Member-only story
My flesh crawls at the possibility of free, unstructured time. I have been brain-damaged; essentially, undeniably. I can’t create my own points of focus; my own activities, goals. As much as I complain about work, I need it — I don’t know what to do without it. I suspect that it is the same for many (most? all?) Americans. We sacrifice our surplus time because we don’t know what to do with it. And why don’t we know what to do with it? Because we have been so thoroughly entertained — are so used to be thoroughly entertained — that we don’t know how to ‘entertain ourselves’: how to think, feel, be. ‘Netflix and chill’ is really a dystopian phrase; a dystopian concept. The mindfulness movement is really a roundabout way of saying that our brains suck; that we suck — that we can’t spend an afternoon in solitude, without technology. And fair enough. We can’t. Given a day off, we’re typing ungrammatical sentences on our phones to people we at best half-care about; ordering food to our door because we don’t know how to cook; masturbating to porn because we don’t know how to seduce.
18/19th century: industrialization of nature.
19/20th century: industrialization of the body.
20/21st century: industrialization of the mind.
