Short Read: The Meaning of Life Is Absurd

Lawrence Yeo | 13 minutes

In the grand scheme of things, many of the endeavors we worry about can seem just as absurd. In the same way we laugh at a dog’s purposeful quest to chase its own tail, the cosmos seems like it’s laughing at our desire to work so hard for yet another promotion, ridiculing us for all the research we do to decide which new iPad to buy, and shaking its head at how much we care about how our stories look on Instagram.

Snippets

Refined sugar is what evolutionary biologists refer to as a supernormal stimulus. Like pornography or video games, these man-made creations hijack our evolutionary desire for something natural and replace it with a drive to attain something artificial.

- Nick deWilde, To Tweet Or Not To Tweet?

The Pavlok is a tool for removing bad habits. It’s a wristband.
You wear it all day, and every time you engage in a bad habit, you can helpfully shock yourself with the band. If done consistently, you associate the bad habit with the shock, and your nervous system naturally wants to avoid it.

- Tasshin Fogleman, The World’s Best Pavlok Story