I don’t subscribe to many newsletters but Dense Discovery is one that I subscribe to and enjoy reading. From the most recent Dense Discovery newsletter:
Tech companies have spent years perfecting their image as enablers – as tools that promise to amplify our capabilities. The pitch has always been ‘convenience’ and ‘efficiency’. But today, we’re coming to terms with the fact that we’re learning less, thinking less, tolerating less. We increasingly behave more like toddlers expecting machines to handle life’s unpleasantness.
Writing in The Cut (free archived version), Kathryn Jezer-Morton argues that tech companies are succeeding in making us think of life itself as inconvenient – something to continuously escape from into digital padded rooms of predictive algorithms and single-tap commands.
Reading is boring; talking is awkward; moving is tiring; leaving the house is daunting. Thinking is hard. Interacting with strangers is scary. Risking an unexpected reaction from someone isn’t worth it. Speaking at all — overrated. These are all frictions that we can now eliminate, easily, and we do.
Once we’ve adopted these habits of escape, the act of returning to unmediated existence feels insufferable.
“We become exactly like toddlers in the five minutes after the iPad is taken away: The dullness and labour of embodied existence is unbearable.”
The whole article is worth reading: link to free archived version. Friction is part of everyday life. It is normal. Think of friction as gravity. Earth gravity gives our bones a mass and strength that someone from another planet might not have. They might not be able to stand up or even breathe on Earth. Friction is gravity for the mind. We should be very selective about which friction we remove. Remove too much and perhaps we all become demanding toddlers.
Reading is boring — until it rewires your attention span. I see it all the time … every class I teach.