anatta

This brings up the interesting and valuable question of what meditation is and isn't. Buddhist meditation is a skill that concerns itself with two activities. I've provided a link at the end of this reply that you can use to learn Mindfulness (as taught by a monk who is also a Stanford Ph.D in Buddhist Studies).

So what are the activities that comprise meditation?

The first activity is to willfully concentrate the mind in an effort to calm it. This is done by focusing strictly on the sensation of the breath in order to restrict the mind from wandering off. The name of this activity in Pali is called "samatha", which means "calm" or "tranquility".

The second activity is to see the processes by which the mind runs off into orthogonal thought and unhelpful states of mind. Once you see these processes happening, you intervene in them to stop them from happening in order to bring your mind into a strong state of calm awareness. This activity is called "vipassana" in Pali. It means "insight" in English.

Samatha and vipassana are two sides of the same coin. They are a process broken into two supporting functions to achieve the goal. When people are introduced to meditation, they are being introduced to the encompassing practice of samatha-vipassana, otherwise referred to as Mindfulness Meditation.

One of the most thorough and accessible sources of instruction on Mindfulness is Gil Fronsdal. You can find an entire course, along with everything else on this site, for free here:

http://www.audiodharma.org/series/1/talk/1762/

Would you be willing to give up the complexity of the original organism for the function you enjoy? Basically they hover there and emit a soft pulse. To get this functionality we might not need all of the extra crap in firefly anatomy, just a rough approximation.

"All we need" is to create some hovering device (a tiny helicopter) affixed to a tiny LED with an oscillating dimmer. We can make a big one first affixed to a wire and then start miniaturizing it.

If you want to try this out I'm down to help out. I miss fireflies so bad :/ Side note: I know jack shit about robotics but this sounds like a fun way to learn.

With technical books, I get those post-it flags and place a green one at the end of the chapter that I'm reading. In the chapter itself, I place purple flags at intervals of about 20 pages. Now I peg my attention to the amount of pages in those small intervals (rather than staring at some huge tome) and it relieves a huge amount of emotional burden because the goal is more clearly defined and realistic.

I read one of those chunks a day or ever other day. As I read, I highlight all the relevant info in the subsections with two different colors (one for "concepts" and the other for "practical application of the concept").

This method works great for me because going back to read the highlighted area indulges that "fast food" information intake and solidifies my understanding of what I'm reading. Doing it every other day also takes a lot of load off of the mind. A pot of coffee gets filled drop by drop.

My only issue with your reply to OP was that it seemed unnecessarily sharp in tone ("Go pursue some other passion. Leave the start-ups for those of us who really care") and addressed an effect ("snubbing customers") of his problem rather than trying to untangle the source of the problem itself (being addicted to inertia but lacking grit).

Thanks so much for bringing this to attention! :)

A fair criticism would be to try different apps, weigh them out and present a measured response based on that analysis or specify that you're criticizing Google's app specifically and constraining the boundaries to that app and not the platform it runs on.

Human progress is largely evolutionary and incremental. We stand on all that came before us. Facebook brought a new concept of interaction that has a downside many people are against. They address this by creating an alternative, and so goes history.

Progress is a dialog.

Writing lengthy boilerplate code becomes trivially fast.

Psychedelic drugs provide an experience of absorption like a trance. When one is absorbed in such a state, it's the first direct experience of a sense of self that is immaterial (but finite). Buddhist meditation (samadhi or "right concentration" in the Noble Eightfold Path) goes very far beyond that and into very different states of consciousness.

Gil Fronsdal is a Stanford Ph.D who teaches clearly, logically, and in stepwise progression. You can learn here:

http://www.audiodharma.org/talks-intromed.html

If you're interested in empirical studies of samadhi, Dr. James Austin published a book called "Zen and the Brain: Toward an Understanding of Meditation and Consciousness" from MIT press.

I hope this helps alleviate your panic and brings you clarity and harmony of mind.