Annotations
We live in a culture of watchers and appearers, of watchers and approvers, a culture where it feels distinctively hard to be a real human being. It’s like some sort of Orwellian nightmare, but worse, since we are being watched, but we have also employed ourselves as the watchers, as big brother, looking in at a projected image of everyone’s life, which isn’t that real but we, for some reason, pretend it is.
I couldn’t help but come to the conviction, right there on the bus, that one of the most important questions modern man must ask himself is how much time he is willing to spend being passively entertained.
We are drowning in a river of short-form video. Where the allure isn’t even the content but the abundance, the infinitude of the flow.
The faster things go, the more immersed we are in the flow, addicted to the speed, unwilling to grapple with the slowness of the real world around us, the more we forget to feed the part of ourselves that likes quiet, that can live in quiet.
This, mind you, is the best definition of addiction I’ve come across: something that makes you feel terrible, but the only way to feel better, it seems, is to do it again.
The transformative moments in my life only came when the pain of staying the same finally became greater than the pain of changing. It wasn’t courage, perse, but a recognition of the cost of inaction.
With constant stimulation, you never have time to hear your thoughts or feel your feelings. In a world afraid of quiet, it is easy to get lost.
Getting off a screen, if you’re anything like me, will force you to confront some painful realities that constant distraction has allowed you to avoid.
There is pain in sitting and sorting through these emotions. But, and this I promise, there is joy and freedom and life to its fullest on the other side.
As you pull yourself away, as the chains you never saw come crashing to the floor, you learn things. You learn books can tell you things about yourself you don’t know. You learn concentrating on anything is very hard work. You learn what you pay attention to is the job of a lifetime, a job that never ends, a job that quite literally shapes your life because all your life is, you realize, is a story you tell yourself about living.