I think the thing that I feel troubled by and despair about is, look, now I'm going to sound

like the beginning of an Atlantic article, but like when you're on the subway and you look

around, maybe your phone's in your pocket and you're reading a book or a magazine or something

and you look around and you see like every single person is just flipping from video to video

to video on their phones.

It does feel kind of like dystopian to me.

And that's because, of course,

basically the most powerful and profitable companies in this country,

what they are doing in order to make all that money

is capturing people's attention and distracting them from like whatever

might be like real and complicated and true about life and so i think it's possible that like what is

attracting certain people to spiritual searching is a sense that is 100% true,

which is that like the world that is being born right now is one which wants people to be

stupid, wants them to be distracted, wants them to be like entirely absorbed by absolute bullshit at all times.

It is a cause of suffering, but it also assuages suffering in the sense that like,

as long as you have something to watch, as long as you have something to flip through

in every moment of boredom, then like life can just be filled up with those moments of mild, half-focused entertainment.

And that seems to be like the whole project of like the culture industry right now is to

lubricate the passing of time, to give people an alternative to living inside their own heads, just to assuage the natural

kind of questioning that takes place when you're left alone with yourself. You know, I am sleepwalking

through my own life and I'm incapable, perhaps. I mean, this is the thing that our peers complain about is like, I'm sleepwalking through my own life, and I'm incapable, perhaps.

I mean, this is the thing that our peers complain about is like, I'm incapable of experiences

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