There are a thousand beautiful ways to start the day that don’t begin with looking at a phone. And yet so few of us choose to do so.
"Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love." Then is the lack of attention the opposite? Does it presuppose fear and hate?
"We believe that we live in the ‘age of information.’" he writes. "That there has been an information ‘explosion,’ an information ‘revolution.’ While in a certain narrow sense this is the case, in many important ways just the opposite is true. We also live at a moment of deep ignorance, when vital knowledge that humans have always possessed about who we are and where we live seems beyond our reach. An Unenlightenment. An age of missing information."
The medium was no longer the message, it was just an asshole.
I want my attention back
Attention is a muscle. It must be exercised. Though, attention is duplicitous — it doesn’t feel like a muscle. And exercising it doesn’t result in an appreciably healthier looking body. But it does result in a sense of grounding, feeling rational, control of your emotions — a healthy mind. Our measuring sticks for life tend to be optimized for material things, things easy to count. Houses, cars, husbands, babies, dollar bills. Attention is immaterial, difficult to track.