On agency & the attention economy

I am so, so bored of talking about what the problem is. I know you are too.

That damn phone is the Matrix. They're gutting you and selling your guts, only that's an understatement. They're melting your brain, they're baiting you, they're piloting your body while you sleep. Eyes glazed, you rob your own house. Sign the whole thing over. Never uncomfortable, never satisfied, you are shrinking for scraps.

A life wasted in restless un-texture is a tragedy and injustice from which no one is coming to save you. It's not even your fault, but that won't save you either. These words here won't save you, I won't save you, watching more videos about going analog won't save you. Enough, already! Aren't you bored?

You are the singular decisive element. That is the truth, maybe the only truth left under the sun. In near-constant denial of your power, a sleeping giant breathing glacially under the moss.

What did Tanya Luhrmann say? University of Chicago, 2003?

"Peel an onion down to its core and all you will find is air. You are not an untouched core. You are and will become the sum of your commitments, your choices - moral, intellectual, and practical... Look at what you actually do, at what you come to care for, at what you fight to defend. Look... in the way that you read and interpret and argue, and the big choices will sort themselves out by themselves."

Unstrap those blinders, baby! Tap back into your breath! You have everything you need. There is nothing to find. Do first, interpret the data later. Speaking for myself: if I spent any more of my wild and precious life in the planning and discovery phase, I would have died there.

Purposeful, rewarded labor is both wisdom and peace. Drive, contribution, and accomplishment are the same as life force. Sure, yeah, do a good job at your job. Try for excellence. Honor that you are an organic thing that bleeds, that requires inputs of care and all seven or eight (or whatever) types of rest. Given all that, let's talk about the real work. Passion projects, acts of service and citizenship, routine behaviors of tending. The raw flame of your artist's spirit.

To create - or even just to give, naturally and honestly - is to crack yourself open on the rocks and leave tuned to your center of gravity. It is an integration of the ineffable divine within you and the external world. An experience, a clarification.

You are the only one who gets to be born as you, live as you, speak as you, make stuff as you. Why withhold all that richness from your contemporaries in this life?

You are no second coming of Christ - no one waits for you on bated breath, and time will smooth the reverberations of your existence to nothing. Do it anyway? No. Do it precisely for that reason. Live small, and you still die.

Nihilistic? Hardly. Hear me now: you owe YOU to this world, whatever you do.