But your attention is, on a foundational level, all you have. This is why it feels worse than bad to waste it. It feels annihilating.

And so I decided not to make an IG reel, and instead, to finally read Swann’s Way .

Maybe there was a tiny bit of dish soap left at the bottom of the bottle, and I considered diluting it with water to get it out more easily, and make the bottle last longer. I wouldn’t simply think that. Thanks to Twitter, I’d think something exponentially more inane and annoying, such as, “The masculine urge to water down the dish soap...” or “The... See more

The problem is that the cameraphone, connected as it is to our online lives, doesn’t just serve the creative impulse and stop there. It risks cannibalizing that impulse, co-opting it, colonizing it, and ultimately thwarting it. Because the cameraphone allows us so readily to stop noticing the thing we’re photographing, and instead to outsource our... See more

The same way I once conditioned myself to think in tweets, I’ve conditioned myself to see in “posts,” in “grid pics,” in “stories,” in flicks texted to the group chat, in .HEICs, and so on.

And yet I know we still have more time on our hands than we realize: our phones take lots of it from us, yes, but there’s lots of time we surrender to our phones, too. We’ve grown accustomed to filling our time with scrolling because scrolling is diabolically easy. We can find ways to engineer away some of that scrolling, however, and replace it... See more

As my life has come to consist so overwhelmingly, and for so many years, of looking at images on screens — and of looking at the world through a camera, which is also a phone, which is also a screen — the distinction for me between the screen and the non-screen can wobble.

I think the widespread impulse to take a photo of everything is in fact, at root, a creative one . It reflects a desire to not just receive life passively, but to intervene in it creatively: To frame the shot, to find the most compelling angle, to draw out the emotion, to honor the light... to participate.

As my life has come to consist so overwhelmingly, and for so many years, of looking at images on screens — and of looking at the world through a camera, which is also a phone, which is also a screen — the distinction for me between the screen and the non-screen can wobble.

Today we are all of us lonelier, and more alone, than ever. But we’re never alone, either, because our attention is hijacked, our time feels crunched, and our cells travel with us everywhere we go, padded with layer upon layer of endless, overlapping digital distractions.