thinking about this mind-bending concept from Byung-Chul Han that people alive today have lost a fundamental feature of intellectual life that all humans in history had access to: attentional fasting. normal fasting - by taking away external calories - forces your cells to consume their own worn-out parts and junk proteins. this scarcity-induced "clearing house" process makes the organism stronger. similarly, "attentional fasting" is when you take away external stimulation and force your brain to stimulate itself with its previously acquired set of memories, experiences, and ideas. in this process, you: - cast out mental debris - digest events which were previously only half-chewed - recombine disparate memories into a coherent Life Story before 24/7 algorithmic "for-you" pages, humans were "attention fasting" for long stretches of time. their minds, deprived of stimulation, turned inward to look for it...and in the process, unlocked a deeper layer of neurochemical cohesion. a "clearing house" process induced by boredom. Byung-Chul Han calls this process "the autophagy of the soul," autophagy being the process via which the cells turn inward for energy and consume their own damaged elements. the internet led to a total extinction of boredom, and that's why we have no attentional fasting today. your mind is OVERFED with stimulating media to the point where it completely loses the desire (and the ability) to look inward. it turns out that when boredom dies, so does self-reflection. and when self-reflection dies, so does the self. the environment is not destiny. free-will is real. while the "attentional fasts" which were naturally embedded into daily life are now gone, we can bring them back by purposefully and ritualistically cutting our own access to the firehose of contextless stimulation that is the internet. thank you for reading. i appreciate your "attention" ;)