Excerpts: “Jacobs lambasts ‘mindfulness’ as a cure-all that too often devolves into ‘the cultivation of a mental stance without objects to attend to.’ In contrast, he argues, the ‘only mindfulness worth cultivating will be teleological through and through: it will be mindfulness for something–for personal formation, for service, for love'” (p. 35).

“How confident are we that today’s high-tech overlords have the moral wisdom to shepherd our precious energy and attention toward the creation of our best lives?” (p. 37).

“We can turn the ‘will to power’ this way and that, inward and outward, toward cruelty or creativity, but we cannot turn it off. Turning it off is to embrace death. If we do, we will give in to the nihilism that ultimately leads to despair. Built for positive action, we must create positive goals” (p. 53).

“After all, knowing ourselves is difficult, and we can never peer inward unshaped by the world in which we have been raised. In societies that have become relentlessly technological, this shaping is significant–and it goes well beyond individual ideas and choices. We are shaped not just by evolution and by family, but by a relentlessly technological culture” (p. 70).

“Technology does not simply alter the societies in which we live; it makes certain life possibilities easier to imagine–and others much harder to entertain. When we try to craft goals for our own lives, we do so from within a society that has already sketched its preferences on the canvas of our lives” (p. 71).

“We can say Yes to this life, to remaining in the moment with people, to letting our thoughts trail off into boredom, and we can find a certain sturdy joy in experiencing the world as it offers itself to us. We may find at the end of it all that subtler pleasures, often ones beyond our screens, are the ones that endure” (p 125).

Anderson, Nate. (2022). In Emergency, Break Glass: What Nietzsche Can Teach Us About Joyful Living in a Tech-Saturated World. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.