ExerciseProposed · Meditation, after Pascal's analysis of divertissement
Staying quietly in a room
described, without blaming us for it, what throws us into : we do not know how to stay quietly in a room, because rest leaves us facing our own condition, and the endless feed is the perfected form of that flight. This exercise does not claim to be a remedy Pascal prescribed: it is a simple meditation, offered to you to feel what he saw, and then to relearn the attention the feed scatters. Its aim is to hold a quarter-hour with nothing, to watch the urge to flee and let it pass; its effect, over time, is to recover a presence to oneself that no longer depends on a screen.
Put this practice to work
The step-by-step routine, with its variants for your position, comes with a Premium account: every practice, for life.
Discover the Premium accountEnacts
- Relation to technology · Techno-criticism
- Attention and diversion · Recollection
Appears in
- Reclaiming attention — Faced with devices designed to capture it, can we really reclaim our attention by working at it, withdrawing, fasting from the feed, returning to the present, or do such techniques only paper over a trouble far larger than us?