Being an intellectual begins with thinking your way outside of your assumptions and the system that enforces them. But students who get into elite schools are precisely the ones who have best learned to work within the system, so it’s almost impossible for them to see outside it, to see that it’s even there.

From the archive:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

What is to become of those of us past schooling, who are aware of these planes? Are we to dredge on with pink shades over our blue eyes? What other choice do we have, become hermits and form our own seceded blue colony?

Also:

The term “white space” implies a place set apart, physically and mentally.

Andy Hines, who studies the future of work at the Washington office of Social Technologies, a global consulting firm, said white space is “what we are looking for when we have thinking to do.”

Mark Bittman:

Living a good life requires a kind of balance, a bit of quiet. There are questions about the limits of the brain and the body, and there are parallels here to the environmental movement.

Who would say you don’t need time to think, to reflect, to be successful and productive?

I believe that there has to be a way to regularly impose some thoughtfulness, or at least calm, into modern life. Once I moved beyond the fear of being unavailable and what it might cost me, ... I felt connected to myself rather than my computer. I had time to think, and distance from normal demands. I got to stop.

Finally, going way back:

There is a connection between the idea of place and the reality of cellular telephones. It is not encouraging.

The Disadvantages of an Elite Education