europe: novembre 2025

Introduction Walking in Memphis

godson: filleul
freakishly: bizarre
freak: bête curieuse
to jabber: bredouiller
swoosh: sifflement
blur: trouble
whirring: ronronner
shrieking: crieur
numbing: engourdissant
baffled: dérouté
respite: répit
listlessly: mollement
wielding: exercer
ripped: musclé
to fiddle with: trafiquer
a slew of: un tas de
tripwires: fil de détente
rickety: bancal

You are missing your life! you are afraid of missing out - that's why you are checking your screen all the time.
If we want to do what matters in any domain - any context in life - we have to be able to give attention to the right things... If we can't do that, it's really hard to do anything.
People who can't focus will be more drawn to simplistic authoritarian solutions.
But nothing can be changed until it is faced.
If we wait for perfect evidence, we will be waiting for ever. I had to proceed, doing my best, on the basis of the information we have.

1 Cause One: The Increase in Speed, Switching and Filtering

giddy: pris de vertige
wanker: connard
twinge: pointe
sliver: éclat
pasty: pâle
bliss: bonheur
jab: piquer
poke: pousser
colicky: qui souffre de coliques
garbled: confus
lurch: embardée
delusion: illusion
pucker: pincer
to bristle: se hérisser
impairment: déficience
delude: qui se fait des idées
hunch: pressentiment
shrieking: crieur
rowdy: chahuteur
bouncer: videur

I had learned years from social scientists that when it comes to beating any kind of destructive habit, one of the most effective tools we have is called 'pre-commitment'
Twitter makes you feel that the whole world is obsessed with you and your little ego - it loves you, it hates you, it's talking to you right now.
I came to this realization that my job in a way is to think that is different from everyone else - but I was in an environment where I was just getting all the same information as everyone else, and I was just thinking the same things as everyone else.
It's always tempting to confuse your personal decline for the decline of the human species.
The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.
The increase in the volume of information is what creates the sensation of the world speeding up.
If you have to keep up with everything and send emails all the time, there's no time to reach depth.
We are, collectively, experiencing a more rapid exhaustion of attention resources.
He stopped using all social media, except Twitter, which he checks only once a week, on Sundays. He stopped watching TV. He read more books instead.
I think the first thing you have to realize is it's an ongoing battle.
In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that's a little bit difficult. What's happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that's with us all the time that always offer an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing. I wanted to give myself a chance at choosing something that's more difficult.
How do you slow down in a world that is speeding up?
The switch cost effect.
Is try to get rid of the distractions as much as possible.
Start slow, but practice, and you'll get there.

2 Cause Two: The Crippling of Our Flow States

crippling: paralysie
lurch: embardée
beak: bec
cursory: rapide
puffy: bouffi
miser: avare
paltry: dérisoire
funk: cafard
sagging: distendu
squalid: sordide
enthralling: captivant
gusher: puits jaillissant
off-kilter: de travers
frak out: crises
stumps: souches
thawing: fondant
slough off: se dépouiller
taunt: sarcasme
blissful: bienheureux

Narcissism is a corruption of attention - it's where your attention becomes turned in only on yourself and your own ego.
Like a money-obsessed miser checking the state of his personal stocks and finding he was slightly richer than yesterday.
No stranger is going to flood you with hearts and tell you you're great.
He discovered that he felt most alive when he was doing something difficult.
Years later, the designers of Instagram asked: If we reinforce our users taking selfies - if we give them hearts and likes - will they start to do it obsessively, just like the pigeon will obsessively hold out its left wing to get extra sed? They know Skinner's core techniques, and applied them to a billon people.
For the artist, when they were in the process of creation, time seems to fall away.
But creative people seemed mostly uninterested in rewards; even money didn't interest most of them.
Staying in the flow.
The first thing you need to do is choose a clearly defined goal, and to set aside other goals while you do.
So, to find flow, you need to choose one single goal; make sure your goal is meaningful to you; and try to push yourself to the edge of your abilities.
We should primarily focus on the things that make life worth living, and finds way to boost them.
The more powerful path out of distraction is to find your flow.
It was like the flow was relaxing my body and opening my mind - perhaps because I knew I had done my best.
I realised then that to recover from our loss of attention, it is not enough to strip out our distractions. That will just create a void. We need to strip out our distractions and to replace them with sources of flow.

3 Cause Three: The Rise of Physical and Mental Exhaustion

hunched: regroupé
bunch: vouté
jangling: tintement
lull: bercer
pass out: tomber dans les pommes
darting: fléchette
stagger: chanceler
funk: avoir le cafard
douse: arroser
coked out: tomber en rade
unclenching: détendre
to crave: brûler d'envie de faire
lapse: écart
drowsy: endormi
bone-tired: extrêmement fatigué
knackered: claqué
to fall apart: s'effondre
brink: bord
bereavement: perte d'un être cher
roadkill: cadavre d'animal écrasé sur la route
to amp up: amplifier

Then I would try to stop my mind jangling as it ran through all the things that had happened that day, and all the things I would need to do when I woke up, and all the things to worry about in the world.
Local sleep: in this state, you believe you are alert and competent - but you aren't. You are sitting at your desk and you look awake, but parts of your brain are asleep.
If you sleep less, your attention will likely suffer.
I'm going to make you want more fast food, I'm going to make you want more sugar for quick energy.
When we sleep, our minds start to identify connections an patterns from what we've experienced during the day.
Sommeil réparateur: when we sleep better, a lot of problem get less - like mood disorders, like obesity, like concentration problems...It repairs a lot of damage.
One of the things that happens is that during sleep, your brain cleans itself of waste that has accumulated during the day.
That can explain why, when you are tired, "you get a hung-over sort of feeling" - you are literally closed up with toxins.
When you dream , you can revisit stressful moments, but without stress hormones flooding your system.
Our economic system has become dependent on sleep-depriving people.
You need to radically limit your exposure to light before you go to sleep. He believes you should have no sources of artificial light in your bedroom at all, and you should avoid the blue light of screens for at least two hours before you go to bed.
Many of the things we need to do are so obvious they are banal: slow down, do one thing at a time, sleep more.

4 Cause Four: The Collapse of Sustained Reading

tangy: acidulé
dashing: se précipiter
glibly: facilement
vituperative: durement critique
nuggets: pépites
hunches: pressentiment
to pore over: examiner
sliver: morceau

Most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book.
"screen inferiority"
"The medium is the message"
The way information gets to you is more important than the information itself. TV teaches you that the world is fast; that it's about surfaces and appearances; that everything in the world is happening all at once.
I Like the person I become when I read a lot of books. I dislike the person I become when I sped a lot of time on social media.
When you read a novel, you are immersing yourself in what it's like to be inside another person's head.
The more novels you read, the better you were at reading other peoples's emotions. Reading non-fiction books, by contrast, had no effect on your empathy.
Reading a factual account may make you more knowledgable, but it doesn't have this empathy-expanding effect.
Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.

Pour que le caractère d'un être humain dévoile des qualités vraiment exceptionnelles, il faut avoir la bonne fortune de pouvoir observer son action pendant de longues années. Si cette action est dépouillée de tout égoïsme, si l'idée qui la dirige est d'une générosité sans exemple, s'il est absolument certain qu'elle n'a cherché de récompense nulle part et qu'au surplus elle ait laissé sur le monde des marques visibles, on est alors, sans risque d'erreurs, devant un caractère inoubliable.
Mon jeune âge, précisément, me forçait à imaginer l'avenir en fonction de moi-même et d'une certaine recherche du bonheur.
Lorsqu'on en a vingt, on considère les hommes de cinquante comme des vieillards à qui il ne reste plus qu'à mourir.
On imagine bien cependant que, pour une réussite semblable, il a fallu vaincre l'adversité ; que, pour assurer la victoire d'une telle passion, il a fallu lutter avec le désespoir.
Pour s'éviter le trajet d'aller-retour, il envisageait de construire une cabane de pierre sur les lieux mêmes de ses plantations.
Il y avait un grand personnage des Eaux et Forêts, un député, des techniciens. On prononça beaucoup de paroles inutiles.
Le travail paisible et régulier, l'air vif des hauteurs, la frugalité et surtout la sérénité de l'âme avaient donné à ce vieillard une santé presque solennelle.
Il en sait beaucoup plus que tout le monde. Il a trouvé un fameux moyen d'être heureux !