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But I don’t do it for a very simple reason: I don’t get to decide what’s right for you. And even if I did decide, the fact that I told you to do it, rather than you doing it for yourself, robs you of most of the emotional benefits. So, if someone like me stands on stage and tells you that for half your life savings, I will take responsibility for your life and tell you exactly what to do and what to value, not only am I merely perpetuating your original problem, but I’m making a killing while doing it. Instead of giving him advice or telling him what he should do, I simply told him about some of the problems I had with my parents in the past that I believed were similar.

For me, it’s only gotten worse as time has gone on—which is strange, because you’d assume that my attention span and focus would be getting stronger as I get older, but that’s not been the case. How we’re becoming less tolerant of people with opposing views, and less patient when the world doesn’t go our way (which, due to the overload of media, feels like all the time.) The method of the Attention Diet is similar to a nutritional diet—by cutting out whole categories of consumption for a period of time, your body (or mind) adjusts, becomes healthier, and then, ideally, after enough time you no longer crave your old guilty pleasures. I will limit email to twice a day, social media to 30 minutes per day, and only read the front page of Wikipedia or consume long-form content.

Whether it’s oil companies or creepy advertisers or Facebook stealing your damn data, every corporation that steps in some shit scrapes off their boot by frantically reminding everyone how they’re just trying to give people what they want And four, I don’t want your fucking Skynet ads following me around wherever I go and mining my fucking life for data. He saw marketing as an incredible new tool that could give people the feeling of having freedom when, really, you’re just giving them a few more flavors of toothpaste to choose from. The second thing that happens is that we become prone to a series of low-level addictive behaviors—compulsively checking our phone, our email, our Instagram; compulsively finishing Netflix series we don’t like; sharing outrage-inducing articles we haven’t read; accepting invitations to parties and events we don’t enjoy; traveling not because we want to but because we want to be able to say we went.

If I worked at Starbucks, instead of writing people’s names on their coffee cup, I’d write the following: One day, you and everyone you love will die. You care because, deep down, you need to feel that sense of importance in order to avoid the Uncomfortable Truth, to avoid the incomprehensibility of your existence, to avoid being crushed by the weight of your own material insignificance. And the narrative that I’ve constructed around that hope is that I believe this book might help some people, that it might make both my life and the world a little bit better. It is one against nihilism—both the nihilism within us and the growing sense of nihilism that seems to emerge with the modern world.8 And to successfully argue against nihilism, you must start at nihilism.