More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Read between
November 1 - November 28, 2024
I think it’s wise to cultivate a healthy suspicion of technology. Technological, and even economic, progress does not necessarily equal human progress. Just because it’s newer and/or faster doesn’t mean it’s better (as heretical as that sounds). Don’t get sucked into the capitalistic marketing ploy. What looks like progression is often regression with an agenda. Others get rich; you get distracted and addicted. As Gandhi wisely said, “There is more to life than increasing its speed.”
It kills wisdom; wisdom is born in the quiet, the slow. Wisdom has its own pace. It makes you wait for it—wait for the inner voice to come to the surface of your tempestuous mind, but not until waters of thought settle and calm.
Put another way: the mind is the portal to the soul, and what you fill your mind with will shape the trajectory of your character. In the end, your life is no more than the sum of what you gave your attention to.
“What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?”
If you were born after, say, 1995, then you can’t really remember a time when infinity wasn’t in your front right pocket. But I can.
A survey from Microsoft found that 77 percent of young adults answered “ ‘yes’ when asked, ‘When nothing is occupying my attention, the first thing I do is reach for my phone.’
But internal noise? That’s a whole other animal. A wild beast in desperate need of taming.
And solitude—as somber as it sounds—is anything but loneliness. In his masterpiece Celebration of Discipline, Richard Foster wrote, “Loneliness is inner emptiness. Solitude is inner fulfillment.”19 In solitude we’re anything but alone. In fact, that’s where many of us feel most in connection to God.
In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that ultimately in this world there is no finished symphony.
Social media takes this problem to a whole new level as we live under the barrage of images—not just from marketing departments but from the rich and famous as well as our friends and family, all of whom curate the best moments of their lives. This ends up unintentionally playing to a core sin of the human condition that goes all the way back to the garden—envy. The greed for another person’s life and the loss of gratitude, joy, and contentment in our own.
Pharaoh would love the USofA.
Just like Egypt, we’re an empire built on the oppression of the poor. In America’s case (and many other nations), literally. What’s more, we’ve found a way to do slavery guilt-free.
at the top is 0.7 percent of humanity, weighing in with 45.9 percent of the world’s wealth.
The odds are, if you’re reading this book, you’re near the top, not the bottom. That’s the tricky thing about Egypt. It’s hell if you’re a slave, but it’s not half bad if you’re an American. I mean, Egyptian.
Not to mention what it would do for the rest of us. If only we could go an entire day without buying anything.
What I really need is time to enjoy what I already have, with God.
like all the most dangerous lies, it’s a half-truth. More money does make you happier—if you’re poor. I hate the way some idealistic Christians (who aren’t poor) glamorize poverty. It’s horrible. Lifting people out of poverty will make them happier, but only up to a point.
No matter where you live, your emotional well-being is as good as it’s going to get at $75,000…and money’s not going to make it any better beyond that point. It’s like you hit some sort of ceiling, and you can’t get emotional well-being much higher just by having more money.
Command those who are rich in this present world not to be arrogant nor to put their hope in wealth, which is so uncertain….
William Morris offered a good rule of thumb: “Have nothing in your houses that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.”
That nagging feeling of always wanting more. Not just more stuff, but more life. The next thing might not be a thing at all; it might be graduation or marriage or children or a better job or retirement or whatever “it” is for you on the horizon.
But there’s always something just out of reach. We live with what the historian Arthur Schlesinger called an “inextinguishable discontent.”63 It’s what the poet of Ecclesiastes described as “a chasing after the wind.”
(Rather than my default of paying for my items while texting with work, while podcasting via headphones, all the while treating the poor cashier like an ATM instead of a soul.)
“Accepting hardship as the pathway to peace; taking, as [Jesus] did, this sinful world as it is, not as I would have it.”
