The new challenges we face in the Age of Attention are, on both individual and collective levels, challenges of self-regulation. Having some limits is inevitable in human life. In fact, limits are necessary if we are to have any freedom at all.

I hope you all find yourselves sleeping with someone you love, maybe not all of the time, but a lot of the time. The touch of a foot in the night is sincere. I hope you like your work, I hope there’s mystery and poetry in your life — not even poems, but patterns. I hope you can see them. Often those patterns will wake you up, and you will know that you are alive, again and again.

“The current memoir craze has fostered the belief that confession is therapeutic, that therapy is redemptive and that redemption equals art, and it has encouraged the delusion that candor, daring and shamelessness are substitutes for craft, that the exposed life is the same thing as an examined one.”

“… life comes from you, not at you. and that takes time to realize.”

If losing me
is the worst thing to happen,
your life is still a good life.

Emily Kendal Frey (2011)