“The more ways we have to connect, the more many of us seem desperate to unplug.
…
wiser souls have always reminded us that the more attention we pay to the moment, the less time and energy we have to place it in some larger context. “Distraction is the only thing that consoles us for our miseries,” the French philosopher Blaise Pascal wrote in the 17th century, “and yet it is itself the greatest of our miseries.”
The central paradox of the machines that have made our lives so much brighter, quicker, longer and healthier is that they cannot teach us how to make the best use of them; the information revolution came without an instruction manual. All the data in the world cannot teach us how to sift through data; images don’t show us how to process images. The only way to do justice to our onscreen lives is by summoning exactly the emotional and moral clarity that can’t be found on any screen.
The child of tomorrow, I realized, may actually be ahead of us, in terms of sensing not what’s new, but what’s essential.”
https://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/01/opinion/sunday/the-joy-of-quiet.html?_r=1
My own observation —- Fight freedom with movement, fire with water, political noisy abrasion with quiet contempt (deprivation of the attention)… Will not blog for a while.
Happy 2012!