Daniel Cornwall

“Amazingly, life went on largely undisturbed as Chesbrough’s team raised the city’s buildings. One British visitor observed a 750-ton hotel being lifted, and described the surreal experience in a letter: “The people were in [the hotel] all the time coming and going, eating and sleeping—the whole business of the hotel proceeding without interruption”
― Steven Johnson, How We Got to Now: Six Innovations That Made the Modern World

“The scary world: fear vs. reality. The world seems scarier than it is because what you hear about it has been selected—by your own attention filter or by the media—precisely because it is scary.”
― Hans Rosling, Factfulness: Ten Reasons We're Wrong About the World—and Why Things Are Better Than You Think

“All of a sudden a car cut across the lanes in front of us and the Archbishop had to swerve out of the way to avoid hitting the other car. “There are some truly amazing drivers on the road!” the Archbishop said with exasperation and a head-shaking chuckle. I asked him what went through his head at moments like this, and he said that perhaps the driver was on his way to the hospital because his wife was giving birth, or a relative was sick. There it was. He reacted with the inevitable and uncontrollable surprise, which is one of our instinctual responses, but then instead of taking the low road of anger, he took the high road of humor, acceptance, and even compassion. And it was gone: no fuming, no lingering frustration, no raised blood pressure. •”
― Dalai Lama XIV, The Book of Joy: Lasting Happiness in a Changing World

“Erecting barriers against the existential is not new—before YouTube we had (and still have) mindless television and heavy drinking to help avoid deeper questions—but the advanced technologies of the twenty-first-century attention economy are particularly effective at this task.”
― Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism: Choosing a Focused Life in a Noisy World