Iman Mohamed
@iman
storyteller, strategist, lover of rest and play
Iman Mohamed
practicerestinleisure.substack.com
The real crisis isn’t that we are overwhelmed by other people’s suffering. We are collapsing because we have learned how to witness it without entering it, without letting it rearrange us, without making space for it to mean anything.
Tamara • The Attention Economy Is Making Us Emotionally Poor
“I’ve cried harder watching a movie than I did reading about someone’s loss, because the movie asked more of me. Because it slowed me down.”
In all of this I am complicit.
We are taught to equate speed with sophistication, reactivity with intelligence, and multitasking with mastery... but it’s all a pathetic farce. You cannot worship in three tabs. You cannot grieve in snippets. You cannot seduce someone while checking your notifications. You cannot raise a child, or a question, or a consciousness, in a room where pr... See more
Tamara • The Attention Economy Is Making Us Emotionally Poor
This is spritual starvation pretending to be modern life.
Most people don’t want to be perceived, they want to be approved of. And those are not the same thing. Real attention interrupts the curated self instead of confirming it. It creates the possibility of rupture, of exposure, of being mirrored back in ways that aren’t always flattering. And in that sense, to be deeply paid attention to, without agend... See more
Tamara • The Attention Economy Is Making Us Emotionally Poor
Do we know what we look like when we’re not performing? to really be seen versus to be liked or followed etc.
we have become so allergic to presence, so habituated to fragmented attention, that stillness now feels like failure and eye contact like a threat. Attention, once the invisible pulse of love, art, learning, even political consciousness, has been broken down, bundled, and resold to the highest bidder, not only making us distracted, but emotionally ... See more
Tamara • The Attention Economy Is Making Us Emotionally Poor
Our attention was the last remaning act of devotion not co-opted by ego, ideology or spectacle.
Go to the Limits of Your Longing
Written by Rainer Maria Rilke
Translated and read by Joanna Macy
Listen
God speaks to each of us as he makes us,
then walks with us silently out of the night.
These are the words we dimly hear:
You, sent out beyond your recall,
go to the limits of your longing.
Embody me.
Flare up like a flame
and make big shadows I can move i
Live the Questions: Rilke on Embracing Uncertainty and Doubt as a Stabilizing Force
Maria Popovathemarginalian.org
aestheticism as philosophy for survival
Video
aesthetic intelligence, a practice and sensuality
This is very aestheticism meets the sensualist’s life, as a form of devotion, not as performance. This is instinct.
Recently I learned about Lacan’s concept of jouissance, which I’ve come to understand as pleasure that becomes so intense it’s hard to distinguish from pain. I’m fairly certain this describes the high of answering anxiety’s biggest questions: binging on information, hoarding social validation, buying stuff, so much stuff, crafting five-year plans. ... See more
Explores Lacan's idea of jouissance as a state where pleasure and pain blur, using it to illustrate how our compulsive behaviors to soothe inner emptiness can be both intensely gratifying and deeply unsettling.
jouissance
Quick Reference
[French ‘enjoyment’, connoting jouir ‘to come’ in the sexual sense]
1. In psychoanalytic theory, for Lacan, an erotic ecstasy beyond the Freudian ‘pleasure principle’, akin to the ‘death drive’ since entering the symbolic order requires its loss, normalizing and regulating pleasure ( plaisir ). The subsequent lack of jouis... See more
Quick Reference
[French ‘enjoyment’, connoting jouir ‘to come’ in the sexual sense]
1. In psychoanalytic theory, for Lacan, an erotic ecstasy beyond the Freudian ‘pleasure principle’, akin to the ‘death drive’ since entering the symbolic order requires its loss, normalizing and regulating pleasure ( plaisir ). The subsequent lack of jouis... See more
jouissance
Pleasure to the point of pain?