Uncomfortable on Purpose

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

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This is why boredom can feel so surprisingly, aggressively unpleasant: we tend to think of it merely as a matter of not being particularly interested in whatever it is we’re doing, but in fact it’s an intense reaction to the deeply uncomfortable experience of confronting your limited control. Boredom can strike in widely differing contexts—when you... See more

Many of us yearn for a way to be fully online without all of the mindlessness, passivity and addiction that often entraps us. Some of us oscillate between fully online and fully offline in a sort of mad dance to establish what feels right. Others have lost hope that it’s possible to engage in a way that feels true and alive, and have resigned to us... See more

there’s this struggle in my head. Is the world ending, or is it a nice day and I’m getting coffee? Obviously, it’s not a binary thing, but living this way is sometimes brain-scrambling. It’s not like the constant doom and gloom of Twitter was making me a better climate activist. Instead I’d be paralyzed. Twitter incentivizes you to live in this con... See more