by my past behavior, my primary goal, while not consciously chosen, is not to find meaning but to create meaning – to do meaningful and useful things. Most of my intentions for reading and writing what I do seem to center around this theme.

When I consider how I might have arrived at that default, the theory I proposed yesterday is already looking pretty flimsy. As a young schoolboy (3 to 11 years ago) I was an accomplished loaf. I was the type who would take pride in his slobitude. Nobody wants to know how many hours I spent playing NFL Blitz 2000 on N64, least of all me. (I never upgraded to Blitz 2001 or to a newer console because of my supreme laziness.) At least in high school, I consistently looked and acted like I just took a puff of some serious weed. In truth, I was as sober as a MADD meeting, but extreme laziness has a tendency to look stonerish.

In summary, the life goal I eventually arrived at could not have been the logical step from my young adulthood image. Instead, it must have been the rebellion to it.

On second thought, maybe if I fudge the story a little it is consistent with my "actions—image—goals" theory because rebelliousness is sort of a big part of my image. I have a tendency to do things differently just because it’s different. (As an aside, I understand rebellion is often unwise. As Paul Graham said, “Rebellion is almost as stupid as obedience. In either case you let yourself be defined by what they tell you to do.” Hat tip: Rebecca) It’s a scary thought, but it could be that I have temporarily arrived at my current goal until I find a more compelling force to rebel against.

I think it’s more likely that my goal slowly developed out of my actions and image in a more straightforward way. Yes, I was an accomplished loaf, but my loafishness was often still centered around a strong curiosity in the natural world, such as watching the National Geographic channel for hours at a time, or observing human behavior (sports and reality shows). That eventually led into reading blogs written by people who were also interested in behavior and such things, giving me a niche of surprisingly productive and motivated people to form a revised identity around. That’s, I think, a big part of how I became the current “me”.

When I look at it that way, I still feel that there must be some connection between actions, identity, and default goal. This motivates me to learn more about how identity is formed, and fortunately it is a rich topic in psychology.

To leave you with a slightly more polished version of the theory, I suspect that people generally slide into a default goal or set of goals based primarily on their identity (and I believe we slide into our identity based primarily on our randomish actions). Our identity and thus our goals can and do change throughout the lifespan, but I suspect they are shaped to a higher degree during our high school and college years simply because that seems to be the time of greatest experimentation.

The implication? To increase societal welfare, we ought to tell young people how curious and action-oriented and motivated and sensitive and charitable they are. I'd bet that one of the most common threads between successful people is that they believed (largely because they were told, implicitly or explicitly) that adjectives like these were true of themselves.

Life goals and how we (might) get them

Building on yesterday’s post, I want to know how/why people end up with the life goals they do. Although I am certain this will read like scattered musings, this topic has important implications. Life goals guide our behavior, and our behavior has externalities, so, to blatantly oversimplify, we ought to make our Bill Gates to Hitler ratio as high as it can be. The first step is to find out where goals come from.

Maybe a better term than "life goals" is "life purposes" because I am not talking about accomplishments we hope to achieve but instead the motivation that underlies our efforts toward those accomplishments and that underlies our day-to-day behavior more generally. Some "goals" (I'll stick with that term for now) seem to be pretty easily labeled such as “hedonist” or “truth-seeker”. Others maybe don’t have such a clean label but are easily recognizable, such as “live-life-to-the-fullest”, and the seeking of spiritual meaning.

Robin Hanson is the poster boy of truth-seeking, and most academics seem to fall in this category to a lesser extent. The goals, of course, are not mutually exclusive, and people pursue various goals to various degrees.

There is a temptation to believe that all life goals are equally as good. As I made clear in my posts on hedonism, that’s not my view. My view is that while there is no “right” goal, some goals have big flaws just by the nature of what they are trying to accomplish (in the case of hedonism, the goal is simply incompatible with biological/psychological reality).

But I won’t make the mistake of debating the merits of life goals again on the individual level. Choose whichever goal you want, fine, knock yourself out. But it cannot be denied that different goals will have different effects from a societal perspective. That is why we should care about trying to answer the question of why/how people end up with the goals that they do.

Now, the theory...

My assumption is that most people stumble into some default goal or set of goals without explicitly considering it, and my guess is that most of the “chosen” goals rise to the surface during the grand experiment that is young adulthood.

What you do most of the time becomes your image, and your image defines who you are and shapes your subsequent actions. Based on that logic, I would hypothesize that the people who were wilder in high school or college were more likely to adopt hedonist or live-life-to-the-fullest goals, while people who were more quiet and reserved were more likely to adopt truth-seeking or spiritual goals – not because they are naturally oriented toward those goals but simply because the image they developed was more consistent with one goal (or set of goals) over others. And there is nothing special about adjectives like “wild” or “reserved”, I am just using those as examples.

Of course big disruptive life events such as the death of a loved one or birth of a child can and do affect life goals, but my assertion here is that initial defaults are primarily shaped by young-adulthood actions and corresponding image.

My only data point right now is me. And to prevent this post from rambling on any more than it already has, I will save that story until tomorrow. Sadly, the story does not do much to support my theory. Let me know if you have a better one.

Awareness of ignorance

If you have peeked at the comments section of this blog lately, you have probably seen a thoughtful comment or two from Xan (wheninrome15). Of his many excellent comments, this one in response to the ‘most important and undervalued skills’ post might be my favorite. He eloquently articulated a very difficult and important concept, what he called "rational awareness of ignorance":

It is fine to be ignorant of a great many things; nobody has time to understand more than a few things deeply. But in those numerous topics on which we are not experts, we are nevertheless tempted to construct a coherent-seeming but illusory image of reality, and believe it with undue certainty. We are far too sure of ourselves when we have not earned it. Overcertainty is an anchor, undue inertia, dragging feet, when we should really be leaves on the winds of evidence.

To me it seems the importance of this cannot be emphasized enough! Two people may start in exactly the same place, and even be fed exactly the same information forever, but over the years, a person with belief probabilities deflated to an appropriately low level will end up much closer to the truth on a great many things. To carry around an anchor is to end up close to where you happened to start...but most likely there's nothing magical about the starting point. I guess I am really talking about the entirety of rationality, but awareness of ignorance would at least make false beliefs relatively benign.

Sadly, an enormously undervalued skill. In fact, in many contexts and by many people, it is _negatively_ valued. In this world, inertia is glorified, especially when it goes by the name of faith.

[In fairness, rationality is only seriously undervalued if you really care about the truth, and it seems there really _are_ other legitimate goals held by many. But most of the time people aren't really even directly aware of what goals they are inadvertently chasing after in the first place, and it is simply not clear what people would pick, in a truly clear-headed moment]

This got me thinking about how/why people end up with the life goals they do. I’ll discuss that in tomorrow’s post.

The Meaning of Wisdom

I recently finished reading NYT science writer Stephen Hall's 2010 book Wisdom: From Philosophy to Neuroscience. Some of the quotes and points I found most meaningful are below (mostly from the last couple of chapters).

He identifies eight neural pillars of wisdom (each is a separate chapter in the book):

-- emotional regulation: the art of coping
-- knowing what's important: the neural mechanisms of establishing a value and making a judgment
-- moral reasoning: the biology of judging right from wrong
-- compassion: the biology of loving-kindness and empathy
-- humility: the gift of perspective
-- altruism: social justice, fairness, and the wisdom of punishment
-- patience: temptation, delayed gratification, and the biology of learning to wait for larger rewards
-- dealing with uncertainty: change, "meta-wisdom", and the vulcanization of the human brain

Basically, though, it comes down to one thing:

So much of wisdom hinges on decisions that involve our relationships with others that almost everything we've been talking about in terms of wisdom, neurologically and psychologically, eventually curls back to a discussion of social intelligence.

I liked this definition:

Most of all, wisdom is a balancing act, a kind of spiritual gyroscope that seeks and requires equilibrium in the face of constantly changing forces and interests.

Specifically, by the definition of Yale psychologist Robert Sternberg, wisdom is the application of intelligence, creativity, and knowledge toward the achievement of a common good through a balance among the following:

-- intrapersonal vs. interpersonal vs. extrapersonal interests
-- short-term vs. long-term
-- adaptation to existing environment vs. shaping of existing environment vs. selection of a new environment

Why we hunger for wisdom:

Humans have that second relentless cognitive clock ticking inside their heads, counting down in a covert yet unassailably certain way the hours and minutes of our remaining time on Earth. Just as we literally hunger for food and water to forestall physiological death, we figuratively hunger for wisdom to forestall spiritual and existential death. The path of the well-lived, virtuous life has meaning precisely because that path arrives, for every living soul, by whatever circuitous route, at exactly the same destination.

More on death's role:

Death jostles the viewfinder through which we look at life most of the time. If we're lucky, it slows down the clock of our quotidian frenzies long enough for us to glimpse a more distant future, see a more worthy goal, imagine a better self.

How technology interferes:

This pause, this form of framing, is harder than ever to achieve nowadays, because so many of our modern technologies produce "personal" devices that collapse time and manufacture urgency -- faster computers, phones that make us perpetually reachable, twitters of constant thoughts, webs of interaction that vastly increase common knowledge, yet somehow deprive us of that apprenticed learning that leads to wisdom; this digital haze obscures our view of the future and keeps our focus ever more relentlessly on the present, with ever more insistence on speed as a virtue in and of itself.

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The book took me about 10 hours to read, and I rated it a 5 on enjoyment, 7.5 on insightfulness, and 6 on well-written. You can view my ratings for all books here.