attention is sacred

Again, I can’t speak for anyone else, but when I spend too much time on the socials, my focus erodes to a point that I have trouble reading anything , much less keeping a page of Morrison straight in my head. Morrison didn’t write for the Elon Musk shattermind; she wrote for the Slow Zone. Anyone can read Toni Morrison, but I would argue that... See more

Compassion, in contrast, means that I identify with the afflicted individual so fully that I feed him for the same reason I feed myself: because we are both hungry. In other words, I have paid him attention.

Being with somebody for an hour is much easier than paying attention to somebody for an hour. The former requires only physical (or virtual) proximity, and we do it every day. The latter happens only rarely. It requires us to donate all our emotional, spiritual, and intellectual energy to being with another person. I can recall only a few occasions... See more

The way to maintain one's connection to the wild is to ask yourself what it is that you want. This is the sorting of the seed from the dirt. One of the most important discriminations we can make in this matter is the difference between things that beckon to us and things that call from our souls.

Nowhere can this be seen more clearly than in the... See more

Perhaps that is why so many of us have half-done tasks on our to-do lists and half-read books on our bedside tables, scroll through Instagram while simultaneously semi-watching Netflix, and swipe between apps and tabs endlessly, from when we first open our eyes until we finally fall asleep. One uncomfortable explanation for why so many aspects of

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What risk are we radically underestimating as a species? What are we overestimating?

I think we’ve still underestimated the harms of scrolling. I am careful to say “scrolling” because I don’t think social media is itself a bad thing, nor do I think screens are uniformly bad. I think it’s specifically the act of scrolling, which forces us to ingest,... See more