10:16AM
I'm off to Canada this week, to the Laurentides woods two hours north of Montreal. Staying in a cabin to work on some things I've been saving up for the better part of a decade.
This is a new start for the writing retreats I used to do a few years back, going off to some remote place with a stack of notebooks, and maybe a guitar and a USB mic.
By the time I leave, the place is usually festooned with reams of stickie notes and sheets of paper taped across the walls. A shrine to unbridled creativity and the plasticity of the human brain.
It's glorious.
(And it's also because I can't afford to go to Yaddo.)
I try not to log into the socials more than once a day on these retreats. I try to let my attention slowly re-center in the isolation and quietude. It usually works. But sometimes it takes a couple days to detox from all the attention residue brought from the outside.
It's hard not to type "fa..." into that browser as soon as I crack open the machine. Hard not to flip open the iPhone to see who liked my latest insta. I mean, fuck, I did it just now.
But this is where we are.
Micro-dosing dopamine in 1000 daily hits.
What was once a place to keep up with the in-laws on the opposite coast and join friend groups of people who like the same weird music you do is now all bouncing tits, finance hacks, and rage baiters in fifteen-second blipverts.
The promise of human connection through digital means has been taken over by the same high school dynamics of bottom feeders seeking attention in the popular spaces by buying them or taking over by brute force.
Rope-a-dopamine.
I wake up to 1000 notifications I don't need to see. 1000 new AI-squirted tracks I don't need to hear. And a dozen productivity gurus promising they can optimize my life in the middle of it all if I just hand over my coveted email address.
It gets harder to keep your eye on the ball.
And that's how they gitcha.
The past is a foreign country and attention is the new currency.
I hope my plane doesn't fall out of the sky.
(But if it does, think of all the money we saved.)
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What I’m reading: Man and His Symbols (Carl Jung)
What I'm listening to: Where Things Are Hollow: No Tomorrow (Pye Corner Audio)
❤️