Wednesday Wisdom: Life Choices, Practice, and Character
January 10, 2024's Wisdom
Welcome to Wednesday Wisdom, our 3x3 Newsletter where I attempt to distill and share worldly advice for better living by presenting three quotes, three observations, and three questions.
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Life Choices
🤨 Quote
“Avoiding informational garbage requires us to make sometimes painful choices about what (and how much) we read, listen to, and watch. But many of us have lost the communities and traditions that in past centuries helped to shape and even constrain our life choices; instead, we have embraced a boundless global freedom. This can be liberating, but we also risk incoherence or simply wasting our time.”
Nate Anderson, In Emergency, Break Glass
Observation 🧐
We’re living in a time where we have nearly every piece of information we need at our fingertips. Scott Galloway, in his book The Four, called Google “a modern man's god” because its “our source of knowledge-ever-present, aware of our deepest secrets, reassuring us where we are and where we need to go, answering questions from trivial to profound.”
But while a freedom like this is liberating, we are simultaneously constrained by the finitude of time. We only have so much of it to spend reading, watching, or listening to information. We need discipline to be able to help us determine what and how much to consume.
While we have pure freedom to explore, which we did not have before, we still need guides to help direct us appropriately. If not, we “waste a lot of time going down blind alleys,” to quote W. Somerset Maugham.