⚡️ Enlightening Bolts

📜 Be Your Own Algorithm: How to break free from the scroll and start curating your own culture. Watch it here.

👁️ How to Reignite Your Sense of Wonder as an Adult: A quiet guide for those who feel numb, overstimulated, or far from themselves — and want to come back to life. Read it here.

📔 The First Notebook That Writes Back: Lightpage is a simple daily habit to move your life forward. Try it here.

🎇 Image of The Week

“For the past 25 years, Ra Paulette has been scraping and shaping New Mexico's sandstone into man-made caves of art. Paulette, an artist without academic training, has become a freethinking sculptor who maximizes the use of negative space. He has spent decades pursuing his obsession as he has learned things that are only perfected in practice; a careful and solitary doer, he has bettered his construction techniques via trial and error as he has, at the same time, enhanced the aesthetic impact of his work.” Read more.

A work of incredible devotion. Imagine this work is lost to time and some thousands of years in the future, humans stumble into this cave system. How struck they would be!

🗺️ Mapping The Motion of Mystery

Enjoy this excerpt from the first episode of my new podcast. Where Wonder Went. New episode coming next week!

“The true spirit of science should be one that is iterative and exists in the context of all that is unknown, and there is so much of it that is unknown. You learn about the turnings of the wheel and the paradigm shifts that occur in science. And too often people forget that we are standing on scientific foundations that will be undermined by future discoveries. This is the very nature of science. And so you see these strands of scientism that occur in people who want to use science as a way to justify their beliefs. Or it even occurs in people who practice science, whether they're professors at an institution or researchers, whatever they may be. They feel that it almost gives them a priesthood—not in terms of moral purity, but in terms of status above others—that they have access to the truth in a way that common folk do not. And in very specific ways they might, but that “truth" is always so tenuous and always subject to revision as more is discovered.

But so often the relationship to science is that so much has been settled and so much has been clarified that science basically—we've figured out so much about the world. And this misses the mystery in it. One of the ways I've described this in the past is that science does a great job of mapping the motion of a mystery, but its ability to explain that mystery is wholly insufficient for the instrument that it is. It cannot do that. And I think too often we allow for the mapping of the motion of the mystery. We look at our ability to name and label things and develop these very rigorous and systematic frameworks for describing the world. We forget that the thing that we're describing is still extremely mysterious to us.”

🌼 Ordinary Beauty of Daily Life

Digest this potent passage from Jeff Foster:

🤓 Learn This Word

Orthosomnia: the obsessive pursuit of optimal sleep metrics based on fitness tracker or mobile phone data”

🕸️ From Around The Web

An Existential Guide to: Making Friends

“The first thing you need to know is that friendship is not natural. If you were natural you would be a moss. Moss doesn’t have friends. Moss just spreads, cold and damp and indifferent, and sometimes another moss spreads nearby, and together they make a bog, and then the bog swallows a horse. But you, unfortunately, are not a moss. You are a person, and people are creatures that rot if they are alone. To be human is to be an animal that needs witnesses. Someone has to see you eating cereal. Someone has to be there when you tell a bad joke. Otherwise you start twitching in public, you start growling in the supermarket. You start developing hobbies. This is the horror we call solitude.

But making friends - have you tried it? Horrible stuff. It’s like applying for a job, except the application process is permanent and the job doesn’t exist. “So what do you do?” you ask. “What music do you like?” you say. All this hideous bureaucracy of the self, filling in forms with little fragments of personality so you can be filed correctly in someone else’s head. And half the time they reject the application. They ghost you. They say “we should hang out sometime” which, in the language of friendship, means “I hope you die.”

The philosophers didn’t make it easier.”

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