Today, good is bad

In our age of excess, it's harder than ever to stay focused, says Paul Graham in a remarkable essay:

One sense of "normal" is statistically normal: what everyone else does. The other is the sense we mean when we talk about the normal operating range of a piece of machinery: what works best.

These two senses are already quite far apart. Already someone trying to live well would seem eccentrically abstemious in most of the US. That phenomenon is only going to become more pronounced. You can probably take it as a rule of thumb from now on that if people don't think you're weird, you're living badly.

Emphasis mine, just because I love that sentence.  The point is, you have to practically live like a monk to avoid the multitude of distractions that feel productive but in fact are just sinkholes of time with maybe some, but definitely small, benefits.  

Most of us won't make it (most likely me included).  Unlike the modern day food industry and trying to eat well -- another place where if you're behaving like everyone else, you're doing quite badly -- in this case you can determine exactly the outcome you want for yourself. 

An opportunity for the disciplined.