attention is sacred
- 800 page novels, 3.5 hour blockbuster movies, 4+ hour podcasts… Not to mention homesteading social media accounts with millions (and millions) of followers, slow food journaling version 2.4 promoting sourdough bread-making, old-school pickling and marmalade making — what’s going on?
Are we experiencing a new and evolved slow revolution? Is this the ... See moreandrea added 1y ago
"The information you consume each day is the soil from which your future thoughts are grown."
alex added 10mo ago
“What I need, what I am trying to build, is — I coin this phrase by analogy to a memory palace — an attention cottage . ... When I sit down in a chair with a book in my lap, a notebook at my side, and no screens within reach or sight, I am dwelling in my attention cottage.
The great artists and thinkers cultivate a systolic/diastolic rhythm, tension
... See morefrom 1, #86 - How to survive in a world of distraction by Alan Jacobs
sari added 3mo ago
alex added 2mo ago
- Rather than the contracting of our muscles, attention involves the canceling of our desires; by turning toward another, we turn away from our blinding and bulimic self. The suspension of our thought, Weil declares, leaves us “detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object.”
from Simone Weil’s Radical Conception of Attention
Alex Dobrenko added 1y ago
- If all else fails, consider your own mortality. How many people on their deathbeds do you think are going to say, “I wish I’d spent more time on Facebook”? Keep asking yourself the same question, again and again and again: This is your life. How much of it do you want to spend on your phone?
from How to Break Up With Your Phone (Published 2018) by Catherine Price
alex added 1y ago
- And yet: as much as the Fediverse is different (the governing structures, the incentives, the moderation, the absence of ads and engagement tricks), so much of it is also unsettlingly familiar—the same small boxes, the same few buttons, the same mechanics of following and being followed. The same babbling, tumbling, rushing stream of thoughts. I ca... See more
from Coming Home by Mandy Brown
sari added 24d ago
- When you’re reading a physical book, your attention is not competing for other things which is why they're so powerful. Books give you solemnity. You forget the world exists, enjoy what the author has to say, and even feeling yourself wanting to know them as a friend.
sari added 6mo ago
“Our respect for attention is in decline. Timeless and eternal truths are forgotten in favor of breaking news and "what's trending."
Instead of deliberately choosing what to consume, we surrender to opaque algorithms that don’t always have our best interests in mind.
The alternative is an intentional and self-directed information diet - the pursuit
... See moresari added 1y ago
- Many things in modernity are brain dead, but I can’t think of anything worse than the short form dystopias of TikTok and Instagram. They’re materially making people dumber, breeding addict behavior (particularly in the young) and ultimately ruining the lives of normies. It’s depressing to think about the countless kids who might have started garage... See more
from TikTok and Instagram are intellectual poison by Adam Singer
sari added 3d ago