The Walking Brain

جِهَنِيَر

[luxe-pauvre]

In order to do anything that matters, we must first be able to give attention to the things that matter. It’s my firm conviction, now more than ever, that the degree to which we are able and willing to struggle for ownership of our attention is the degree to which we are free.

James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

[mindofserenity]

Remember dears,

Your hearts belongs not to this world, but to Allah ﷺ

[thenordroom]

[areasonablydressedwoman]

[kushandwizdom]

Go.

[luxe-pauvre]

We experience our identities as stories, according to a line of thought known as “narrative identity theory”. In his book Neuroethics, Neil Levy writes that both synchronic and diachronic unity are essential for helping us maintain the integrity of these stories: “We want to live a life that expresses our central values, and we want that life to make narrative sense: we want to be able to tell ourselves and others a story, which explains where we come from, how we got to where we are, and where we are going”. When we lose the story of our identities, whether on individual or collective levels, it undermines what we could call the “starlight” of our attention, or our ability to navigate “by the stars” of our higher values or “being goals”. When our “starlight” is obscured, it makes it harder to “be who we want to be”. We feel the self fragmenting and dividing, resulting in an existential sort of distraction. William James wrote that “our self-feeling in this world depends entirely on what we back ourselves to be and do”. When we become aware that our actual habits are in dissonance with our desired values, this self-feeling often feels like a challenge to, if not the loss of our identities.

James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy 

[humansofnewyork]

“After my father graduated from medical school, he decided to open an office in a small agricultural community called Coalinga.  Both his parents were Mexican immigrants, and he wanted to give back by working in an underserved community.  There’s 16,000 people in that town, these are the people who pick the lettuce, and the cotton, and the fruit.  I used to love visiting him at work when I was a kid.  I can picture him wearing a lab coat, holding a chart, and people thanking him.  They’d bring him bags of almonds and onions.  He’d keep saying: ‘De nada, de nada, de nada.’  Dad always looks at the ground when he’s being thanked. That’s how humble he is.  He went to Stanford, but he doesn’t even hang his graduation certificate in his office.  When he comes home from work, he’ll do the jobs around the house that nobody else wants to do.  He cleans out the garage.  He washes the dishes.  He doesn’t drive an expensive car.  He doesn’t wear fancy clothes.  His favorite things to wear are T-shirts and sweatshirts from our school athletic teams.  Both my sister and I played collegiate sports.  And he was our biggest fan. Every weekend for eight years, he’d drive to Los Angeles to watch us compete.  And my sister was a rower, so those races were only eight minutes long.  Dad would wake up at 3 AM, drive almost five hours, watch an eight minute race, then drive all the way home.  And then wash the dishes.” #quarantinestories

[luxe-pauvre]

So the main risk information abundance poses is not that one’s attention will be occupied or used up by information, as though it were some finite, quantifiable resource, but rather that one will lose control over one’s attentional processes. In other words, the problems in Tetris arise not when you stack a brick in the wrong place (though this can contribute to problems down the line), but rather then you lose control of the ability to direct, rotate, and stack the bricks altogether. It’s precisely in this area - the keeping or losing of control - where the personal and political challenges of information abundance, and attention scarcity, arise. To say that information abundance produces attention scarcity means that the problems we encounter are now less about breaking down barriers between us and information, and more about putting barriers in place. It means that the really important sort of censorship we ought to worry about pertains less to the management of information, and more to the management of attention. Here’s the problem: Many of the systems we’ve developed to help guide our lives - system like news, education, law, advertising, and so on - arose in, and still assume, an environment of information scarcity. We’re only just beginning to explore what these systems should do for us, and how they need to change, in this new milieu of information abundance. We call our time the Information Age, but I think a better name for it would be the “Age of Attention”. In the Age of Attention, digital technologies are uniquely poised to help us grapple with the new challenges we face - challenges which are, fundamentally, challenges of self-regulation.

James Williams, Stand Out of Our Light: Freedom and Resistance in the Attention Economy

[ohnoresources]

[luxe-pauvre]

A big secret is that you can bend the world to your will a surprising percentage of the time—most people don’t even try, and just accept that things are the way that they are. People have an enormous capacity to make things happen. A combination of self-doubt, giving up too early, and not pushing hard enough prevents most people from ever reaching anywhere near their potential. Ask for what you want. You usually won’t get it, and often the rejection will be painful. But when this works, it works surprisingly well. Almost always, the people who say “I am going to keep going until this works, and no matter what the challenges are I’m going to figure them out”, and mean it, go on to succeed. They are persistent long enough to give themselves a chance for luck to go their way.

Sam Altman, How To Be Successful 

[madame-verte]

“I want to be haunted. I want autumn, flowers bathed in blood, the sort of intensity that weighs me down against my own will.”

— Julia de Burgos, from Song of the Simple Truth: Poems, Autumn Psalm.

[areasonablydressedwoman]

[luxe-pauvre]

“What it really means is ‘be more yourself,’ where ‘yourself’ is a consistent and recognizable pattern of habits, desires and drives that can be more easily advertised to and appropriated, like units of capital,” she writes. “Ultimately, I argue for a view of the self and of identity that is the opposite of the personal brand: an unstable, shapeshifting thing determined by interactions with others and with different kinds of places.” In other words, to regard yourself as nebulous, amorphous, a product of and contributor to your environment. To neither lean in nor out, but to take a look around.

Maddie Crum, Do… Nothing? (via luxe-pauvre)

[fruityogurt]

[goodbyeeveryonee-deactivated202]

The law of attraction is so real. I swear, once you establish yourself as powerful, or strong, or independent, or business minded, people like you will flock your way out of nowhere. And it’s just the universe reminding you that when you can see something beautiful in yourself, others can see it and admire it as well.

[2gris]

[gunseli]