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I didn’t know who Anthony Bourdain was until the news of his tragic passing made it into headlines earlier this month. From what I understand, the man was a prolific worker, an impressive TV personality, and one of the world’s most influential chefs. But it wasn’t until I came across one of his quotes that I got a glimpse into Bourdain’s candid persona.

“I understand there’s a guy inside me who wants to lay in bed, smoke weed all day, and watch cartoons and old movies. My whole life is a series of stratagems to avoid, and outwit, that guy.”

That’s real.

In a world where we can airbrush the highlight reels of our lives to appear perfect and ultra-productive, we need the honesty that Anthony Bourdain fearlessly expressed. No matter how much we discipline ourselves, no matter how many motivational talks we listen to, we can never kill that proverbial person in our head that tells us to snooze the alarm or eat the extra slice of pizza. We can only do our best to outsmart him or her.

With that being said, here are three important lessons I’ve learned:

Admit that there actually is a part of you who wants to do absolutely nothing productive. 

Bourdain called it a guy. Steven Pressfield calls it the Resistance. Regardless of how you label it, awareness is half the battle. It’s impossible to escape that inertia, the temptation to say, “Fuck it, I’ll do it tomorrow.” Renouncing laziness only intensifies it. But accepting that you can’t eliminate it ironically puts you in more control than the person in denial. We all want to slack off to some degree. It’s just a matter of accepting that desire and keeping it in check.

Have a “why.”

Purpose facilitates action. It’s incredibly difficult to justify pain, discomfort, and sacrifice without having a “why,” an underlying reason for doing what you do. Waking up early, working out, and getting shit done sounds great in theory, but if there are no real consequences for abandoning those commitments, it makes it a lot easier to fall off the wagon. Make a promise to someone you love. Start a challenge with a friend. Sometimes sheer willpower isn’t always enough to keep that voice in your head at bay.

Avoid toxic people and situations.

Jim Rohn said that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. Or as Goethe said 170 years earlier, “Tell me who you associate with and I will tell you who you are.” The company we keep sets the standard for what we perceive is acceptable. Laziness and indifference are as infectious as physical diseases – associating with toxic people who aren’t interested in going anywhere in life makes it seem okay to do the same. What’s more, it isn’t always people that influence our behavior. Look at your Facebook feed. Look at the games on your phone. Look at the food in your pantry. Do these enable laziness or curb it?

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All of this might sound cynical. I was resentful, even guilty when I originally heard or read the lessons above. But the good news is that we can make a decision to change. “The right activities are as accessible as all the bad influences,” says Ryan Holiday. “They are as plentiful as anything else. What you decide to do with those assets is up to you. But choose wisely, because it will determine who you are.”

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College basketball teams have a knack for scheduling relatively easy non-conference games to start their seasons. Xavier University, my alma mater, kicked off its 2017 season with games against Morehead State and Rider, which Xavier won 101-49 and 101-75.

These “cupcakes,” as they’re called, are thrilling: they hype fans up and build confidence, but when it comes to preparing for the challenges of conference play and March Madness, the data suggests that cupcakes do more harm than good.

After poring through heaps of statistics, researchers found that college basketball teams tend to have more successful seasons when their preseason schedules are demanding, which may explain #1 seed Xavier’s disappointing loss to Florida State in the second round of the tournament this year.

Scheduling legit preseason opponents is just one example of what Adam Alter calls hardship inoculation: the idea that struggling through practice trials inoculates us against future hardships, just as vaccinations inoculate us against illness.

Initial struggles are critical – we aren’t designed for perpetual comfort. And we get exposed if we show up unprepared. Unfortunately, these critical struggles are dissipating with the rise of the bubble-wrapped lifestyle.

In terms of survival, life in 2018 is easier and fairer than it’s ever been. We can get food at the touch of a button and we have an infinite network of information in our pockets. Don’t want to deal with rejection and awkward romantic encounters? Just swipe. But the tradeoff of endless convenience is that we’re left cognitively unprepared when shit hits the fan.

Apple, Google, Uber, Tinder create a paradox: they aim to make life easy, justifiably so. But relying on them means we won’t experience the minor hardships (like talking face-to-face) that they eliminate, hardships that inoculate us against things that are genuinely difficult.

Nobody is calling for an all-out rebellion against technology (at least I’m not), but we need to balance it out. So how do we create our own “vaccinations?”

For starters, taking the stairs is harder than taking the elevator, making dinner is harder than using Uber Eats, and reading a book is harder than watching TV; if you’re the most talented person in the room, find a different room (awesome advice from Austin Kleon.)

You get the point.

We can schedule cupcakes or bite the bullet early on. The choice is ours – just don’t get knocked out in the second round.

A few weeks ago, I saw an infomercial for the Bacon Bonanza Copper Cooker: a contraption that lifts bacon away from grease during the cooking process to lower its fat content. For $19.95 (plus shipping and handling) I’m told I can revolutionize the way I eat bacon.

Initially, the Bacon Bonanza impressed me. It seemed so cool that someone concocted this idea and actually had the determination to make it real. But as the infomercial progressed and the comically enthusiastic salesman rambled, I had second thoughts:

What exactly was the problem that the Bacon Bonanza aimed to solve?

The best answer I came up with was that it solved the problem of patting the grease off my bacon with a paper towel. But this begs the question: Do we have such a widespread bacon grease epidemic that it warrants the time and effort to design, manufacture, and market a contraption that reduces it? Most people, including myself, are not opposed to bacon grease. They’re actually quite fond of it.

Needless to say, I didn’t order the Bacon Bonanza.

We live in an age of innovation stagnation. We produce an abundance of new apps, gadgets, and services every day, but make little to no progress in terms of improving the aspects of life that truly need attentin. Our quantity of innovations overshadows their quality, or lack thereof.

“Compared with the staggering changes in everyday life in the first half of the 20^th century, the digital age has brought relatively minor alterations to how we live,” says Harvard Business Review editor Justin Fox.

Consider how the standard of human life changed between 1850 and 1950. For the first time ever, people had vaccinations, mass communication, electricity, sanitation, public education, household appliances, cross-country transportation, the list goes on. These advances laid the foundation for a safer, more secure life. In the 21^st century, however, our inventions rarely aim to improve our quality of life or solve serious problems.

Apple’s Face ID solves the problem of typing a four-digit password. Visa’s payWave solves the problem of swiping a card through a machine. The Bacon Bonanza solves the problem of having grease on your bacon.

The benefits of innovations like these are unclear and certainly not as transformative as those of the 19^th and 20^th centuries. They put us, as Peter Thiel says, in a technological desert where we are becoming increasingly creative, but channeling that creativity in ways that are virtually meaningless. Automation, efficiency, and speed give us the illusion that we’re progressing when we’re really just spinning our wheels in the mud.

Take, for example, this statement by Google’s CEO, Sundar Pichai:

“Computing mainly automates things for you, but when we connect all these things, you can truly start assisting people in a more meaningful way…If I go and pick up my kids, it would be good for my car to be aware that my kids have entered the car and change the music to something that’s appropriate for them.”

It’s hard to imagine Thomas Edison, who gave us the light bulb and the movie camera, getting excited about some mom’s minivan knowing when to switch from NPR to Selena Gomez when little Suzy hops in the back seat. In fact, I think he’d be disappointed that we waste our time and talent automating things that nobody asked to be automated.

“Missing from [Pichai’s] view is any consideration of the pleasures and responsibilities of everyday life,” says Nicholas Carr in his book Utopia is Creepy. “Pichai doesn’t seem to have entertained the possibility that much of the joy of parenting lies in the little, inconsequential gestures that parents make on behalf of their kids, like picking out a song to play in the car.”

Is it unreasonable to ask what would happen if, just for one year, Apple, Microsoft, and Google pooled their creativity, intelligence, and trillions of dollars to combat hunger or human trafficking instead of finding another way to keep us glued to our phones? We’ll likely never know.

Maybe the Silicon Valley groupies are right. Maybe we are progressing toward some radical paradigm shift that will improve everyone’s lives. But from the looks of it now, we’ve hit a wall.

If you’re still convinced that we’re better off with Face ID and the Bacon Bonanza, consider the following question: are we collectively happier than people were 100 years ago when such things didn’t even exist in the imagination?

If you equate happiness with excitement, then yes. But what about fulfillment and purpose? The fact that 1 in 5 adults will take a prescription medication for depression or anxiety today would indicate that our innovations are not leading us to paradise. If anything, they’re making us miserable.

Tomorrow’s headlines will assure us that we are one step closer to utopia. But what is utopia? If it’s an orgy of technological sedation where life is on autopilot, I’m not interested.

And I’ll keep my bacon grease while I’m at it.

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Why do you want the things you want?

It’s an ambiguous question, one that resists a straightforward answer. I want them because I like them, we might say. But a question so deep requires  a more satisfactory explanation. If you don’t know why you want to be a nurse/banker/teacher, if you don’t know why you want a blonde wife or a tall husband, if you don’t know why you want to be a Reform Jew or why you want the newest Yeezy sneakers, is it really “your” desire?

Of course, there’s a philosopher who was fascinated by such a bothersome question. His name was Rene Girard, a former professor at Stanford who passed away a few years ago. Girard’s studies in literature, history, and sociology led him to develop a pretty cynical theory for why we want things:

We don’t know what we want, so we imitate what other people want. He called this “mimetic desire.”

People are switching jobs, getting divorced, and feeling dissatisfied more than any time in history. It’s as if our values and desires are in a constant state of fluctuation, changing with the slightest off-hand comments or newest trends. Rene Girard saw it coming: we have no concept of what we truly want or value, so the next best thing is to mimic someone else’s desires.

The girl with the Louis Vuitton bag got 600 Instagram likes – drop two grand.

Being a [insert religion here] worked for the rest of my family – do the same.

He’s a lawyer that makes money and drives a cool car – go to law school.

Everyone’s having fun in L.A. and New York – pack up and move.

The compound effect of mimetic desire is that it creates a culture where we battle for products, ideologies, and lifestyles that likely won’t satisfy either person fighting for them. We unintentionally manufacture social, political, and cultural norms, then try to stand out by being really good at those norms. And if that doesn’t work, we look for something else to “want.”

Needless to say, social media turbocharges mimetic desire. Scrolling through Facebook and Instagram is like diving into a vortex of social proof. It’s where our personal tastes are formed. It’s where “likes” have more merit than authenticity or talent. It’s where we learn to want what everyone else wants.

So how can we break the cycle? The cop-out answer is to “be yourself,” but trying to be yourself without first knowing yourself is putting the cart before the horse. In fact, trying to understand may be the root of the problem; it’s the gateway into mimetic desire. The author Robert Greene teaches that each person is born with a unique skill set which can often be traced back to childhood inclinations.

This primal uniqueness naturally wants to assert and express itself…It feels like something that has its own external reality—a force, a voice, destiny. In moments when we engage in an activity that corresponds to our deepest inclinations, we might experience a touch of this: We feel as if the words we write or the physical movements we perform come so quickly and easily that they are coming from outside us. We are literally “inspired,” the Latin word meaning something from the outside breathing within us…At your birth a seed is planted. That seed is your uniqueness. It wants to grow, transform itself, and flower to its full potential. It has a natural, assertive energy to it. Your Life’s Task is to bring that seed to flower, to express your uniqueness through your work. The stronger you feel and maintain it—as a force, a voice, or in whatever form—the greater your chance for fulfilling this Life’s Task and achieving mastery.

Know yourself, says the ancient wisdom. The unexamined life is not worth living.

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After staring at an unflattering photograph of the 45^th President of the United States for over 300 hours, Ryan Nephew completed his intentionally incomplete creation. His work speaks for itself, but the purpose and rationale behind that work was ambiguous — until now. Perhaps that was his intention all along. Nevertheless, here’s what he had to say about it:

I’ll address the elephant in the room: why did you create a gigantic close-up of Donald Trump’s face?

It took me a relatively long time to decide on Donald Trump as my subject, but I figured I couldn’t go wrong choosing such an unpredictable social/mainstream media train wreck. He’s an undeniably polarizing and unforgettable figure in popular culture, so I wanted to use that to my advantage. I also found it challenging to find a picture suitable to work with, given that I needed a specific picture quality for details.

What did you use to create this piece?

I decided to try chalk pastels, which actually give an interesting ‘paint-like’ effect. Before pastels, I started working on a charcoal drawing referencing a different photo of Trump, but I abandoned it because it started to look like more of an homage to him, which is something I wanted no part of.

What was your work process like?

I had a really weird and sporadic schedule. For the first month I worked 12-14 hours each day and rarely took breaks. I’d start at around 4 or 5 in the afternoon and work non-stop until about 7 in the morning. Shockingly, that’s not a very sustainable method, so after a couple months of working on the piece on and off I ended up taking 3-month hiatus where I didn’t even look at it. I’ve learned that if you have a goal to finish something, you can’t rush it. You have to be patient and work at a level of intensity that’s viable and organic. If your passion is starting to turn into a chore, take some time to reflect on what the end goal is and go from there.

What was it like staring at Donald Trump’s face every day?

It sucked. He’s fucking gross. But after the first few sessions I just zoned into each section I was working on rather than observing the picture as a whole – I treated each section as its own individual portrait. I looked at each specific portion primarily for the shapes within that I needed to exaggerate or downplay. Making sure each tiny section makes sense and looks fluid will make the picture as a whole look way better.

You intentionally left the face incomplete. Some people think you’re lazy and couldn’t finish, others think it adds more artistic value. What’s your explanation?

I remember first seeing hyper-realistic art and being completely blown away with the level of skill involved, but at the same time thinking, ‘What is the artistic value in merely recreating an image?’ A camera can capture an image. A computer can recreate an image better than I ever could. But art is about the integrity of self-expression and adding a personal touch. Simply reproducing a photo would’ve been boring and pointless. I wanted to create a conversation piece that was open to the viewer’s interpretation.

What’s next?

To be honest, I don’t know. Galleries are pretty much impossible to get in if you only have one piece. As far as my next piece, I want to work with incorporating more vibrant colors, mainly because I feel that they give the piece more character and emotion.

* Be sure to check out more of Ryan’s work on Instagram: @ryan_nephew

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I don’t remember how or why it happened, but a conversation with Rick Hill in the summer of 2016 quickly turned into a marriage advice session.

Rick is the co-founder of Hill Investment Group in St. Louis where I was working as a marketing intern at the time. At 75 years old, he doesn’t plan to retire any time soon. He oozes wisdom and has a contagious energy that people half his age do not.

One afternoon, during one of our post-lunch discussions, Rick chose to pivot away from business and instead share some marriage advice:

“Dominic, if you think you’ll be home from work at five o’clock, tell your wife you’ll be home at 6:30.”

I looked at him, confused.

“Set expectations,” he said. “Tell your spouse you’ll be home 90 minutes past the time you think you’ll get back. When you arrive home early, everyone’s happy. Most people do the opposite. They think, If I hit all the lights, I can get home by 5. But that sets them up for disappointment every time.”

Makes sense, I thought to myself. But later that summer I realized Rick’s lesson could be applied to other aspects of life, not just marriage. By under-promising and over-delivering, everybody wins: completing assignments earlier than expected not only makes you more valuable, it makes your boss’s life easier. And in the early stages of a career, that’s pretty damn important.

An over-eager intern might be tempted to impress the boss with a 24-hour turnaround, but once they realize they’re in over their heads they utter that cringe-worthy sentence: I need an extension. Extensions might work for college essays, but asking for an extension in the real world is career suicide.

Since that summer, I made it a point to over-deliver on every project I was assigned to, and it’s paid off. My supervisors never have to chase me down, call me twice, or send follow-up emails asking for status updates. If they give me a one-week deadline, I finish in three days.

Does operating this way add a little more pressure? Sure. But it’s worth sparing the embarrassment that comes with asking for extensions. It’s the best way I know to establish a reputation of being reliable. What’s more, I know it’s what Rick Hill would want from me.

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In 2010 Jonah Berger, an expert on social influence and virality at The University of Pennsylvania, examined 7,000 articles that made The New York Times’ most-emailed list. His study revealed that the most accurate indicator of a story going viral was how much anger the article evoked. At the time, Berger’s finding was just an interesting theory that helped explain how information spreads in the digital age. But nearly a decade later, it’s morphed into the cheat code for mobilizing crowds of people online, initiating political movements, and hijacking the vehicles of publicity.

Richard Spencer, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, is one of many right-wing provocateurs along with Ann Coulter, Tomi Lahren, and Milo Yiannoppolis who have not only discovered that cheat code, but turbo-charged it. They understand that the most effective way to give their movements credibility and build a following is to leverage the anger of their anti-audience, which in their case includes everyone from traditional Republicans to socialists.

Richard Spencer doesn’t care that you hate him. He doesn’t care if you call him a racist, a fascist, or a Nazi. And truthfully, he doesn’t care that his college speaking tour was thwarted. He loves it. More importantly, he needs it. His movement is dependent on mainstream society’s outrage and mockery which bolster its credibility. As malicious as Spencer and the alt-right are, they’re smart enough to understand that their power lies not in their actions, but in everyone else’s re-actions: protests, lawsuits, heated Q&A sessions, the list goes on.

This, says media columnist Ryan Holiday, “[is] proof to their followers that they are doing something subversive and meaningful. It gives their followers something to talk about. It imbues the whole movement with a sense of urgency and action—it creates purpose and meaning … [We’re] worried about ‘normalizing’ their behavior when in fact, that’s the one thing they don’t want to happen.”

This leads to a critical point: if the alt-right bases its entire movement on riling up the opposition and manipulating their emotions, wouldn’t it make sense to not publicly broadcast the anger and disgust that emboldens them?

Watch the pattern unfold for yourself: the minute Richard Spencer spews something provocative, the media (along with ourselves) shower him with attention. There was even a barrage of media coverage when he announced the end of his college tour. Nobody can resist indulging in the controversy, and that’s precisely the problem.

Algorithms online don’t discern between support and disgust: shares are shares and replies are replies. All of the chatter, whether negative or positive, creates a where-there’s-smoke-there’s fire phenomenon. Soon enough, people that normally wouldn’t give Spencer the time of day become his most effective publicists. When we mock the alt-right on Twitter or provoke comment sections on Facebook, we’re just as complicit in their rise to prominence as their supporters.

The pattern doesn’t differ offline. When we organize protests or set up “safe spaces,” the intention is, rightly, to denounce and marginalize these disturbing movements. But in reality, these tactics tend to have the opposite effect: they exacerbate the situation and provide the alt-right with material to recruit more followers.

Like a ringmaster dangling meat in front of a lion, Richard Spencer and his comrades spread clips of irate college students to their followers to incentivize aggressive behavior. The alleged resistance is precisely what gives a middle-aged man with zero intellectual accomplishments permission to manipulate you along with journalists who have a fetish for controversy.

History tells us that attempts to ridicule, exploit, and suppress radical groups as a means of promoting peace is counterproductive. Time and time again, these efforts recoil tragically in the face of activists. In order to generate real change, we must see the world as it is, not how we think it should be.

White supremacy is rooted in a deep fear and anxiety that cannot be assuaged by rational arguments. As our world has become increasingly diverse, a subset of white Americans feels disoriented and lost. They don’t understand the direction our society is taking, and experience its slow transformation illogically. As the old system that once offered comfort and familiarity crumbles, they experience a numbing loss of identity and a paralyzing despair. Human beings, when faced with this despair, project their insecurity onto imaginary enemies. And in this case, that despair has manifested itself in the white supremacist movement.

To lecture a white supremacist on the values of diversity, equality, and justice only fans the flames of their extremism. By the time we’ve exhausted ourselves with futile arguments, it’s too late: the articles have been written, the social media chatter has escalated, and the mainstream news networks have given air time to neo-Nazis.

We made the alt-right real. Not Russia, not trolls on Reddit, not the Trump Administration, but decent people with morals that couldn’t resist engaging with trolls. We’ve failed to heed the 3,000-year-old warning in the book of Proverbs: “Don’t answer to the arguments of fools, lest you become as foolish as they are.”

In an interview with The Atlantic, Richard Spencer admitted that he doesn’t believe bad publicity exists. If that’s the case, how can he be defeated? The only option is to give him no publicity. The New York Times isn’t going to write a feature story about something that nobody’s talking about.

Picture the average person: they probably wouldn’t know about people like Richard Spencer if it weren’t for mainstream media coverage. But to our detriment, professional journalists made a conscious choice to publicize these figures with puff pieces like this, this, and this when they should have implemented the editorial judgement that we deserve.

We cannot rely on public shaming to derail alt-right. It will fail miserably. In order to escape the hole we’ve dug ourselves into, we’ll need to get more creative.

If you really want to defy the alt-right, if you really want to “resist,” tell them you respect their right to free speech. Tell them you’re willing to have an open dialogue. Be peaceful and empathetic. Do the opposite of what fuels their movement and what propels their media narrative. In other words, be anti-viral.

Richard Spencer and the alt-right don’t fear scathing criticism, liberals, or the mainstream media. They fear obscurity. The day Richard Spencer will be defeated is the day he looks at his phone and sees zero notifications.

If we want to win, we will have to beat them at their own game. When shouts of “Heil Trump” and “White Lives Matter” are met with shouts of “F*** you, Nazis!” and “Die, fascist pigs!” you play the loser’s game. Any semblance of progress quickly evaporates.

“When the debate is over,” said Socrates, “slander becomes the tool of the loser.”

This is why it is my hope that if Richard Spencer does end up speaking at another university, the people that rightly oppose his message will finally realize that retaliating with mockery, condescension, and insults is just as irrational as holding a rally for neo-Nazis.

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Dominic Vaiana’s articles, essays, interviews, and book recommendations are sent in his monthly newsletter. All subscribers receive the PDF “11 Immutable Writing Lessons from Legendary Authors.”

The average goldfish has an attention span of nine seconds. Humans, on the other hand, lose focus after just eight seconds. How that happened is beside the point – my concern is reversing that trend so we can focus longer than an animal whose brain weighs 0.0002 pounds.

For millions of people, the solution is popping an Adderall or Vyvanse. I haven’t tried either – apparently it’s like having a cheat code to focus. But as with all cheat codes, you never learn how to master the game. And in this case, it’s the game of your career, your life.

The following methods are investments, not tricks. They aren’t easy, and they won’t work instant miracles. They are, however, sustainable and effective.

1. Sit in silence

Søren Kierkegaard once said, “If I were to prescribe just one remedy for all the ills of the world, it would be silence.”

Undoubtedly, one of those ills is the collective dwindling of our attention spans. The endless flood of pings, notifications, and chatter overloads our prefrontal cortex, diminishing our capacity for higher-order thinking. Left unchecked, it can seem unmanageable to maintain a singular stream of thought for more than a few minutes. Fortunately, we can restore our ability to focus by retreating away from sensory overload and into silence.

You’d think sitting in a chair for a few minutes with your eyes closed doing absolutely nothing would be a breeze. While it’s probably the simplest way to increase your attention span, it’s also the most challenging. In fact, it’s painful, especially if you’re not used to it.

2. Go for a walk

We can’t sit still forever. Accordingly, walking serves as a compliment to stillness in the quest for an improved attention span. The process of putting one foot in front of the other, of wandering and contemplating reorders our thoughts in ways that everyday activities can’t.

Aside from the scientific evidence supporting the benefits of walking, we can look to history’s most prolific thinkers to see just how powerful going for walks actually is. Charles Dickens would walk as many as 20 miles per day; Nikola Tesla discovered the rotating magnetic field on a walk through a park in Budapest; Ernest Hemingway went for long walks whenever he had writer’s block; Charles Darwin went on multiple walks throughout the course of each day.

It goes without saying that a therapeutic walk shouldn’t be confused with a frantic walk to catch the bus or get to class on time. Make the most of it. Enjoy it. Soon enough you’ll notice, as Thoreau did, that the moment your legs begin to move, your thoughts begin to flow.

3. Stop multitasking

 It’s ironic that we coined the term “multitasking” when it’s physically impossible for the brain to do so. If you have email, Twitter, Netflix, iMessage, and an Excel sheet all open at the same time, your brain doesn’t distribute attention equally to all of them. It flits from one task to another without ever diving deeply into anything.

It’s hard to readjust once we’re conditioned for sporadic thinking, especially since multitasking makes us feel productive. But feeling productive is a far cry from being productive. In reality, multitasking only leaves us scatterbrained and frustrated.

Don’t take my word for it, though. According to Jordan Grafman, a cognitive neuroscientist at Northwestern University, “The more you multitask, the less deliberative you become; the less able to think and reason out a problem… You become more likely to rely on conventional ideas and solutions rather than challenging them with original lines of thought.”

4. Read books

Reading a book can be painful, but why? For starters, it requires the brain to use neural pathways that are either weak or absent. It’s like trying to lift weights when you’ve never been in a gym before. But even just a few weeks of consistent reading can significantly improve one’s ability to settle down and focus. The brain is a remarkably plastic instrument.

A book invites the reader into their own mind and acclimates them to sustained, linear thought patterns. But when we spend time scanning and clicking instead of reading and reflecting, we break the synapses that support a healthy attention span and create new ones that make our thinking fragmented and dull.

I don’t know why I started reading. All I know is that it introduced me to a new world and I haven’t looked back since. It’s why I give recommendations every month and it’s why I have a bookshelf instead of a TV.

Like I said, these strategies aren’t quick fixes or “life hacks.” But I guarantee if you stick to them, you won’t need to ask your friend for Adderall when finals season creeps up.

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Dominic Vaiana’s articles, essays, interviews, and book recommendations are sent in his monthly newsletter. All subscribers receive the PDF “11 Immutable Writing Lessons from Legendary Authors.”

“What initial or lingering emotions are you feeling? Do these images offend you?”

These are the questions posed by a sign at the “Racism, Sexism and Stereotypes” exhibit in the student center of my school, Xavier University. Sponsored by Xavier’s Center for Diversity and Inclusion (CDI), the exhibit is intended to “spark conversation that will lead to greater understanding, accountability, and social change.”

Among the artifacts on display is a collection of women’s underwear branded with Washington Redskins, Chicago Blackhawks, and Cleveland Indians logos. This may, according to the exhibit’s description, cause unintended harm to viewers, but can provide windows that allow us to see more clearly how history influences today’s social issues.

Initially, this might make us feel cozy and socially responsible. But in reality, the exhibit accomplishes nothing except for diverting our attention away from the real injustices that afflict our community.

The city of Cincinnati ranks 3rd nationally in terms of child poverty behind Cleveland and Detroit. Nearly 90,000 children in the tristate area are food insecure, meaning they often do not know where their next meal is coming from, or if they will get a meal at all. Each Friday, over 5,000 students rely on packs of food called Power Packs to ensure they have something to eat over the weekend. Many go to bed hungry.

The mission of Xavier’s CDI is to “achieve a unifying consciousness for the common good.” It has done the opposite. “Microagressions” and “triggers” now irritate us more than hunger or poverty, and our campus leaders are complicit in this embarrassing rearrangement of priorities. Their continual fabrication of controversy proliferates a plague of hypersensitivity that has crippled our capacity to take action on pressing issues.

There are plenty of things to be outraged about in this world. Hunger is one of them. Underwear is not. Blithely overlooking the plight of our neighbors while encouraging students to share their emotions about team-branded panties is a blatant waste of time and energy.

In the past, anger and frustration fueled some of society’s most admirable revolutions and progressions. But today, how much of that anger and frustration is squandered on policing political correctness and coddling feelings? Does magnifying something that people wouldn’t typically care about compromise our ability to mobilize assistance for children, some of which are in walking distance from Xavier, who might go to bed hungry tonight?

The CDI has good intentions, as do most of us. We understand right from wrong. This isn’t a matter of morality. It’s a matter of convenience. Indulging in pseudo-drama boils down to one thing: it’s easy. It’s easy to talk about the world as we’d like it to be instead of how it actually is. It’s easy to retreat into a fantasy world where hard and unpleasant facts don’t interfere with our comfort. But the longer we stew over insubstantial issues, the faster the community around us unravels.

If the CID truly wants to work for the common good, it should line the walls of the student center with pictures of the 90,000 local children that have probably never heard of a bias incident, but know the pain of hunger all too well.

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Dominic’s articles, essays, interviews, and book recommendations are sent in his monthly newsletter. All subscribers receive the PDF “11 Immutable Writing Lessons from Legendary Authors.”

After Malcolm X was released from prison in 1952, a writer from London called him to conduct an interview. One of the questions he asked Malcolm was, “What’s your alma mater?” His response was, “Books.”

Sentenced to ten years in prison on burglary charges, Malcolm X refused to wallow in self-pity during his time behind bars. Instead, he educated himself by reading widely and often. In his autobiography, he recalls reading until three in the morning with only a sliver of light shining through the bars of his cell.

“No university would ask any student to devour literature as I did when this new world opened to me,” he said. “The ability to read awoke inside me some long dormant craving to be mentally alive.”

But he wasn’t reading to boost his status or to earn a degree. He was reading because he was genuinely curious and hungry for truth. He understood that personal experience could only take one so far in life.

Today we are not confined by prison walls, but by a seemingly inescapable multitude of distractions and trivial obligations. The times have changed, but we still face the same decision that Malcolm X did: sit idly as the world passes by, or take the initiative to immerse ourselves in things that challenge us, guide us, and build character.

The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that the average American adult reads only 19 minutes per day. The number is likely lower for college students who juggle classes, jobs, homework, internships, sports, and a social life. If we want to carve out time to read, something has to go. Most of these obligations are non-negotiable; but attending every single class? Not so much. So why not skip once in a while?

College is important for developing social intelligence and time management skills. But when it comes to understanding the big picture and cultivating intuition, sitting through PowerPoint slides and monotonous group projects won’t cut it.

“I have never let my schooling interfere with my education,” said Mark Twain.

The world doesn’t give a shit that you go to college. What matters is what you do while you’re there, what you have to show for it. And if making the most of your four years means skipping a few gen-ed lectures to read the autobiography of a Holocaust survivor or how an obscure ancient philosophy can change your life, so be it.

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Dominic’s articles, essays, interviews, and book recommendations are sent in his monthly newsletter. All subscribers receive the PDF “11 Immutable Writing Lessons from Legendary Authors.”