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Rush Limbaugh and Keith Olbermann, Glenn Beck and Arianna Huffington, Rachel Maddow and Ann Coulter – these people provide fuel for beliefs, they pre-filter the world to match existing world-views.

If their filter is like your filter, you love them. If it isn’t, you hate them.

Whether or not pundits are telling the truth, or vetting their opinions, or thoroughly researching their topics is all beside the point. You watch them not for information, but for confirmation.

But, exceptions are meant to be just that. By their default, they can’t be the norm. If they do become that, something’s busted and there need to be some repairs at a higher level.

…there is one compensating advantage for the people who escape the old system: when the ecosystem stops rewarding complexity, it is the people who figure out how to work simply in the present, rather than the people who mastered the complexities of the past, who get to say what happens in the future.

Having the impulse to approach a stranger is effortless, actually doing it requires chutzpah. My advice: stock up on chutzpah.

Another key to [Charity Water’s] success is that 100% of donations are used for direct water project costs. (A group of private donors, foundations and sponsors help pay for the everyday costs of running the organization.) CW even pays for the paypal and credit card transaction fees when people donate online so each penny goes straight to actually building a well.

Harrison chose this route because he felt many donors had lost faith in charities due to outsized admistrative costs. Many CW donors decide to give because they know for sure where their money goes.

I told him how I was scared that the search for substance in a bottomless well might make me fickle. About how I’d go to one site to look for things, then to a second and a third and fourth, and then after the circuit was finished, I’d go back to the first site just to see if anything was new. I told him about how whole mornings disappeared that way. I pictured a guy looking for his keys so he could get his day started, but he searched by lifting up every item he owned to look under it. “Not under the rug. Not under the fridge. Not under the laundry, or the paperclip on my desk. Not under the silverware tray in the top drawer on the left in the kitchen. Maybe I should check the rug again?” It was a different, special kind of neurosis.

I told him about how I behaved on the sites. I’d move down, glancing, skimming, my scrollbar ever careening downward, endlessly scrolling. Then, picture after picture, on and on for infinity, witnessing flashes of color and form, my mind moving like a rock skipping across an edgeless ocean, never quite sure of what’s under the surface. Maybe nothing. Or water all the way down.

There’s too much fear in the way we talk about our environment: fear of running out of oil, fear of climate change, fear of pollution, fear of diminishing biodiversity, to name a few.

Often, science turns to dramatic, fear-inducing predictions to convince people that environmental issues are important and certain changes need to be made immediately. Act now, or it might be too late, we’re told.

But it’s not working.

Fear of something in the distant (or even not-so-distant) future is a lousy motivator of sustained action in the present. People lash out against fear; they rarely take calm, rational action against it.

That voice in your head spewing out eloquent reasons to do this or do that doesn’t actually know what’s going on, and it’s not particularly adept at getting you nearer to reality. Instead, it only cares about finding reasons that sound good, even if the reasons are actually irrelevant or false.

If companies always agreed with regulators’ rules, there would be no need for regulators. The very point of a regulator is to do things that companies don’t like, out of concern for the welfare of the market or the consumer.

In general, it’s easier to ask open questions than to give confident answers. There’s no social penalty for appearing open-minded – but if you take a stand and get it wrong (or just different), better watch out.

The lesson seemsalmost Zen: you live longer only when you stop trying to live longer. When Cox was transferred to hospice care, her doctors thought that she wouldn’t live much longer than a few weeks. With the supportive hospice therapy she received, she had already lived for a year.

The world is more addictive than it was 40 years ago. And unless the forms of technological progress that produced these things are subject to different laws than technological progress in general, the world will get more addictive in the next 40 years than it did in the last 40.

And now here I am in a world guided by fear, a world suppressing the uniqueness that lies inside each of us, a world where we can either acquiesce to the inhuman nonsense of corporatism and materialism or insist on change. We are not enlivened by an educational system that clandestinely sets us up for jobs that could be automated, for work that need not be done, for enslavement without fervency for meaningful achievement. We have no choices in life when money is our motivational force. Our motivational force ought to be passion, but this is lost from the moment we step into a system that trains us, rather than inspires us.

It seems as though we’re entering a season in which it’s easy to ostracize or become righteously indignant over someone’s national origin, skin color, religion or sexual orientation.

If this is the best a politician can do to organize and lead, then we all lose.