less>more

less>more

I saw that in an ad for Simple shoes and have adopted it as my mantra for the week. Good timing, because life threw my family a tremendous curve ball this past Friday.

I won't go into all the details (you know, because less>more) but the deepest thanks and appreciation to those prayer warriors, family and friends who have reached out with my father-in-law's recent illness. We have truly felt and appreciated the prayers, enjoyed the coffee and bagels, and the knowledge that we are blessed by God with great friends and family. Shining stars on the darkest of nights.

Don't know how much I'll post here this week. But did want to share this: a great read on Twitter from Nicholas Carr, the guy who wrote "Is Google Making Us Stupid?" Enjoy!

Here's my favorite part:

Narcissism is just the user interface for nihilism, of course, and with artfully kitschy services like Twitter we're allowed to both indulge our self-absorption and distance ourselves from it by acknowledging, with a coy digital wink, its essential emptiness. I love me! Just kidding!

The great paradox of "social networking" is that it uses narcissism as the glue for "community." Being online means being alone, and being in an online community means being alone together. The community is purely symbolic, a pixellated simulation conjured up by software to feed the modern self's bottomless hunger. Hunger for what? For verification of its existence? No, not even that. For verification that it has a role to play. As I walk down the street with thin white cords hanging from my ears, as I look at the display of khakis in the window of the Gap, as I sit in a Starbucks sipping a chai served up by a barista, I can't quite bring myself to believe that I'm real. But if I send out to a theoretical audience of my peers 140 characters of text saying that I'm walking down the street, looking in a shop window, drinking tea, suddenly I become real. I have a voice. I exist, if only as a symbol speaking of symbols to other symbols.