QUIT ALCOHOL

“For four months, I vacillated. I made spreadsheets and pro-con lists. I sought advice. I talked to friends. I consulted with my mentors. And every time I tried to land on a yes, something in me resisted. One afternoon, after yet another conversation about my indecision, my very patient CEO said something to me that changed everything. He said, Debbie, anything that takes you four months to decide might mean you really don't want to do it.”

“I think there is so much evidence throughout history that the fewer decisions you have to make as an investor, the better you're going to do over the course of your life. If I can be a passive investor for 50 years, you will probably after taxes and fees end up in the top 2% or 3% of investors, maybe the top 1% of investors just by doing nothing.”

“There's a particular kind of simplicity that comes not from doing less, but from doing what feels really true. Simplicity isn't only about minimalism. I think it's also about coherence. But validation is not the same thing as fulfillment, and power is not the same thing as purpose. Simplifying my life didn't mean shrinking it.”

“I decided to stop giving my time to people whose company and conversation I don't absolutely cherish, not just like or appreciate or admire or feel kinship with, but cherish. Because as Annie Dillard so memorably wrote, how we spend our days is of course how we spend our lives, and so every middling hour is a step toward a middling life. Life is wasted on the lukewarm. Anything you give your time and attention to should royal with the magma of yes.”

“I find that therapy, when it's done really well, it cuts to the bone in a really clarifying, interesting way. It just calls out all the bullshit-adled voices that you carry around in your head, you've probably been carrying around your whole life. To use a dope metaphor, we're all swimming, some of us are swimming in clearer waters than others. Fundamentally, you're not going to change the creature that you are in the water, but I do find that therapy cleans the waters quite a bit.”

“I realized, wait a second, these aren't two different worlds. I'm a computer scientist and I'm writing about the impacts of the type of technologies that computer scientists create and what we should do about it. This is the same world. I could be an academic that focuses on technology and its impacts, the ethics of technology. I put a pause on that to say all of my effort is aimed at the same thing, thinking and writing about technology and its impacts on humans flourishing in depth and what we can do. And that simplified everything.”

“I think a really good heuristic for your relationship with information is read more history and fewer forecasts. As simple as it gets. And there's a great quote that I love from an author named Kelly Hayes. And she says, when you haven't engaged with history, everything feels unprecedented.”

“And so I stopped using autoresponders or apologizing for how long it takes me to return a text because the moment you begin apologizing for how you manage your time, you are essentially apologizing for your priorities, which means apologizing for your life.”

“What I've learned over the years is that I basically have to make no my default answer. Because here's the problem. If you try to put in a triage rule, here is how I evaluate if something is good enough for me to actually spend time doing it. I found that whatever rule I came up with, too many things actually satisfied that rule. There are too many good enough offers coming my way that I would end up coming busy anyways.”

“The lowest energy in, biggest impact out, simplification of my life has been to drop alcohol by the side of the road like a sack of dead cats, stinky dead cats. I struggled mightily with alcohol abuse in my 20s, and looking back, nothing made things more complicated than this very stupid, very destructive relationship between me and drinking. Everything I perceived as complex in my life, trying to figure out who I was, believing in that person, that that person could even exist, wanting to find a strong, meaningful partnership, was made exponentially more complex by the presence of alcohol.”

“Almost nothing in my life has paid bigger dividends than stopping my waffling around trying to figure out if I was an artist or a musician or a technologist or a writer or programmer or publisher or photographer. No. I'm a writer. The end. And the more I've doubled down on that choice, that commitment to the craft of writing, the simpler my life has become and the more vast my connections to beautiful, inspiring people.”