"My son checks online about a college out east he’s curious about. He picks up a few facts and data. And suddenly he’s panicking about his class schedule. We see natural disasters occur – many times live on our televisions or computers – and we become overcome with a desire to help. Again, some of these things are extraordinarily good. But they illustrate the demands placed on our shoulders by having easy access to information.

Technology makes it nearly impossible for many kids to get a break. When I was a 16-year-old who had a bad day, I’d go home, put some headphones on and listen to my favorite album until my dad called me down for dinner. Today, that same 16-year-old might toss on headphones and listen to music on their iPhone. But they also are checking Facebook and texting at the same time. They still are getting sucked into the drama of their life and their friends."

"But even if the problems are different, human nature remains the same. And most humans have two contradictory impulses: we love and need one another, yet we crave privacy and autonomy.

To harness the energy that fuels both these drives, we need to move beyond the New Groupthink and embrace a more nuanced approach to creativity and learning. Our offices should encourage casual, cafe-style interactions, but allow people to disappear into personalized, private spaces when they want to be alone. Our schools should teach children to work with others, but also to work on their own for sustained periods of time. And we must recognize that introverts like Steve Wozniak need extra quiet and privacy to do their best work."

"A few months later, I read an interview with the perennially cutting-edge designer Philippe Starck. What allowed him to remain so consistently ahead of the curve? “I never read any magazines or watch TV,” he said, perhaps a little hyperbolically. “Nor do I go to cocktail parties, dinners or anything like that.” He lived outside conventional ideas, he implied, because “I live alone mostly, in the middle of nowhere.”

Around the same time, I noticed that those who part with $2,285 a night to stay in a cliff-top room at the Post Ranch Inn in Big Sur pay partly for the privilege of not having a TV in their rooms; the future of travel, I’m reliably told, lies in “black-hole resorts,” which charge high prices precisely because you can’t get online in their rooms."

"If the world overwhelms you with its constant production of useless crap which you filter more and more to things that only interest you can I calmly suggest that you just create things that you like & cut out the rest of the world as a middle-man to your happiness?
From where I sit creating things does the following:

Let’s you filter to something you like…Frees you…Makes you happy…Plays to strengths not weaknesses…

I can’t say it better than _why [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff ]: "when you don’t create things, you become defined by your tastes rather than ability. your tastes only narrow & exclude people. so create."

…

If you quiet your mind & allow yourself to stop judging everything you will find that you have more potential for innovation (at work, in the kitchen…with your hobbies…your thoughts) than you thought before. You were using the same brutal quality filter on yourself that you used on viral videos, talk radio, and blog posts. You deserve better."

"About six months ago, in May, my wife and I moved from San Francisco to Portland, Oregon. We expected to rent an apartment in Portland for at least a year, maybe two. Yesterday, in a major diversion from that path, we closed on our first home. We move in this coming Saturday.

In this post, I’m going to talk about why we bought a home, how we went about it, and the context of the particular socioeconomic moment we find ourselves in."

"There’s a simplicity that comes from transience, and a simplicity that comes from permanence. Both are illusions, and one will present itself before the other. For now, I’m eager to be wrapped up in the illusion of permanence, serene and arboreal."

"One would be tempted to say that the contemporary museum is a machine for ‘slipping glimpses’ – to misappropriate Willem de Kooning’s famous description of his painting, while noting that the essence of appreciating his work consists in looking hard and long at what he captured in a blink of the eye and the flick of a wrist. But, in truth, the mechanisms in play are horridly like those of a sci-fi monster that ingests people in great gulps, pumps them peristaltically through its digestive tract in a semi-delirious state, and then flushes them out the other end with their pockets lighter and with almost no memory of their ‘museum experience’ other than a mild anaesthetic hangover. In short, one leaves the halls of culture much as one does a colonoscopy clinic."

"past year is culmination of decade-long effort to change museum's character, to turn it "interactive," place where people come to see, but also be seen; to not just look at art but participate in it. MoMA has made its mission to transform "into a social space from an treasure trove," according to the director…

But a resulting influx of people through the doors has lead influential art worlders like Robert Storr to lament rise of "Death Star Museums." These are places where "uninterrupted contemplation" is impossible. More people may be coming to contemp art museums, Mr. Storr wrote…, but "the mechanisms in play are horridly like those of a sci-fi monster that ingests people in great gulps."

"Museums of modern art are a kind of inherently unstable space," Mr. Lowry said. "If you're going to follow flow of contemp art, you have to constantly tweak & adjust. You can't lock it down & say this is what it should be for the next 10 years. Artists are moving much faster than that.""

"At our desk, on the road, or on a remote beach, the world is a tap away. It's so cool. And yet it's not. What we lose with our constant connectedness." ... "DESCARTES, NEWTON, LOCKE, Spinoza, Kant, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard -- they share the distinction of having been some of the greatest thinkers the world has known. They also share this: None of them ever married or had their own families, and most of them spent the bulk of their lives living alone. In his provocative 1989 book Solitude: A Return to the Self, British writer and psychiatrist Anthony Storr made a persuasive case for the value of deep, uninterrupted alone time. He found it in ample supply in the lives of not just philosophers and physicists, but also some of the greatest poets, novelists, painters, and composers."