Media Quotes
“Falling for people through screens is dangerous. It’s fiction. It’s stranger than fiction. We’re not falling for people, but rather the idea of them we’ve fabricated in our own heads. It’s like falling in love with Lady Brett Ashley in Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. After I read Hemingway, I fell in love with that women. But, I can’t take her to dinner because she doesn’t exist. And, that is our generation’s curse, falling for the pretty fiction behind glowing screens that we create in our own heads. At times, I wonder if our imaginations will be the death of any chance we have at love.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 108)
“The moment we find ourselves feeling bored, sad, anxious or complacent we reach for our phones, a prescription or a self-help book. We’ve become terrified of feeling anything negative. I’m not going to point a finger, but if someone held a gun to my head and told me to point a finger, I’d point to Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. I’d say we were due. I’d say that when you have an entire society overly focused on sharing the upper 1% of their days in a virtual world 24/7, we were bound to create some deep-rooted fears and insecurities around negative emotions. Now, we are forced to reap what we have sown.”
Cole Schafer (January Black), One Minute, Please? (Page 64)
“I remember the day quite clearly. My brother and I were in the front yard playing basketball, as we often did after school. My father drove up on his motorcycle, coming back from work, and said, ‘I have some good news guys. I have decided to order cable TV.’ Our life changed. We went from about 4 stations to over 60 stations overnight. In the following months, my brother and I played basketball together less often, and as more kids in the neighborhood also got cable, there were fewer evenings when we were all out playing hide–and–go–seek in the neighborhood. I learned that every new offering both gives something … and also takes away.”
Soren Gordhamer
“What’s required is the will to resist the urge to consume more and more since that strategy can only lead to the feeling of having more experiences left to consume.”
Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks
“Ultimately, nobody can manage our attention but ourselves. We can get mad at Netflix or Spotify or the Senate. But ultimately, these systems are loose reflections of our own attention habits shining back at us. Change our attention, change the systems. There’s an old saying that people “vote with their feet.” Well, today you need to vote with your eyeballs and mouse clicks. Don’t watch the next episode of that poorly written piece of garbage that keeps teasing you with characters almost dying. Don’t listen to the next half-assed album with 27 different two-minute tracks. Don’t click on clickbait. Don’t mindlessly scroll through TikTok and YouTube, rewarding people for attention-grabbing stunts. And don’t watch or respond to politicians and pundits who try to blather on and on about pet issues but never actually get anything done.”
Mark Manson, Blog
