Alex Lewis on Substack
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has discovered in his research that one of the simplest and most common forms of flow that people experience in their lives is reading a book—and, like other forms of flow, it is being choked off in our culture of constant distraction. I thought a lot about this. For many of us, reading a book is the deepest form of focus we
... See moreJohann Hari • Stolen Focus: Why You Can't Pay Attention And How to Think Deeply Again
“We are all plugged into an infinite stream of data, updated continuously and delivered at light speed via a network of intelligent devices, embedded in every corner of our lives. Value has shifted from the output of our muscles to the output of our brains. Our knowledge is now our most important asset and the ability to deploy our attention is our... See more
From Notetaking to Neuralink
“To read slowly, attentively, without agenda or distraction is to resist. Not with noise or spectacle, but with the quiet, deliberate force of contemplation. In an economy built on speed and stimulus, deep reading becomes an act of principled refusal. It defies the algorithm’s logic of efficiency, the newsfeed’s velocity, the platform’s hunger for... See more