mills: Internet Stupidity
“The relationship between attention, awareness, moral decency, and happiness seems fairly straightforward to me, yet I sometimes feel that this knowledge has little or no impact on my behavior; sitting for hours reading what I don’t care to read, detesting commenters whose lives I might imagine and whose transgressions I might therefore forgive, scanning stream after addictive stream of semi-social expressions, ignoring Abby, my dogs, my life, the city around me, the sky, the clouds, my own heart, the need to sleep, the stacks of books I haven’t touched, and the fact that I remember little of what I read last week, I am aware of some malfunction in my mind: I have become thoughtless, superficial, other-directed. And as I have grown older, it is less the stupidity that upsets me than my lost attention, my collapsing awareness, my shallow morality, predicated on judgement rather than forgiveness, and the sense that what stands between me and greater happiness iswill alone, the very will which is being disabled, distracted moment by distracted moment, as I check Facebook on my iPhone while someone I ostensibly care for speaks to me.” - mills
