Parker C

Confidence is the ability to be in your body and breathe

Attention is all we have. According to philosopher Simone Weil, it is sacred — the rarest form of generosity:

“Attention alone, that attention which is so full that the ‘I’ disappears, is required of me. I have to deprive all that I call ‘I’ of the light of my attention and turn it onto that which cannot be conceived.”

The only way

out, I believe, is to make big hard decisions that make all of the little ones for me.

Like switching your

phone. I can’t win against the iPhone but I can simply not play. And that’s powerful.

When's the last time you watched something other than a screen for that long without checking your phone?

It’s wild how often we are lured into the phone to do one quick thing and then get stuck there forever. Smart phones are like one big ‘come for a quick tour of our timeshare and you get a nice weekend for free’ that end up with you buying the timeshare and living there fulltime (is this how timeshares work idk).

The direction language models indeed prompt you to follow (pun intended) often leads you somewhere boring — to the land of averages

It’s ok to wait, and it’s definitely ok to de-wheel from the hamsterism of today’s productivity theatre. In fact, you might need to if you really want to dream up a monster story.

In our culture,

waiting has a bad rap. After all, if you’re waiting, what’s to show off on Insta?

If only the internet was a thing, it would have been tempting to bleed off the anxiety, and swoon into an infinite doomscroll.

The emotional stickiness

of conversational bots raises the question of manipulation. After all, the people making the bots have an incentive to keep people chatting for as long as possible, so they do things to make the bots as addictive as possible.