Existence is crushingly hard. It’s very tempting to step off its road, to avoid living one’s life. One has to work hard to make sure to go through existence, not around it. It’s a terrifying reality that you can end up, almost as if by accident, not having lived your given life. At its harshest, and most literally brutal, it can be taken from you by the appalling carceral state, by systemic racism, by the endless crimes of inequality—by the theft of opportunity. But it can also be taken from you minute by minute by the shortcuts that everything you encounter invites you to take—to keep up, to do more within less time, to trade in wisdom, or even knowledge, for information. Our ever-shortening attention span craving its quick satisfactions—which affects whatever creative act might even be attempted, curtailing it before it even finds deep water—is the most powerful tool of the surveillance capitalist state, or whatever you want to call this enmeshment of powerful interests using our desire for instant access to enrich itself.