As you pull yourself away, as the chains you never saw come crashing to the floor, you learn things. You learn books can tell you things about yourself you don’t know. You learn concentrating on anything is very hard work. You learn what you pay attention to is the job of a lifetime, a job that never ends, a job that quite literally shapes your... See more

This, mind you, is the best definition of addiction I’ve come across: something that makes you feel terrible, but the only way to feel better, it seems, is to do it again

This urge to be less online. To be less performative, less see-through, less concerned with what others think of how we live, and more deeply involved and intimate with our own real local lives.

We are drowning in a river of short-form video. Where the allure isn’t even the content but the abundance, the infinitude of the flow. As the cultural conversation is dominated by what is fast and loud and immediately engaging, because those are the qualities screens reward, we lose the capacity to think in paragraphs, to think hard about the same... See more

And I saw another guy on the bus, beside the hypothetically Lebanese girl, watching a videos of a chef pulling pizzas out of a wood-fired oven, pizzas with genoa salami and sweet pepper and fennel, pizzas with prosciutto and arugula, pizzas with sausage and wild mushrooms, pizzas glistening, bewitched to a dark gold, while he pulled a second hard... See more

The faster things go, the more immersed we are in the flow, addicted to the speed, unwilling to grapple with the slowness of the real world around us, the more we forget to feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet. That deprivation makes itself felt in the body as a kind of dread.

Most of a good life is simply refusing to do what is bad.

“If there’s no price, you are the price.”

We live in a culture of watchers and appearers, of watchers and approvers , a culture where it feels distinctively hard to be a real human being. It’s like some sort of Orwellian nightmare, but worse, since we are being watched, but we have also employed ourselves as the watchers, as big brother, looking in at a projected image of everyone’s life,... See more