It’s becoming harder and harder to resist the attention economy, and it’s also becoming more and more urgent that we figure out how to do so.
I can feel it. Honestly, everyone can feel it. Every body is feeling it. Now, whether or not we know how to understand those feelings and explain them to ourselves and each other in order to try and make the necessary changes is another story.
But even when it comes to that, honestly, I feel more hopeful than hopeless. More comforted than abandoned. And I suppose that’s because everywhere you look, you see what you’re looking for.
That’s the only way any of this works.
And there are dissociated, navigated-by-pain (unconsciously), motivated-by-money (consciously) human beings deciding on behalf of millions of other human beings what we should all look at; what to see, and therefore — what to believe reality is.
We thought this tech was connecting us with the world as it is but, as it turns out, it’s connecting us with the world as a precious few want it to be. Or, at least, want it to seem like so that they can extract more of our attention by forcibly cultivating specific somatic states in our bodies.
I feel it whenever I’ve been spending too much time scrolling, I’m not immune to it. I have a body just like everyone else.
But I’ve learned to notice the subtleties of what she is saying to me, and experience those sensations as the beginning of a conversation, not the end of a story.
Or a state to surrender to.
And, most importantly, I don’t accept dysregulation as reality.
Because I know there is a better way to feel in my body, and I assume the responsibility for getting back to it.
We can and should spend time acknowledging and discussing the injustices and inequities of the structures of the world, and — that cannot be the full measure of our attention if we want to be well.
The most basic, fundamental fact and truth is actually that, at any given moment, there is always more going right in the world than wrong.
We have simply allowed ourselves to become addictively trained into only seeing what is wrong, feels wrong, because for so many of us, a dysregulated, uncomfortable, foreboding sense of unease in our physicality is the most familiar feeling…