#208: What is rotting, if not rest?

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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Aggressively uncreative practices such as aimless wandering or birdwatching (or, as she perceptively calls it, “bird listening”) offer “an antidote to the rhetoric of growth” that surrounds us every day. There is ultimately a feminist and environmental case to be made for doing nothing: if we can shift our notion of constructive social behavior fro

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Not using a phone taught me what a phone is really for. It’s not for communicating with other people, getting directions, reading articles, looking at pictures, shopping for products, or playing games. A phone is a device for muting the anxieties proper to being alive. This is what all its functions and features ultimately achieve: cameras deliver ... See more

If you observe a sabbath, this feeling is not unfamiliar. You are well-acquainted with what others think of as the awkward restraints of just being . You understand its essential, restorative purpose — and marvel at others’ allergy to it. Why are we so terrified of stillness? To be still is an invitation to reckon with our smallness, our powerlessn

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