23 Ocak 2022, Pazar
saat: 20:26
Having read Followers and graded students' learning plans within the same week, I started thinking about how the internet, social media, modern tech etc etc is deliberately designed to fracture and fragment and disrupt flow states. Completely unoriginal, perhaps, but maybe that is one reason (out of one million reasons) why my beloved ducklings are so self-absorbed and unhappy.
Additional stray thoughts for later:
*flow states are states where you are almost entirely unconscious of yourself as a self (ie so immersed you are not thinking at all of your emotions, reactions, preferences, ideas);
*internet disrupts flow by fracturing attention, focus (and making it increasingly difficult for us to sustain focus for long periods of time);
*internet keeps us intensely focused on the self (our emotions, reactions, preferences, ideas, etc);
*we seem to be happiest and least fretful when we are regularly immersed in activities that decenter the self or ‘quiet’ the noise of the self.
I am thinking a lot lately about the consuming joy of being immersed in a challenging long-term project, largely thanks to A's newfound wisdom and self-help discoveries and my conversations with dear friend and collaborator M on our papers on contemporary insurgencies. However, I do not seem to be able to articulate the degree of joy and fulfillment and subjective well-being i derive from sustained work on a just-difficult-enough thing. My discussion of this concept last week drew only blank stares from my capstone seminar students, who knowingly or unknowingly just signed up a similarly difficult task.
Instead, they had discovered that the two primary obstacles to improvement were (1) starting, and (2) continuing.
Sigh. It is going to be a long semester.
