“On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience: a writer who posted a take, a celebrity who announced a project, a pretty girl just trying to live her life, that anon who said something afflictive. When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing.”
“That was a terrible idea. As I’ve written before on this subject, people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either. From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality.”
“Boredom lurks around every corner in our lives. I’ve come to view it, specifically its avoidance, as the silent engine of modern life. Attention, where we put our conscious thoughts in any given moment, is the substance of life. We are painfully aware of the constant claims on our attention—the buzz and zap of the phone and push notifications and texts and little red circles that alert us that there’s more to pay attention to that we haven’t even gotten to yet.”
“Under this assault, it’s easy to feel that we’re trapped in an age that leaves no space for us to simply sit and think. But it’s worth noting that as much as the current forms of attention capitalism exist to take our attention, there is some very deep part of us that wants it taken.”
• An essay on what monks can teach us about attention.
“One uncomfortable explanation for why so many aspects of modern life corrode our attention is that they do not merit it. The problem for those of us who don’t live in monasteries but hope to make good use of our days is figuring out what might.”
“Much of the day-to-day thinking involved in creative work is simply lost, like sand castles in the tide. Ephemerality can actually be useful in low-fidelity thought, but it’s simply an accidental property in many cases. We should do our serious thinking in the form of Evergreen notes so that the thinking accumulates.
Leaps of insight emerge from prior thought. So where does that thought happen? It could happen in your head, or in a series of fleeting sketches in the pages of your notebook, but Knowledge work should accrete, and those mechanisms are awfully lossy.”
• An article about how music has become structurally simpler over time.
“The results highlight that, in Jazz and Classical music, more popular songs are the ones having lower density, i.e. lower number of transitions between notes. We find a similar pattern for mean entropy, where all genres exhibit negative correlations.”
“For what regards reciprocity and efficiency, we observe exactly opposite patterns. In fact, the former shows positive correlations with popularity, while the latter has negative correlations.”
“Observed together, the results point to an inverse relationship between popularity and musical complexity. Notably, this holds especially in Jazz and Classical music, which have been proven to show greater complexity compared to the other genres.”
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