If you are immune to boredom, if you can get drunk staring into the flames of a fire, or lost in reverie walking by yellow-lit windows, or experience a secret pleasure from staring into space, if you can be by yourself but not lonely, simply alone, then you’ve got it.

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

On his regular rants about ‘the Facebook,’ an old business professor I had in Navarra used to say, in his velvet Spanish accent, “If there’s no price, you are the price.” Entertainment’s main goal is not to entertain but to keep you so hooked, so riveted, that you can’t tear yourself away so advertisers can advertise. To create an anxiety that only... See more

“At a certain point we’re gonna have to build up some machinery, inside our guts, to help us deal with this. Because the technology is just gonna get better and better and better and better. And it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient, and more and more pleasurable, to be alone with images on a screen, given to us by by people

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To create an anxiety that only promises relief by purchase. It’s a system that reduces the nobility of man to a cog in the capitalist machine, a unit of utility, something to sell to.

I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much time he is willing to spend being passively entertained.

those are the qualities screens reward, we lose the capacity to think in paragraphs, to think hard about the same thing for half an hour, to practice any kind of sustained attention.

The goal isn’t entertainment. The goal isn’t even distraction. The goal is addiction4.

People argue they use social media to keep in touch with family and friends. Luckily, there is something called email and the telephone. It is only in two-way mediums, where we must contend with the reality of another person, that real relationship forms and grows. Passive one-way consumption of someone’s life only creates the illusion of... See more