We have more and more ways to communicate, as Thoreau noted, but less and less to say.
Interpretation
Increased communication options have led to a decrease in meaningful dialogue.
This quote reflects on the paradox of modern communication, suggesting that with the advent of numerous platforms and methods for expression, genuine conversation and meaningful content are diminishing. Pico Iyer points to the irony that while we can reach out to each other in various ways, the substance of what we communicate often lacks depth and significance.
In practice
In a speech about the importance of meaningful conversation in our digital age.
Quitting, for me, means not giving up, but moving on; changing direction not because something doesn’t agree with you, but because you don’t agree with something. It’s not a complaint, in other words, but a positive choice, and not a stop in one’s journey, but a step in a better direction. Quitting-whether a job or a habit-means taking a turn so as to be sure you’re still moving in the direction of your dreams.
I think one reason, obviously, that I spend so much time in one place is that I've been lucky enough to travel a lot, and now there are other different, invisible trains that are more interesting to me.
I've never meditated in my life. I don't practice yoga nor any religion. I'm a tourist on the realm of stillness.
We travel to open our hearts and eyes and learn more about the world than our newspapers will accommodate.
I'm no Buddhist monk, and I can't say I'm in love with renunciation in itself, or traveling an hour or more to print out an article I've written, or missing out on the N.B.A. Finals. But at some point, I decided that, for me at least, happiness arose out of all I didn't want or need, not all I did.
The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology.
People demand freedom of speech as a compensation for the freedom of thought which they seldom use.
It is only in our decisions that we are important.
God is the ultimate source of all power. All human power is therefore derived, limited, unstable and transient.
Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made.
There is no person without a world.
There are two types of seeds in the mind: those that create anger, fear, frustration, jealousy, hatred and those that create love, compassion, equanimity and joy. Spirituality is germination and sprouting of the second group and transforming the first group.
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