The idea that everyone wants to make money—and spend money—while playing a video-game surely sounds attractive to the people making those games and selling digital tchotkes; some gamers beg to differ.

it is not an overhyped (and ill-conceived) product: It is pure hype, without a product

It is not necessarily bad for technology companies to take a leaf from sci-fi, but if you really have to, at least try picking the utopian stuff, like Amazon’s Echo, blatantly modeled after Star Trek’s chirpy talking computer, over the unsettling dog-eat-dog hellscape of Snow Crash.

The retreat wasn’t the actual event; it just gave me a minute to realize the event that’s been going on this whole time. I had the space to step far enough way

I’d say I’m not sure I was even there at all. If you were to press me on it and say, It couldn’t have been that bad?,

Every day, thousands of strangers upload little slices of their consciousness directly into my mind. My concern is that I'm prone to mistake their thoughts for my own — that some part of me believes I'm only hearing myself think.

If you aren’t visibly producing, you aren’t worthy. In this context, taking time to lie dormant feels greedy, even wasteful.

Protecting and practicing fallow time is an act of resistance; it can make us feel out of step with what the prevailing culture tells us.

one problem was that i had collected too many quotes and excerpts that i wanted to weave into the post and couldn’t find good spots for them, so here they are anyway.

more often, time feels like a resource to be divvied up into usable pieces.

then, books were as much a part of this landscape, the noise of other people's thoughts, as anything else. and yet even then, she touched on this theme that around this time became a meme among self-aware gen z kids, with viral tiktoks and tweets like "i have to consume like 8 forms of media at once to prevent myself from ever having a thought."

the lack of external input—of content to consume—is terrifying to people, to the extent that singular artifacts of media aren't sufficient. you need multiple inputs at once, to hedge against the possibility that one of them will fail to hold your attention and force you to sit in the quiet of your own mind.

we try in vain to pay out fractional amounts of our attention and find that the whole is, somehow, less than the sum of its parts. in wanting to pay attention to everything, we often fail to pay attention to anything at all.

i spend a lot of time thinking about time—how we conceptualize it, how we experience it, how it expands and contracts beneath different lenses. focus is about the ability to direct attention for a duration of time. boredom is about the discomfort that comes from a perceived slowness of time. having less mental space might be the outcome of consuming all this content, but wanting less time is the more explicit reason we do it.

i like them because they're time without my phone, time to properly and intentionally inhabit my body, time to experience time.