by I caught myself doing it again today. Hand reaching for the phone before any conscious thought had formed, like a reflex that bypasses the mind entirely. There was no impulse, no “I wonder what’s new.” Just motion. Palm closing around smooth glass. This isn’t distraction in the traditional sense. Distraction implies something external wrestles your … Read more
by I caught myself tapping my foot waiting for a webpage to load the other day. Three seconds, maybe four. I was annoyed. And then I laughed at myself, because I remember waiting — real waiting — for the same thing. The dial-up screech, the slow crawl of a kilobyte at a time, the ritual of … Read more
by There’s a folder on my desktop called Read Later. It contains, among other things, a guide to morning routines, a manifesto on deep work, and a list of note-taking methods I was excited about for exactly forty-five minutes. I have never opened any of them a second time. I also have not deleted them. They … Read more
by I spent most of a Saturday recently being utterly, almost impressively bad at something. The kind of bad where your hands don’t know what your brain is asking them to do. Where every attempt is a little worse than the one before it, and you start wondering if maybe this particular skill just isn’t for … Read more
by I’ve been writing long enough now to admit something: most of the time, I don’t know what I’m about to say. I sit down with a shape in my head — a direction, a mood, a vague sense that something is worth turning over. But the thought itself isn’t formed yet. It forms in the … Read more
by I spent last weekend being terrible at something. Deliberately, conspicuously terrible. I won’t say what because the details don’t matter, but I will say it involved muscle memory I do not have and a level of coordination my body refuses to cooperate with. It was uncomfortable. That familiar adult feeling of standing at the bottom … Read more
by A few months ago I caught myself in a rare moment of stillness. Not meditation, not a deep breath before a meeting — just standing in the middle of the kitchen, looking at nothing, thinking about nothing in particular. No phone in hand, no music playing, no podcast filling the silence. Just me, a counter, … Read more
by I spent forty-five minutes watching someone organize their refrigerator. Not my refrigerator. Some stranger’s, in a rental apartment in a city I’ve never been to. The video’s runtime was fourteen minutes; the rest was other videos. A capsule wardrobe, a morning routine, a desk setup that made my own desk feel embarrassed to be itself. … Read more
by There’s a moment, just before you find what you’re looking for, that has a texture all its own. You’ve turned over every possibility, ruled out the obvious candidates, and now you’re circling something you can almost feel. It’s not quite an answer yet — it’s the shape of one, pressing against the membrane of what … Read more
by There’s a moment that happens more often than I’d like to admit, when I catch myself treating a description of something as if it were the thing itself. I read a summary of an idea and feel like I understand it. I glance at a dashboard and believe I know what’s happening. I navigate by … Read more