“
Annabeth came up to me. She was dressed in black camouflage with her Celestial bronze knife strapped to her arm and her laptop bag slung over her shoulder—ready for stabbing or surfing the Internet, whichever came first.
”
”
Rick Riordan (The Last Olympian (Percy Jackson and the Olympians, #5))
“
Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Damned (Damned, #1))
“
Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year.
”
”
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials))
“
And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly at your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.
”
”
Nathan Hill (The Nix)
“
Your life should consist of more than commuting, working, eating, surfing the Internet, sleeping and watching TV. Your life should be filled with purpose-driven experiences and projects that bring excitement, passion, energy, and authentic meaning and joy into your life.
”
”
Richie Norton (The Power of Starting Something Stupid: How to Crush Fear, Make Dreams Happen, and Live without Regret)
“
Then the guilt from my ignored responsibilities grows so large that merely carrying it around with me feels like a huge responsibility. It takes up a sizable portion of my capacity, leaving me almost completely useless for anything other than consuming nachos and surfing the Internet like an attention-deficient squirrel on PCP.
”
”
Allie Brosh (Hyperbole and a Half)
“
Trust me, the being-dead part is much easier than the dying part. If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually, watching television and surfing the Internet are really excellent practice for being dead.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk
“
When feeling lonely or anxious, most of us have the habit of looking for distractions, which often leads to some form of unwholesome consumption -- whether eating a snack in the absence of hunger, mindlessly surfing the Internet, going on a drive, or reading. Conscious breathing is a good way to nourish body and mind with mindfulness.
”
”
Thich Nhat Hanh (Silence: The Power of Quiet in a World Full of Noise)
“
While some more passive forms of leisure, such as watching TV or surfing the Internet, are fun in the short term, over time, they don't offer nearly the same happiness as more challenging activities.
”
”
Gretchen Rubin (Happier at Home: Kiss More, Jump More, Abandon a Project, Read Samuel Johnson, and My Other Experiments in the Practice of Everyday Life)
“
I was surfing the Internet for a different sort of education. I surfed for photos of circus freaks and synonyms for the word intercourse and for answers to why staring at the stars in the evening tore my heart with longing.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Shiver (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #1))
“
The faster we surf across the surface of the Web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google gains to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Its advertising system, moreover, is explicitly designed to figure out which messages are most likely to grab our attention and then to place those messages in our field of view. Every click we make on the Web marks a break in our concentration, a bottom-up disruption of our attention—and it’s in Google’s economic interest to make sure we click as often as possible.
”
”
Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains)
“
People over the age of thirty were born before the digital revolution really started. We’ve learned to use digital technology—laptops, cameras, personal digital assistants, the Internet—as adults, and it has been something like learning a foreign language. Most of us are okay, and some are even expert. We do e-mails and PowerPoint, surf the Internet, and feel we’re at the cutting edge. But compared to most people under thirty and certainly under twenty, we are fumbling amateurs. People of that age were born after the digital revolution began. They learned to speak digital as a mother tongue.
”
”
Ken Robinson (The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything)
“
Ability to find the answers is more important than ability to know the answers.
”
”
Amit Kalantri
“
Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I’d put all that energy into studying I’d have earned an MBA.
”
”
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood)
“
It was music of a kind, at the same time soothing and invigorating, such a human place and time, when no one texted at the table or had an Internet to surf while they ate or carried a cell phone the ring of which could never be ignored.
”
”
Dean Koontz (The City)
“
If you can watch much television, then being dead will be a cinch. Actually watching television and surfing the internet are really excellent practise for being dead.
”
”
Chuck Palahniuk (Damned (Damned, #1))
“
Internet makes you think that you have millions of friends, whereas you are your own friend.
”
”
Michael Bassey Johnson
“
Cut down on television watching and Internet surfing and instead spend the time with your family, read, exercise, or do something else that enhances the quality of your life.
”
”
Brian Tracy (Eat That Frog!: 21 Great Ways to Stop Procrastinating and Get More Done in Less Time)
“
Most people are afraid. Most people get comfortable in a life that seems tolerable enough. They don’t have the time, they complain, and may actually believe it (even as they spend hours watching TV, playing video games, surfing the Internet, at the mall). The price is that moment near the end when you realize that your life never belonged to you. You never stepped up. You never owned it. You never showed us who you really are.
”
”
Srinivas Rao (The Art of Being Unmistakable)
“
Some innovations just don’t attract enough economic or social demand: just as supersonic flight and manned space flight stagnated after the 1970s, today (in 2002) the potentialities of broadband (G3) technology are being taken up rather slowly because few people want to surf the Internet or watch movies from their mobile phones.
”
”
Martin J. Rees (Our Final Hour: A Scientist's Warning)
“
Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel.
”
”
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials))
“
Sickness usually dominates the thoughts of a patient with cancer, but too much preoccupation with illness can have a destructive effect on the mind, and knowing what can happen frequently becomes self-fulfilling. Today, people who are ill will spend hours surfing the internet to find out all they can about their illness – but this isn’t always a good thing.
”
”
Jennifer Worth (In the Midst of Life)
“
Accessing the Internet can actually make people dumber than if they had never engaged a subject at all. The very act of searching for information makes people think they’ve learned something, when in fact they’re more likely to be immersed in yet more data they do not understand. This happens because after enough time surfing, people no longer can distinguish between things that may have flashed before their eyes and things they actually know. Seeing words on a screen is not the same as reading or understanding them.
”
”
Thomas M. Nichols (The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters)
“
MÁIRE DOHERTY has a strong flavor of nun about her, the non-terrifying kind, who wear socks in their sandals, do Internet surfing, and drink cappuccinos. She’s a thin woman with an unflattering haircut pitched somewhere between Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music and an Amish elder.
”
”
Jess Kidd (Mr. Flood's Last Resort)
“
The learning principle is to plunge into the detailed mystery of the micro in order to understand what makes the macro tick. Our obstacle is that we live in an attention-deficit culture. We are bombarded with more and more information on television, radio, cell phones, video games, the Internet. The constant supply of stimulus has the potential to turn us into addicts, always hungering for something new and prefabricated to keep us entertained. When nothing exciting is going on, we might get bored, distracted, separated from the moment. So we look for new entertainment, surf channels, flip through magazines. If caught in these rhythms, we are like tiny current-bound surface fish, floating along a two-dimensional world without any sense for the gorgeous abyss below. When these societally induced tendencies translate into the learning process, they have devastating effect.
”
”
Josh Waitzkin (The Art of Learning: An Inner Journey to Optimal Performance)
“
Viewers routinely spend hours surfing galleries of porn videos searching for the right video to finish, keeping dopamine elevated for abnormally long periods. But try to envision a hunter-gatherer routinely spending the same number of hours masturbating to the same stick-figure on a cave wall. Didn't happen.
”
”
Gary Wilson (Your Brain On Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction)
“
People who do surf the Internet for fun at work—within a reasonable limit of less than 20 percent of their total time in the office—are more productive by about 9 percent than those who don't,” according to Dr. Brent Coker, from the department of management and marketing at the University of Melbourne, Australia.
”
”
Erik Qualman (Socialnomics: How Social Media Transforms the Way We Live and Do Business)
“
Biologists invent the contraceptive pill – and the Pope doesn’t know what to do about it. Computer scientists develop the Internet – and rabbis argue whether orthodox Jews should be allowed to surf it. Feminist thinkers call upon women to take possession of their bodies – and learned muftis debate how to confront such incendiary ideas.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A History of Tomorrow)
“
You know what writing is? Writing is sitting on a chair staring into space. Writing is two hours surfing the internet and five minutes typing. Writing is skim-reading ‘writing advice’ on websites and muttering ‘fuck off’ under your breath. Writing is looking at your friends’ success and muttering ‘fuck off’ under your breath. Writing is reading over what you’ve written and thinking you’re a genius. Writing is reading over what you’ve written and shouting ‘fuck you’ at the screen. Writing is £3500 college courses after which you pursue a career in telemarketing. Writing is something you either fucking do or you fucking don’t. Writing is listening to Tom Waits and wanting to be the literary equivalent. Writing is ending up as the literary equivalent of Bananarama. Writing is forty publishers saying you do not meet our needs at this time. Writing is meeting no one’s needs at any time. Writing is completing 2000 words one morning and weeping about never being able to write again the next. Writing is losing a whole day’s work to a decrepit Dell laptop. Writing is never having the time to write and never writing when you have the time. Writing is having one idea and coasting on that for months until another one comes along. Writing is never having any ideas. Writing is sitting at a bus stop and having four million ideas and not having a notebook to hand. Writing is laughing at the sort of people who keep notebooks on them at all times as if they are proper writers. Writing is reading. Writing is reading. Writing is reading. Writin’ is fightin’. Writing is writing.
”
”
M.J. Nicholls (The 1002nd Book to Read Before You Die)
“
After all, the internet didn't surf itself; someone had to look at strange porn, might as well be Max.
”
”
Richard Stephenson (Collapse (New America, #1))
“
I may not have been to college, he said, "but I have been to the police academy."
...
He went on, "What do you think we do at the police academy, surf the internet?"
"I can honestly say I never gave it much th-.
”
”
Jennifer Echols (Going Too Far)
“
In 1995, psychiatrist Ivan Goldberg coined the term internet addiction disorder. He wrote a satirical essay about “people abandoning their family obligations to sit gazing into their computer monitor as they surfed the Internet.” Intending to parody society’s obsession with pathologizing everyday behaviors, he inadvertently advanced the idea. Goldberg responded critically when academics began discussing internet addiction as a legitimate disorder: “I don’t think Internet addiction disorder exists any more than tennis addictive disorder, bingo addictive disorder, and TV addictive disorder exist. People can overdo anything. To call it a disorder is an error.
”
”
Danah Boyd (It's Complicated: The Social Lives of Networked Teens)
“
Writing is the hum. Writing is laying track. Writing is the high. Now imagine that hum, that high, that track to be laid is behind a door. And that door is five miles away. Those five miles are just . . . writing crap and doodling and trying to have an idea and surfing the internet and hoping like hell not to get so distracted that you give up. Worse? Those five miles are lined with brownies and cupcakes and episodes of Game of Thrones and Idris Elba waiting to talk to only you and really good novels to read. Every time I sit down to write, I have to mentally run those five miles past all of that to get to that door. It’s a long, hard five-mile run. Sometimes I am almost dead by the time I reach the door. That’s why I have to keep doing it. The more often I run the five miles, the fitter I become. And the fitter I become, the easier the run begins to feel and the less fresh and exciting all that stuff on the side of the road seems. I mean, how long has it been there? More important, as I get fitter, I can run faster. And the faster I can run, the faster I can get to that door. The faster you can too, writers out there. When you sit down to write every day, it becomes easier and easier to tap into that creative space inside your mind. The faster I can get to that door, the quicker I can get to the good stuff.
”
”
Shonda Rhimes (Year of Yes)
“
Their words also make it a lot easier for people to justify that shift -- to convince themselves that surfing the Web is a suitable, even superior, substitute for deep reading and other forms of calm and attentive thought. In arguing that books are archaic and dispensable, Federman and Shirky provide the intellectual cover that allows thoughtful people to slip comfortably in the permanent state of distractedness that defines the online life.
”
”
Nicholas Carr (The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains)
“
There's a hardness I'm seeing in modern people. Those little moments of goofiness that used to make the day pass seem to have gone. Life's so serious now. Maybe it's just because I'm with an older gang now.[...]I mean nobody even has hobbies these days. Not that I can see. Husbands and wives both work. Kids are farmed out to schools and video games. Nobody seems able to endure simply being themselves, either - but at the same time they're isolated. People work much more, only go home and surf the Internet and send e-mail rather than calling or writing a note or visiting each other. They work, watch TV, and sleep. I see these things. The world is only about work: work work work get get get...racing ahead...getting sacked from work...going online...knowing computer languages...winning contracts. I mean, it's just not what I would have imagined the world might be if you'd asked me seventeen years ago. People are frazzled and angry, desperate about money, and, at best, indifferent to the future.
”
”
Douglas Coupland (Girlfriend in a Coma)
“
Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I’d put all that energy into studying I’d have earned an MBA. Instead I was majoring in hustling, something no university would give me a degree for.
”
”
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials))
“
FINDING THE TIME If you’re going to run regularly, you’re going to need to carve out part of your day, even if it’s 30 to 60 minutes. If that seems impossible, ask yourself: How much time do I spend watching television? Or surfing the Internet? Or shopping? Take some of that time and devote it to doing something good for yourself.
”
”
Scott Jurek (Eat and Run: My Unlikely Journey to Ultramarathon Greatness)
“
The internet is nothing but a jumble of nonsense, an atrocious mixed metaphor. It’s not meant to be understood. First and foremost, it’s a web that you surf. What the hell does that even mean? It not only defies sense but the very laws of physics! And now, apparently, it also contains a cloud. And this is something that’s supposed to be secure? That which looks solid but in fact is not, something literally as thin as air? Perfect!
”
”
A.D. Aliwat (In Limbo)
“
the most effective stress-relief strategies are exercising or playing sports, praying or attending a religious service, reading, listening to music, spending time with friends or family, getting a massage, going outside for a walk, meditating or doing yoga, and spending time with a creative hobby. (The least effective strategies are gambling, shopping, smoking, drinking, eating, playing video games, surfing the Internet, and watching TV or movies for more than two hours.)
”
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Kelly McGonigal (The Willpower Instinct: How Self-Control Works, Why It Matters, and What You Can Do To Get More of It)
“
The longer I procrastinate on returning phone calls and emails, the more guilty I feel about it. The guilt I feel causes me to avoid the issue further, which only leads to more guilt and more procrastination. It gets to the point where I don’t email someone for fear of reminding them that they emailed me and thus giving them a reason to be disappointed in me. Then the guilt from my ignored responsibilities grows so large that merely carrying it around with me feels like a huge responsibility. It takes up a sizable portion of my capacity, leaving me almost completely useless for anything other than consuming nachos and surfing the Internet like an attention-deficient squirrel on PCP.
”
”
Allie Brosh (Hyperbole and a Half)
“
Today the Catholic Church continues to enjoy the loyalties and tithes of hundreds of millions of followers. Yet it and the other theist religions have long since turned from creative into reactive forces. They are busy with rearguard holding operations more than with pioneering novel technologies, innovative economic methods or groundbreaking social ideas. They now mostly agonise over the technologies, methods and ideas propagated by other movements. Biologists invent the contraceptive pill – and the Pope doesn’t know what to do about it. Computer scientists develop the Internet – and rabbis argue whether orthodox Jews should be allowed to surf it. Feminist thinkers call upon women to take possession of their bodies – and learned muftis debate how to confront such incendiary ideas.
”
”
Yuval Noah Harari (Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow)
“
It’s easy to underestimate how profound and holistic Roddenberry’s vision of the techscape of the future was. By today’s standards, the available technology of 1964 was downright primitive. Doors did not open automatically when we approached them. The first handheld calculator was still in the future, as were microwave ovens and cell phones. 1964 was a year before most Americans had even heard of a place called Vietnam, five years before man walked on the moon, 25 years before anyone ever surfed the Internet. Your phone had a curly cord, and the new innovation of “touchtone” dialing was merely a year old. Even the television sets that viewers watched would be considered positively prehistoric today. Most TVs were black-and-white models, and the majority of those sets had no remote control. There was no cable or satellite; rabbit ears and roof-top antennas were the norm. The world looked, and was, different.
”
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Marc Cushman (These are the Voyages: TOS Season One (These are the Voyages, #1))
“
Just as the printing press led to the appearance of a new set of possibilities for democracy, beginning five hundred years ago—and just as the emergence of electronic broadcasting reshaped those possibilities, beginning in the first quarter of the twentieth century—the Internet is presenting us with new possibilities to reestablish a healthy functioning self-government, even before it rivals television for an audience. In fact, the Internet is perhaps the greatest source of hope for reestablishing an open communications environment in which the conversation of democracy can flourish. It has extremely low entry barriers for individuals. The ideas that individuals contribute are dealt with, in the main, according to the rules of a meritocracy of ideas. It is the most interactive medium in history and the one with the greatest potential for connecting individuals to one another and to a universe of knowledge. An important distinction to make is that the Internet is not just another platform for disseminating the truth. It’s a platform for pursuing the truth, and the decentralized creation and distribution of ideas, in the same way that markets are a decentralized mechanism for the creation and distribution of goods and services. It’s a platform, in other words, for reason. But just as it is important to avoid romanticizing the printing press and the information ecosystem it created, it is also necessary to keep a clear-eyed view of the Internet’s problems and abuses. It is hard to imagine any human evil that is not somehow abundantly displayed somewhere on the Internet. Parents of young children are often horrified to learn what obscene, grotesque, and savage material is all too easily available to children whose Web-surfing habits are not supervised or electronically limited. Teen suicides, bullying, depravity, and criminal behavior of all descriptions are described and—some would argue—promoted on the Internet. As with any tool put at the disposal of humankind, it can be, and is, used for evil as well as good purposes. And as always, it is up to us—particularly those of us who live in a democracy—to make intelligent choices about how and for what we use this incredibly powerful tool.
”
”
Al Gore (The Assault on Reason)
“
The tricky thing about the hood is that you’re always working, working, working, and you feel like something’s happening, but really nothing’s happening at all. I was out there every day from seven a.m. to seven p.m., and every day it was: How do we turn ten rand into twenty? How do we turn twenty into fifty? How do I turn fifty into a hundred? At the end of the day we’d spend it on food and maybe some beers, and then we’d go home and come back and it was: How do we turn ten into twenty? How do we turn twenty into fifty? It was a whole day’s work to flip that money. You had to be walking, be moving, be thinking. You had to get to a guy, find a guy, meet a guy. There were many days we’d end up back at zero, but I always felt like I’d been very productive. Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I’d put all that energy into studying I’d have earned an MBA. Instead I was majoring in hustling, something no university would give me a degree for.
”
”
Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials))
“
GCHQ has traveled a long and winding road. That road stretches from the wooden huts of Bletchley Park, past the domes and dishes of the Cold War, and on towards what some suggest will be the omniscient state of the Brave New World. As we look to the future, the docile and passive state described by Aldous Huxley in his Brave New World is perhaps more appropriate analogy than the strictly totalitarian predictions offered by George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Bizarrely, many British citizens are quite content in this new climate of hyper-surveillance, since its their own lifestyle choices that helped to create 'wired world' - or even wish for it, for as we have seen, the new torrents of data have been been a source of endless trouble for the overstretched secret agencies. As Ken Macdonald rightly points out, the real drives of our wired world have been private companies looking for growth, and private individuals in search of luxury and convenience at the click of a mouse. The sigint agencies have merely been handed the impossible task of making an interconnected society perfectly secure and risk-free, against the background of a globalized world that presents many unprecedented threats, and now has a few boundaries or borders to protect us. Who, then, is to blame for the rapid intensification of electronic surveillance? Instinctively, many might reply Osama bin Laden, or perhaps Pablo Escobar. Others might respond that governments have used these villains as a convenient excuse to extend state control. At first glance, the massive growth of security, which includes includes not only eavesdropping but also biometric monitoring, face recognition, universal fingerprinting and the gathering of DNA, looks like a sad response to new kinds of miscreants. However, the sad reality is that the Brave New World that looms ahead of us is ultimately a reflection of ourselves. It is driven by technologies such as text messaging and customer loyalty cards that are free to accept or reject as we choose. The public debate on surveillance is often cast in terms of a trade-off between security and privacy. The truth is that luxury and convenience have been pre-eminent themes in the last decade, and we have given them a much higher priority than either security or privacy. We have all been embraced the world of surveillance with remarkable eagerness, surfing the Internet in a global search for a better bargain, better friends, even a better partner.
GCHQ vast new circular headquarters is sometimes represented as a 'ring of power', exercising unparalleled levels of surveillance over citizens at home and abroad, collecting every email, every telephone and every instance of internet acces. It has even been asserted that GCHQ is engaged in nothing short of 'algorithmic warfare' as part of a battle for control of global communications. By contrast, the occupants of 'Celtenham's Doughnut' claim that in reality they are increasingly weak, having been left behind by the unstoppable electronic communications that they cannot hope to listen to, still less analyse or make sense of. In fact, the frightening truth is that no one is in control. No person, no intelligence agency and no government is steering the accelerating electronic processes that may eventually enslave us. Most of the devices that cause us to leave a continual digital trail of everything we think or do were not devised by the state, but are merely symptoms of modernity. GCHQ is simply a vast mirror, and it reflects the spirit of the age.
”
”
Richard J. Aldrich (GCHQ)
“
Exceed expectations
Jesus said, “Do more than is expected; carry it two miles.” That’s the attitude you need to have: “I’m not doing just what I have to. I’m not doing the minimum amount to keep my job. I’m a person of excellence. I go above and beyond what’s asked of me. I do more than is expected.” This means if you’re supposed to be at work at 8 a.m., you show up ten minutes early.
You produce more than you have to. You stay ten minutes late. You don’t start shutting down thirty minutes before closing. You put in a full day. Many people show up to work fifteen minutes late. They get some coffee, wander around the office, and finally sit down to work a half hour late. They’ll waste another half hour making personal phone calls and surfing the Internet. Then they wonder why they aren’t promoted. It’s because God doesn’t reward sloppiness. God rewards excellence.
In the Old Testament, Abraham sent his servant to a foreign country to find a wife for his son, Isaac. Abraham told the servant that he would know he’d found the right lady if she offered a drink to both him and his camels. The servant reached the city around sunset. A beautiful young lady named Rebekah came out to the well. The servant said, “I’m so thirsty. Would you mind lowering your bucket and getting me a drink?”
She said, “Not only that, let me get some water for your camels as well.”
Here’s what’s interesting: After a long day’s walk, a camel can drink thirty gallons of water. This servant had ten camels with him. Think about what Rebekah did. If she had a one-gallon bucket of water, she said, in effect, “Yes I’ll not only do what you asked and give you a drink, but I’ll also dip down in this well three hundred more times and give your ten camels a drink.”
Rebekah went way beyond the call of duty. As a result, she was chosen to marry Isaac, who came from the wealthiest family of that time. I doubt that she ever again had to draw three hundred gallons of water.
”
”
Joel Osteen (You Can You Will: 8 Undeniable Qualities of a Winner)
“
I think we all collectively have gone a little crazy. We worry about the wrong things. I have an acquaintance, Christy, whose twelve–year–old son managed to get into a very violent PG–13 movie. I don’t know how many machine–gunnings, explosions, and killings this boy wound up witnessing. As I recall, the boy had nightmares for a week afterward. That disturbed his mother—but not as much as if her son had stumbled into a different kind of movie.
“At least there wasn’t any sex,” she said with dead–serious concern.
“No,” I said, “probably not a single bare breast.”
I didn’t add that most societies do not regard the adult female breast as being primarily an object of sexual desire. After all, it’s just a big gland that makes milk in order to feed hungry babies.
“You know what I’m talking about,” she snapped. “I mean graphic sex.”
We were sitting in a café drinking tea. She cut off the volume of her speech at the end of her sentence, whispering and exaggerating the consonants of S–E–X as if she needed me to read her lips—as if giving voice to this word might disturb our neighbors and brand her as a deviant.
“I don’t think children should see that kind of thing,” she added.
“What should children see?” I asked her.
I am not arguing that we should let our children buy tickets to raunchy movies. I never let my daughters bring home steamy videos or surf the Internet for porn. But something is wrong when sex becomes a dirty word that we don’t even want our children to hear. Why must we regard almost anything sexual as tantamount to obscene?
I think many of us are like Christy. We wouldn’t want our children—even our very sexual teenagers—to see certain kinds of movies, even if they happened to be erotic masterpieces, true works of art. It wouldn’t matter if a movie gave us a wonderful scene of a wife and a husband very lovingly making love with the conscious intention of engendering new life. It wouldn’t matter that sex is life, and therefore must be regarded as sacred as anything could possibly be. It wouldn’t even matter that not one of us could have come into the world but for the sexual union of our fathers and our mothers. If a movie portrayed a man and woman in the ecstatic dance of love—actually showed naked bellies and breasts, burning lips and adoring eyes and the glistening, impassioned organs of sex—most people I know would rather their children watch the vile action movie. They would rather their “innocent” sons and daughters behold the images of bloody, blasted bodies, torture, murder, and death.
”
”
David Zindell (Splendor)
“
• No matter how open we as a society are about formerly private matters, the stigma around our emotional struggles remains formidable. We will talk about almost anyone about our physical health, even our sex lives, but bring depression, anxiety or grief , and the expression on the other person would probably be "get me out of this conversation"
• We can distract our feelings with too much wine, food or surfing the internet,
• Therapy is far from one-sided; it happens in a parallel process. Everyday patients are opening up questions that we have to think about for ourselves,
• "The only way out is through" the only way to get out of the tunnel is to go through, not around it
• Study after study shows that the most important factor in the success of your treatment is your relationship with the therapist, your experience of "feeling felt"
• Attachment styles are formed early in childhood based on our interactions with our caregivers. Attachment styles are significant because they play out in peoples relationships too, influencing the kind of partners they pick, (stable or less stable), how they behave in a relationship (needy, distant, or volatile) and how the relationship tend to end (wistfully, amiably, or with an explosion)
• The presenting problem, the issue somebody comes with, is often just one aspect of a larger problem, if not a red herring entirely.
• "Help me understand more about the relationship" Here, here's trying to establish what’s known as a therapeutic alliance, trust that has to develop before any work can get done.
• In early sessions is always more important for patients to feel understood than it is for them to gain any insight or make changes.
• We can complain for free with a friend or family member, People make faulty narratives to make themselves feel better or look better in the moment, even thought it makes them feel worse over time, and that sometimes they need somebody else to read between the lines.
• Here-and-now, it is when we work on what’s happening in the room, rather than focusing on patient's stories.
• She didn't call him on his bullshit, which this makes patients feel unsafe, like children's whose parent's don’t hold them accountable
• What is this going to feel like to the person I’m speaking to?
• Neuroscientists discovered that humans have brain cells called mirror neurons, that cause them to mimic others, and when people are in a heightened state of emotion, a soothing voice can calm their nervous system and help them stay present
• Don’t judge your feelings; notice them. Use them as your map. Don’t be afraid of the truth.
• The things we protest against the most are often the very things we need to look at
• How easy it is, I thought, to break someone’s heart, even when you take great care not to.
• The purpose on inquiring about people's parent s is not to join them in blaming, judging or criticizing their parents. In fact it is not about their parents at all. It is solely about understanding how their early experiences informed who they are as adults so that they can separate the past from the present (and not wear psychological clothing that no longer fits)
• But personality disorders lie on a spectrum. People with borderline personality disorder are terrified of abandonment, but for some that might mean feeling anxious when their partners don’t respond to texts right away; for others that may mean choosing to stay in volatile, dysfunctional relationships rather than being alone.
• In therapy we aim for self compassion (am I a human?) versus self esteem (Am I good or bad: a judgment)
• The techniques we use are a bit like the type of brain surgery in which the patient remains awake throughout the procedure, as the surgeons operate, they keep checking in with the patient: can you feel this? can you say this words? They are constantly calibrating how close they are to sensitive regions of the brain, and if they hit one, they back up so as not to damage it.
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Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
“
ჩვენ წმინდანები გვჭირდება ანაფორებისა და თავსაფრების გარეშე - ჩვენ გვჭირდება წმინდანები ჯინსებსა და კედებში. ჩვენ გვჭირდება წმინდანები, რომლებიც დადიან კინოში და უსმენენ მუსიკას, რომლებიც დასდევენ საკუთარ მეგობრებს (…) ჩვენ გვჭირდება წმინდანები, რომლებიც სვამენ კოკა-კოლას, ჭამენ ჰოთ-დოგებს, მოგზაურობენ ინტერნეტში და უსმენენ მუსიკას აიპოდებში. ჩვენ გვჭირდება წმინდანები რომელთაც უყვართ ევქარისტია, რომლებსაც არც ეშინიათ და არც რცხვენიათ ჭამონ პიცა, ანაც დალიონ ლუდი მათ მეგობრებთან ერთად. ჩვენ გვჭირდება წმინდანები ვისაც უყვართ ფილმები, ცეკვა, სპორტი, თეატრი. ჩვენ გვჭირდება წმინდანები, ვინც არიან გახსნილები, სოციალურები, ნორმალურები, მხიარული კომპანიონები. ჩვენ გვჭიდება წმინდანები ვინც არიან ამ სამყაროში და იციან, როგორ ისიამოვნონ ყველაზე უკეთ უგულობისა და მიწიურობის გარეშე. ჩვენ წმინდანები გვჭირდება”.
რომის პაპი ფრანჩისკე, ახალგაზრდების მსოფლიო დღე 2013
"We need saints without cassocks, without veils - we need saints with jeans and tennis shoes. We need saints that go to the movies that listen to music, that hang out with their friends (...) We need saints that drink Coca-Cola, that eat hot dogs, that surf the internet and that listen to their iPods. We need saints that love the Eucharist, that are not afraid or embarrassed to eat a pizza or drink a beer with their friends. We need saints who love the movies, dance, sports, theatre. We need saints that are open, sociable, normal, happy companions. We need saints who are in this world and who know how to enjoy the best in this world without being callous or mundane. We need saints”.
Pope Francis, 2013
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David Tinikashvili (მსოფლიო რელიგიები)
“
The Internet and social media are like the ocean: good for surfing and fishing, but never drink any Kool-Aid made with the water.
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M.T. Bass
“
Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain.
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Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials))
“
I was fourteen, curious, and my nightly internet surfing might have already given me a death sentence.
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C. Kopf
“
Remove your electronics from your bedroom. Yes, even your TV and your cell phone! Buy an alarm clock instead. Your bedroom is a sleeping zone, a haven free from distraction. Watching TV, surfing the internet, and using on social media before bed can all interfere with a good night's rest. Studies are showing that the artificial light from these devices can interfere with our natural sleep cycles. We may also become distracted, lose track of time, and stay up later than we intend to. Turn off your TV, and computer at least 30 minutes before bedtime. Put your phone on silent and put it away.
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Akiroq Brost
“
The Addictive Self-Soother When dealing with the addictive self-soother, recognize that you’re with someone who is in a state of unknowing avoidance. The intolerable discomfort associated with his unrecognized loneliness, shame, and disconnection when the spotlight isn’t casting its shimmering glow upon him sends him hiding beneath the floorboards once again. He may be engrossed in workaholism, drinking binges, spending marathons, or voracious Internet surfing. He may indulge in the delivery of yet another tiring oration on some esoteric or controversial subject, not necessarily because he’s seeking attention, but in an effort to avoid feeling the throbbing pulse of his aloneness and fragility. You may go knocking, but he doesn’t come out. He can’t risk being seen au naturel, with all of his emotions, needs, and longings revealed. You’re expected to pander to his selective emotional departures and not request his presence, regardless of the emotional costs to you.
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Wendy T. Behary (Disarming the Narcissist: Surviving and Thriving with the Self-Absorbed)
“
What do guys who successfully recover from porn-induced ED suggest? Suggestion number one is to eliminate porn, porn substitutes, and recalling the porn you watched. Or to put it another way, eliminate all artificial sexual stimulation. By artificial I mean pixels, audio and literature. No porn substitutes, such as: surfing pictures on Facebook, Snapchat or dating apps, cruising Craigslist, underwear ads, YouTube videos, ‘erotic literature’, etc. If it’s not real life, just say ‘no’. Content isn’t as much the issue as whether you are mimicking the behaviours that wired your brain to need novel, screen-based stimulation. The second suggestion is to rewire your sexual arousal to real people. While this helps everyone recover, it may be a key component for young men with little or no sexual experience. This does not mean that you need to have sex to rewire. In fact, slowly getting to know someone is probably the best path. Hanging out, touching, and making out help connect sexual arousal and affection to a real person, and may be essential to recovery.
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Gary Wilson (Your Brain On Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction)
“
Starting a clothing company
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livebnfd
“
He read reviews, poured through code, and surfed forums because someone had already done everything on the internet and it was always for sale. Hours
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Megan Bryce (Boring is the New Black (The Fashionista and The Geek #1))
“
A large portion of my day is devoted to obsessively surfing the Internet. I'm addicted to knowledge, to be filled in on things I should’ve been taught growing up but never was. Give me a couple of days on most subjects, I will become an obsessed expert — guaranteed. My other talents, for lack of a better word, that can be easily attributed to Asperger’s include but aren’t limited to: photographic memory, polyglotism, an aversion to the color white (only contextually though) and some shades of purple, as well as a penchant for counting bathroom and kitchen tiles. Then there’s bipolar disorder.
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J.C. Mells (Pierced (Pierced, #1))
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But it seems to Samuel that all the school is preparing them for is to sit quietly and fake that they're working. To feign the appearance of concentration when in fact they're checking sports scores or e-mail or watching videos or spacing out. And come to think of it, maybe this is the most important lesson the school could teach them about the American workplace: how to sit calmly a your desk and surf the internet and not go insane.
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Nathan Hill
“
The public debate on surveillance is often cast in terms of a trade-off between security and privacy. The truth is that luxury and convenience have been pre-eminent themes in the last decade, and we have given them a much higher priority than either security or privacy. We have all embraced the world of surveillance with remarkable eagerness, surfing the internet in a global search for a better bargain, better friends, even a better partner.
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Richard J. Aldrich (GCHQ)
“
The nice ending to this crazy snake surveillance fact is that in order to facilitate the camera monitoring the government laid super-fast broadband to remote areas in the country. So, there are now Chinese farmers surfing the internet for the best snake videos on YouTube.
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James Warwood (Truth or Poop? Amazing Animals: the true or false quiz book for the whole family (Truth or Poop: true or false quiz book 1))
“
Celebrities Ain't Health Experts (The Sonnet)
Celebrities and influencers are not health experts,
Stop taking medical advice from halfwits of wellness.
Stop being a two-bit doctor from ten minutes of googling,
For Google is not a substitute for doctors and nurses.
Compared to that of a trained and experienced doctor,
Even as a neurobiologist my diagnosis skills are insignifant.
Then why can't you accept that when it comes to medicine,
Your opinion is worth no more than a counterfeit coin.
One goes through years of training and many sleepless nights,
Then they earn the right to wear the white coat of service.
And yet upon spending an hour surfing on the internet,
You put on the personality of a grey-haired neurologist!
Lack of expertise is by no means the same as lack of dignity.
But denial of expertise indicates a definite lack of senility.
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Abhijit Naskar (Handcrafted Humanity: 100 Sonnets For A Blunderful World)
“
And I’m also very active on the Internet.” “I’m sure you are,” said Nevada. It was impressive how she didn’t actually add the words “No doubt surfing for porn, you pathetic loser,” yet we all clearly understood that’s what she meant.
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Andrew Cartmel (Written in Dead Wax (The Vinyl Detective #1))
“
Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading.
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Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials))
“
And visit they will, because everyone has demons—big, small, old, new, quiet, loud, whatever. These shared demons are testament to the fact that we aren’t such outliers after all. And it’s with this discovery that we can create a different relationship with our demons, one in which we no longer try to reason our way out of an inconvenient inner voice or numb our feelings with distractions like too much wine or food or hours spent surfing the internet (an activity my colleague calls “the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller”).
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Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
“
When you fast, you abstain from food for spiritual purposes. I have heard people say that they were planning to fast TV or computer games or surfing the Internet. It is good to put those things down for a time of consecration if they are interfering with your prayer life or with your study of God’s Word or your ministering to the needs of others, but technically, that is not fasting. Fasting is doing without food for a period of time, which generally causes you to leave the commotion of normal activity. Part of the sacrifice of fasting, seeking God, and studying His Word is that normal activity fades into the background.
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Jentezen Franklin (Fasting: Opening the Door to a Deeper, More Intimate, More Powerful Relationship With God)
“
You don’t have to choose the perfect investment or save exactly the right amount or predict your rate of return or spend hours watching television shows about the stock market or surfing the Internet for stock picks. You don’t need a plan for every contingency.
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Carl Richards (The Behavior Gap)
“
A teacher once got furious over a student surfing too many websites while studying. Teacher: you are going to grow really fat and completely useless if you spend all your time on the internet doing useless stuff. Student; wow Ma'am, you must be speaking from experience. Which sites did you surf as a kid? ***
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Kevin Murphy (Jokes : Best Jokes 2016 (Jokes, Funny Jokes, Funny Books, Best jokes, Jokes for Kids and Adults))
“
Identify the apps and tools you need for doing your best work. My bet is that, for most of us, social networks, email, random internet surfing, and news sites will not be among them.
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Patrick Rhone (enough)
“
Internet Users in India Prefer Local Language to Surf the Web
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TridIndia
“
Who 'waits for inspiration' has probably never explored the brain. Its much larger than the entire internet. Writing, however, is partly stalking the big wave, and ride it when it comes. However, the thousands and thousands of blokes sitting at the shoreline trying to create waves by splashing their hands in the surf - it might be what they teach at writer workshops, but the sight is absolutely ghastly.
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Martijn Benders
“
I felt a stir of hope. Computers and smartphones left a number trail as distinct as tracks in the snow each time they touched the Internet. One of these numbers was assigned by providers but one was hardwired into the device. From the instant a person signed on, their computer’s numerical path was logged and recorded by Internet service providers, networks, wireless hotspots, servers, and routers, forever linking the time, location, and path of service to your specific machine. Surf the Net, check your email, chat with a friend—each new router and service provider recorded and stored your numbers. The geolocation of a computer could be found by back-tracing this trail of numbers. Finding an approximate location was relatively easy. The spooks Jon knew could probably back-trace to a specific sign-on address, identify a specific machine, and pull the name of the person who bought it from the manufacturer. I
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Robert Crais (The Promise (Elvis Cole, #16; Joe Pike, #5; Scott James & Maggie, #2))
“
List your ten favorite comedians and humorists, and search for jokes, tweets, or quotes by each of these individuals. After you amass twenty jokes, identify the subject or target of the joke, and explain why you think the joke is funny. This exercise will help you become aware of the format of successful jokes and provide you with insight into your own comedic preferences. Collect ten to fifteen cartoons or comics. As you did with the jokes, identify the target of the humor and describe why the cartoon is funny to you. You may find it helpful to continue building a file of jokes and cartoons that appeal to you. In addition to building a joke and cartoon file, you’ll need to find new material to use as the building blocks for your humor writing. Most professional humor writers begin each day by reading a newspaper, watching news on TV, and/or surfing the Internet for incidents and situations that might provide joke material. As you read this book and complete the exercises at the end of each chapter, form a daily habit of recording odd and funny news events. Everyday life is the main source for humor, so you need to keep some type of personal humor journal. To facilitate psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud had patients complete a dream diary, and he encouraged them to associate freely during therapy. To be a successful writer and to tap into the full potential of your comic persona, you should follow an analogous approach. Record everyday events, ideas, or observations that you find funny, and do your journaling without any form of censorship. The items you list are not intended to be funny, but to serve as starting points for writing humor.
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Mark Shatz (Comedy Writing Secrets: The Best-Selling Guide to Writing Funny and Getting Paid for It)
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Listening to music, reading literature, writing, and extended periods of personal introspection provide four prongs of the incitements available to form a conscious and subconscious designation of self. Other potential incentives that contribute to self-identity include religion and cultural events as well as painting, sculpture, dance, films, newspapers, television, Internet surfing, web sites, and online message boards.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Start netiquette conventions by emulating good users. NetworkEtiquette.net
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David Chiles
“
Age: 10 Height: 5’3 Favourite animal: Osprey Clara once had a dream that she was a bird, flying high over hills, cliffs and the ocean. She dreamt she flew down towards the waves with her powerful wings and used her sharp talons to snatch a fish out of the water to eat. When Clara woke up, she looked on the internet to find out if there were any real birds that ate fish. She realised that she had dreamed of being an osprey, which is a rare ‘eagle of the sea’, and ever since then Clara has wondered whether there is such a thing as the supernatural: dreams that have special meanings, spirits walking the world, and magical creatures that may or may not have existed many centuries ago, like dragons, fairies and unicorns. Because of this interest, she can often be found surfing the internet whilst she researches interesting animals and the habitats they live in. Like Benjamin, she loves nature and likes to spend as much time as possible outdoors. Also like Ben, her goals for the future include travelling around the world. She would like to visit the countries of India and South-East Asia. She would especially like to see wild orang-utans in the forests of Indonesia. She also hopes to one day be a real life detective, so that she can help people. She says, “Helping people is the most important thing in the world. Without that desire, there would be no Cluefinders Club to help the people who need it!” She loves to read books, especially mystery stories. Clara is considered the founder of the Cluefinders Club, and her bedroom is the place they like to meet most evenings to talk about detective stories and mysteries they might be able to solve.
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Ken T. Seth (The Case of the Vanishing Bully (The Cluefinder Club #1))
“
success that can be reapplied over and over again. Planning, organizing, and executing based on (strategic) priorities are key to success, and your priorities should stem from your positive values, not on habitual superficial gratification or pain avoidance (for example, spending lots of time aimlessly surfing the Internet). Most people unfortunately tend to act first and think later, which is the opposite of how it should be. Saying yes is easy and saying no may be hard but will make you a lot more successful over time. To me, time is the most precious resource in life. Even billionaires share with us mortals exactly this same resource and cannot buy more than 168
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Jason L. Ma (Young Leaders 3.0: Stories, Insights, and Tips for Next-Generation Achievers)
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opportunities. Make sure that you are connecting with good people and for the right reasons—not wasting a disproportionately huge amount of time by yourself or with your so-called buddies on lost causes, aimlessness, or addictive habits of the wrong kind like video games or watching brain-dead stuff on the Internet and TV. Going down that path only results in opportunity costs, and it malnourishes your neurons, which then end up making poor synaptic connections in your brain, leaving you numb. A little bit of gaming, occasional web surfing, and TV is fine, but not too often. Lack of integrity and laziness are your enemies—at home, in school, in your community, and at work. Avoid these
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Jason L. Ma (Young Leaders 3.0: Stories, Insights, and Tips for Next-Generation Achievers)
“
Hilda loved surfing the Internet for new ideas to make other people's lives a living hell.
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Billy Wells (Scary Stories: A Collection of Horror - Volume 1 (Chamber of Horror Series))
“
Consider a 2012 study, led by psychologists Wilhelm Hofmann and Roy Baumeister, that outfitted 205 adults with beepers that activated at randomly selected times (this is the experience sampling method discussed in Part 1). When the beeper sounded, the subject was asked to pause for a moment to reflect on desires that he or she was currently feeling or had felt in the last thirty minutes, and then answer a set of questions about these desires. After a week, the researchers had gathered more than 7,500 samples. Here’s the short version of what they found: People fight desires all day long. As Baumeister summarized in his subsequent book, Willpower (co-authored with the science writer John Tierney): “Desire turned out to be the norm, not the exception.” The five most common desires these subjects fought include, not surprisingly, eating, sleeping, and sex. But the top five list also included desires for “taking a break from [hard] work… checking e-mail and social networking sites, surfing the web, listening to music, or watching television.” The lure of the Internet and television proved especially strong: The subjects succeeded in resisting these particularly addictive distractions only around half the time. These results are bad news for this rule’s goal of helping you cultivate a deep work habit. They tell us that you can expect to be bombarded with the desire to do anything but work deeply throughout the day,
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Cal Newport (Deep Work: Rules for Focused Success in a Distracted World)
“
My stomach didn’t let me read, eat, watch TV, or surf the internet.
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Al Macy (The Antiterrorist (Jake Corby, #0.5))
“
The greatest enemy of hunger for God is not poison but apple pie. It is not the banquet of the wicked that dulls our appetite for heaven, but endless nibbling at the table of the world. It is not the X-rated video, but the prime-time dribble of triviality we drink in every night. For all the ill that Satan can do, when God describes what keeps us from the banquet table of his love, it is a piece of land, a yoke of oxen, and a wife. The greatest adversary of love to God is not his enemies but his gifts. And the most deadly appetites are not for the poison of evil, but for the simple pleasures of earth. For when these replace an appetite for God himself, the idolatry is scarcely recognizable, and almost incurable. Jesus said some people hear the word of God, and a desire for God is awakened in their hearts. But then, “as they go on their way they are choked with worries and riches and pleasures of this life.” In another place he said, “The desires for other things enter in and choke the word, and it becomes unfruitful.” “The pleasures of this life” and “the desires for other things”—these are not evil in themselves. These are not vices. These are gifts of God. They are your basic meat and potatoes and coffee and gardening and reading and decorating and traveling and investing and TV-watching and Internet-surfing and shopping and exercising and collecting and talking. And all of them can become deadly substitutes for God.
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John Piper
“
Make another list. A list of what you did today. It doesn't matter what day it is, weekday, weekend, holiday, birthday, the calendar date is irrelevant. Write down all the things that occupied your time on a given day. Woke up, ate breakfast, hit the gym, went to work, surfed the Internet, had a coffee with a colleague, did some work, ate some lunch, did some more work, slipped out to buy new sneakers, clicked around on social media sites, went home, called a parent, watched TV, ate dinner, changed outfits, met someone for a drink, made out with them on a street corner, caught a taxi home, read a book, went to sleep.
That's what you believe in. According to Greta, your belief system is how you actually spend your time every day.
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Elan Mastai (All Our Wrong Todays)
“
You will invariably face jobs that are associated with uncomfortable feelings, ranging from relatively minor annoyance (e.g., taking out the garbage in the rain) to more persistent and recurring feelings of stress and discomfort (e.g., dissertation, organizing income taxes) that activate your procrastination script. Even a minimal degree of stress or inconvenience (what we have come to describe as the feeling of “Ugh”) can be potent enough to make you delay action.
Think about some of the mundane examples of procrastination, such as watching a boring television show because the remote control is out of reach (e.g., “It’s ALL THE WAY over there.”) or exercise (e.g., “I’m TOO TIRED to change into my workout clothes.”). The use of capital letters is meant to illustrate the tone of voice of your selftalk, which serves to exaggerate and convince you of the difficulty of what you want to do. You are capable to perform the action, but your thoughts and feelings (including feeling tired or “low energy”) makes you conclude that you are not at your best and therefore cannot and will not follow through (for seemingly justifiable reasons).
You might think, “I have to be in the mood to do some things.” But, how often are any of us in the mood to do many of the tasks on which we end up procrastinating? The very fact that we have to plan them indicates that these tasks require some targeted planning and effort. When facing emotional discomfort, ADHD adults are particularly at risk for bolting to pleasant, easy, and yet often unsatisfying activities, such as eating junk food, watching television, social networking, surfing the Internet, etc.
In fact, sometimes you may escape from stressful tasks by performing other, lower priority errands or chores. Thus, you rationalize violating your high-priority project plan in order to run out to fill your car with gas. This strategy can be seen as a form of “plea bargaining”—“I will do something productive in order to justify not doing the higher priority but less appealing task.” Moreover, these errands are often more discrete and time limited than the task you are putting off (i.e., “If I start mowing the lawn now, I will be done in 1 hour. I don’t know how long taxes will take me.”), which is often their appeal—even though they are low priority, you are more confident you will get them done.
You need not be “in the mood” for a task in order to perform it. A useful reframe is the reminder that you have “enough” energy to get started and recall that once you get started on the first step, you usually feel better and more engaged. Breaking the task down into its discrete steps and setting an end time help you to reframe the plan (e.g., “I’m tired, but I have enough energy to do this task for 15 minutes.”). Rather than setting up the unrealistic expectation that you must be stress-free and 100% energized before you can do tasks, the notion of acceptance of discomfort is a useful mindset to adopt and practice.
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J. Russell Ramsay (The Adult ADHD Tool Kit)
“
The Mappiness data makes clear that many passive activities, such as watching TV, don’t yield much happiness—and lead to less happiness than people expect. One of the best ways to improve one’s happiness is to avoid that instinct to avoid doing things that seem like a lot of energy. When the thought of doing an activity makes you go “ughhh,” that is likely a sign you should do it, not that you shouldn’t. When someone used to cancel a plan to go to a show together or have a dinner party together or go for a run together, I used to say, “What would Larry do?,” thank my blessings for the cancellation, and surf the internet by myself. Now instead I say, “What would the Mappiness data say?” And I look at my iPhone case and try to overrule my instinct to sit on my couch and passively consume media. Mappiness data tells us there is great value (and more value than most suspect) in leaving your couch—unless, of course, you are having sex on that couch.
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Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (Don't Trust Your Gut: Using Data to Get What You Really Want in Life)
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because everyone has demons—big, small, old, new, quiet, loud, whatever. These shared demons are testament to the fact that we aren’t such outliers after all. And it’s with this discovery that we can create a different relationship with our demons, one in which we no longer try to reason our way out of an inconvenient inner voice or numb our feelings with distractions like too much wine or food or hours spent surfing the internet (an activity my colleague calls “the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller”). One of the most important steps in therapy is helping people take responsibility for their current predicaments, because once they realize that they can (and must) construct their own lives, they’re free to generate change.
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Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
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The rule allowed us time to “surf the urge” and insert a pause to interrupt the otherwise mindless habit. We also connected our internet
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Nir Eyal (Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life)
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You know you’re living in the future when you can board a hundred-ton pressurized aluminum tube with wings, fly smoothly in a cushioned chair at 500 miles per hour, 31,000 feet above Earth’s surface, and while crossing the continent, get served a pasta dinner and a mixed drink by someone whose job, in part, is to make you comfortable. And for most of the trip you surf the internet, watch any one of a hundred movies, only to land safely and smoothly a few hours later and complain that the marinara sauce was not to your liking.
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Neil deGrasse Tyson (Starry Messenger: Cosmic Perspectives on Civilization)
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…I then look up into the evening sky where the e-mail courses and the internet surfs. Here, like modern sorcerers, fly the young, each alone, to type his or her way into what must pass as a communication — but of a strange and limited kind: one where you must draw little faces with smiles or frowns to show what you feel — an analogue system of emotions, either yes or no, but nothing in between.
Here, it is said, a kind of dialogue takes place. But it takes place between two keyboards in two rooms in two cities or countries or continents. And the hands on those keyboards fabricate the person — he or she is arbitrarily created according to the wishes or desires or compulsions of the moment: a protean creature, which can change into any self. It is not communication but imposture.
In a further sense as well — this is a universe of words, only words, and words are only agreed upon signals to denote a reality, not the reality itself. They are notoriously clumsy; they are coarse compared to the real. It is the real that is excised in this modern mode. (10 January 1996)
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Donald Richie (The Japan Journals: 1947-2004)
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Nowadays, as we spend more time communicating via social media, playing computer games, and surfing the Internet, our powers of concentration are diminishing. According to international motivational guru Kevin Kelly, we are now living in an attention-deficit society. The dial has moved from conversation to presentation and from dialogue to monologue. We no longer give each other our undivided attention, and neither do we take the time to observe our own breathing or allow our minds to still.
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Patrick McKeown (The Oxygen Advantage: The Simple, Scientifically Proven Breathing Techniques for a Healthier, Slimmer, Faster, and Fitter You)
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of the reward circuitry leads to a localized rebellion. If DeltaFosB is the gas pedal for bingeing, the molecule CREB functions as the brakes. CREB dampens our pleasure response.[134] It inhibits dopamine. CREB is trying to take the joy out of bingeing so that you give it a rest. Oddly enough, high levels of dopamine stimulate the production of both CREB and DeltaFosB. Our bodies are equipped with countless feedback mechanisms to keep us alive and functioning well. It makes perfect sense for mammals also to have evolved a braking system for bingeing on food or sex. There comes a time to move on and take care of the kids or maybe hunt and gather. But the glitch in the CREB/DeltaFosB balancing act is that it evolved long before humans were exposed to powerful reinforcers such as whiskey, cocaine, ice cream, or porn tube sites. All have the potential to override evolved satiation mechanisms, including CREB’s brakes. Put simply, CREB doesn’t stand much chance in the era of supernormal stimuli and widely available prescription and illicit drugs. What’s CREB to do in face of a Big Mac, fries and milkshake dinner, followed by 3-hour Mountain Dew-fuelled Call of Duty session, and two hours of surfing PornHub while smoking a joint? What array of enticements did a 19-year old hunter-gatherer encounter to goose his dopamine? Perhaps a second helping of overcooked rabbit meat or watching the four girls he’d known since birth tan hides.
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Gary Wilson (Your Brain On Porn: Internet Pornography and the Emerging Science of Addiction)
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In the worst moments of a person’s life, other people are watching TV, surfing the internet, folding clothes, having sex. People engage in the utterly mundane while others slip away.
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Taylor Harris (This Boy We Made: A Memoir of Motherhood, Genetics, and Facing the Unknown)
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You and I are close friends now, reader. So you know how I feel about writing. Writing is the hum. Writing is laying track. Writing is the high. Now imagine that hum, that high, that track to be laid is behind a door. And that door is five miles away. Those five miles are just . . . writing crap and doodling and trying to have an idea and surfing the internet and hoping like hell not to get so distracted that you give up. Worse? Those five miles are lined with brownies and cupcakes and episodes of Game of Thrones and Idris Elba waiting to talk to only you and really good novels to read. Every time I sit down to write, I have to mentally run those five miles past all of that to get to that door. It’s a long, hard five-mile run. Sometimes I am almost dead by the time I reach the door. That’s why I have to keep doing it. The more often I run the five miles, the fitter I become. And the fitter I become, the easier the run begins to feel and the less fresh and exciting all that stuff on the side of the road seems. I mean, how long has it been there? More important, as I get fitter, I can run faster. And the faster I can run, the faster I can get to that door. The faster you can too, writers out there. When you sit down to write every day, it becomes easier and easier to tap into that creative space inside your mind. The faster I can get to that door, the quicker I can get to the good stuff. Behind that door is the good stuff. So when I reach the door and open it . . . that’s when my creativity clicks in and that special spot in my brain starts working and I go from exertion to exultation and suddenly I can write forever and ever and ever and eve— And then someone opens the door and asks me if I want coffee or water and I am FIVE MILES AWAY all over again. I grit my teeth and try to smile and say No thank you, see, I have coffee AND water both already, right here. And then I start running that five miles all over. That happens roughly thirty-five times a day at the office.
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Shonda Rhimes (Year of Yes: How to Dance It Out, Stand In the Sun and Be Your Own Person)
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hours spent surfing the internet (an activity my colleague calls “the most effective short-term nonprescription painkiller”).
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Lori Gottlieb (Maybe You Should Talk to Someone: A Therapist, Her Therapist, and Our Lives Revealed)
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Your life should consist of more than commuting, working, eating, surfing the Internet, sleeping, and watching TV. Your life should be filled with purpose-driven experiences and projects that bring excitement, passion, energy, and authentic meaning and joy into your life. I hope that as you start something stupid, you will find real meaning in your life and that you will learn these three great (albeit simple) truths: Your life matters. Your life has purpose. You are meant to be happy. May this book be a source of inspiration for some of the coolest and most meaningful projects and experiences of your life! It all starts with a tiny, stupid idea, then one thing leads to another, and suddenly, you find something amazing: yourself.
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Richie Norton (The Power of Starting Something Stupid: How to Crush Fear, Make Dreams Happen, and Live without Regret)
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That’s called “surfing” or sometimes “stalking,” and it may appear unfocused. In fact, as the lexicographer and publisher Lizzie Skurnick puts it, it requires no less than rapt attention not to lose one’s place. Reading a book straight through is much easier. For many of us this kind of Web project is also highly satisfying.
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Virginia Heffernan (Magic and Loss: The Pleasures of the Internet)
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Hustling is to work what surfing the
Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet— tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was. It’s maximal effort put into minimal gain. It’s a hamster wheel. If I’d put all that energy into studying I’d have earned an MBA. Instead I was majoring in hustling, something no university would give me a degree for.
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Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood)
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Hustling is to work what surfing the Internet is to reading. If you add up how much you read in a year on the Internet—tweets, Facebook posts, lists—you’ve read the equivalent of a shit ton of books, but in fact you’ve read no books in a year. When I look back on it, that’s what hustling was.
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Trevor Noah (Born a Crime: Stories from a South African Childhood (One World Essentials))
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Americans’ love affair with television and tabloid journalism, along with their constant immersion in the vast offerings of the media and the Internet’s dynamic communication mechanism operates to distinguish the American psyche from that of other nationalities. The onslaught of visual information available to Americans operates to deaden their innate curiosity of the natural world and to numb their interior world. Instead of exploring nature and ideas, Americans demonstrate a proclivity to scan headlines, watch television and films, and surf the Webb in order passively to partake in cultural events. The immense amount of social and political news that the average citizen takes in is bound to reduce the attention span of Americans, especially citizens devoted to celebrity watching, the distinctive American obsession of ogling the film, television, music, and sport stars whom draw media attention and captivate the public of each generation.
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Kilroy J. Oldster (Dead Toad Scrolls)
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Yo mama is so stupid… she thought Dunkin’ Donuts was a basketball team! Yo mama is so stupid… she tripped over a wireless phone! Yo mama is so stupid… she failed a survey! Yo mama is so stupid… she got locked in a grocery store and starved to death! Yo mama is so stupid… when they said that it is chilly outside, she went outside with a bowl and a spoon. Yo mama is so stupid… she tried to drown a fish! Yo mama is so stupid… she tried to throw a bird off a cliff! Yo mama is so stupid… she took a knife to a drive-by! Yo mama is so stupid… she thought Boyz II Men was a daycare center! Yo mama is so stupid… she bought a ticket to Xbox Live! Yo mama is so stupid… she thought she couldn’t buy a Gameboy because she is a girl! Yo mama is so stupid… she thought a scholarship was a ship full of students! Yo mama is so stupid… she threw a clock out the window to see time fly! Yo mama is so stupid… she went to the ocean to surf the Internet! Yo mama is so stupid… you can hear the ocean in her head! Yo mama is so stupid… she thought Hamburger Helper came with a friend! Yo mama is so stupid… she got locked in Furniture World and slept on the floor. Yo mama is so stupid… she sits on the floor and watches the couch. Yo mama is so stupid… she stayed up all night trying to catch up on her sleep! Yo mama is so stupid… she got her hand stuck in a website! Yo mama is so stupid… she thought Christmas wrap was Snoop Dogg’s new song! Yo mama is so stupid… she can't pass a blood test. Yo mama is so stupid… she thought the Harlem Shake was a drink! Yo mama is so stupid… she ordered a cheeseburger without the cheese. Yo mama is so stupid… she tried to climb Mountain Dew! Yo mama is so stupid… that she burned down the house with a CD burner. Yo mama is so stupid… she went to PetSmart to take an IQ test! Yo mama is so stupid… she went to the library to find Facebook! Yo mama is so stupid… she stole free bread. Yo mama is so stupid… she sold her car for gas money. Yo mama is so stupid… she stopped at a stop sign and waited for it to turn green. Yo mama is so stupid… when she asked me what kind of jeans I am wearing I said, “Guess”, and she said, “Levis”. Yo mama is so stupid… she called me to ask me for my phone number! Yo mama is so stupid… she worked at an M&M factory and threw out all the W's. Yo mama is so stupid… she tried to commit suicide by jumping out the basement window. Yo mama is so stupid… she got lost in a telephone booth. Yo mama is so stupid… she stuck a phone in her butt to make a booty call! Yo mama is so stupid… I said that drinks were on the house and she went to get a ladder! Yo mama is so stupid… she went to a dentist to fix her Bluetooth! Yo mama is so stupid… she put lipstick on her forehead to make up her mind. Yo mama is so stupid… it took her two hours to watch 60 seconds.
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Johnny B. Laughing (Yo Mama Jokes Bible: 350+ Funny & Hilarious Yo Mama Jokes)