If you sit with emptiness for a while, you’ll notice that, at first, your mind continues to tell the story it always tells. It could be the one about work or the one about a friend or the one about what you should eat. You might even flick through all of them and then some.
Eventually, however, you’ll realize that you are telling yourself a story. Most of your time is spent fighting your inner silence.
We’re discussing whether technology fosters a culture of escapism, but if we’re honest, that’s not something we needed devices for. A desire to escape our psyche is built into the human experience. It’s a feature we can’t turn off.
We like to say we “think,” but, mostly, we’re just letting whatever thoughts happen to appear wash over us. To some extent, this too is human. You can’t constantly squeeze your gray matter with existential questions. “Who am I? Why am I? What is the meaning of life?” Too many rounds on the Ferris wheel of purpose will drive you insane. At the same time, if we immediately shut these questions down every time they creep up, we stand to lose our minds just the same.
Faced with these two, equally terrifying ends of the thinking-escaping spectrum, our brains do something fascinating: They stop dead in the middle — and then collapse upon themselves.
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