Political pessimism keeps people trapped in a search for purely personal and individual solutions.
We are now exposed to ten times the amount of artificial light that people were exposed to just fifty years ago.
It could be that reading fiction, over time, boosts your empathy. But it could also be that people who are already empathetic are simply more drawn to reading novels. This makes his.
The sensation of being alive in the early twenty-first century consisted of the sense that our ability to pay attention – to focus – was cracking and breaking.
Take care what technologies you use, because your consciousness will, over time, come to be shaped like those technologies.
Your brain can only produce one or two thoughts” in your conscious mind at once. That’s it. “We’re very, very single-minded.” We have “very limited cognitive capacity.” This is because of the “fundamental structure of the brain,” and it’s not going to change. But rather than acknowledge this, Earl told me, we invented a myth. The myth is that we can actually think about three, five, ten things at the same time.
The more information you pump in, the less time people can focus on any individual piece of it.
We don’t let them play freely; we imprison them in their homes, with little to do except interact via screens; and our school system largely deadens and bores them. We feed them food that causes energy crashes, contains drug-like additives that can make them hyper, and doesn’t contain the nutrients they need. We expose them to brain-disrupting chemicals in the atmosphere. It’s not a flaw in them that causes children to struggle to pay attention. It’s a flaw in the world we built for them.
Slowness, he explained, nurtures attention, and speed shatters it.
I ask: What could you do now to get into a flow state, and access your mind’s own ability to focus deeply? I remember what Mihaly taught me are the main components of flow, and I say to myself: What would be something meaningful to me that I could do now? What is at the edge of my abilities? How can I do something that matches these criteria now? Seeking out flow, I learned, is far more effective than self-punishing shame.
The truth is creepier. It’s not that they are listening and then they can do targeted ad serving. It’s that their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic.
In general, we want to take the easy way out, but what makes us happy is doing the thing that’s a little bit difficult. What’s happening with our cellphones is that we put a thing in our pocket that’s with us all the time that always offers an easy thing to do, rather than the important thing.
It’s always tempting to mistake your personal decline for the decline of the human species.
We live in a gap between what we know we should do and what we feel we can do.
It’s that their model of you is so accurate that it’s making predictions about you that you think are magic.
We touch our phones 2,617 times every twenty-four hours.
I was for the first time in my life living within the limits of my attention’s resources. I was observing as much information as I could actually process, think about and contemplate. The fire hose of information was turned off. Instead, I was sipping water at the pace I chose.
You simulate being another human so well that fiction is a far better virtual reality simulator than the machines currently marketed under that name.
As a culture, in the Western world, we work longer with each decade that passes. Ed Deci, a professor of psychology who I interviewed at the University of Rochester in upstate New York, has shown that an extra month per year has been tacked on to what, in 1969, was considered a full-time job.
I wondered if the motto for our era should be: I tried to live, but I got distracted.