Screening out consciousness
All across our culture, you’ll find people eager to abandon the fundamental task of our lives, fostering and maintaining human connection, so that they can fall deeper into a pit of hedonistic distraction forever. You send an email a large language model wrote for you to spare yourself a minute of mental activity at the end of a long day working f
... See moreFreddie deBoer • You Are You. We Live Here. This is Now.
The only faculty you can use to see what’s happening to your attention is your attention, the very thing that’s already been commandeered. This means that once the attention economy has rendered you sufficiently distracted, or annoyed, or on edge, it becomes easy to assume that this is just what life these days inevitably feels like.
Oliver Burkeman • Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals
if you feel less satisfied and connected to others than you did years ago—perhaps before getting your first smartphone, or before your working environment turned into a hyperconnected one—you’re not alone. Engaging in any dopaminergic habit suppresses activity in the brain’s calm network. In turn, this suppresses signals that we should stop working
... See moreChris Bailey • How to Calm Your Mind: Finding Presence and Productivity in Anxious Times
Scrolling displaces observation, shuts out occasions for self-generated thought, silences out-of-the-blue invitations. Checking the phone reroutes the discomfort of blankness and emptiness. It stoppers authentic—often anxious—waiting. And, even more disturbing, scrolling narrows the field of my curiosity. I take what I find there; I don’t make adve... See more