Your Mind Is Being Fracked
“The whole idea that ordinary people would concern themselves with their fitness is something that’s emerged over the last 40 years. It’s staggering to consider the scale of the collective awareness of our physical well-being. Now, does that mean that health itself is a new idea? No, people have been worried about their health since forever. But the specific activation of fitness, that’s a relatively new thing, and it’s really changed in our lifetimes. And I’m proposing to you that that’s going to happen again. Over the next 40 years, a collective recognition that our wellness in our attentional lives, our hygiene and health and our attention, is going to be constitutive of our experience of being. This is what’s going to happen. It’s going to reshape education, which, as you’ve signaled, needs to be for and about attention. That’s what it needs to teach. And it’s going to transform our other ways of being together.”
I found this entire podcast really interesting and could've pulled a lot of different quotes from it, but settled on this one becuase it resonated so much when Burnet pointed it out. The way in which we collectively change and come to think about things differently takes time, but I do think the way we're thinking about attention is changing. The little devices we carry with us that are constantly demanding our attention, if you let them, are a big reason why. As my life has changed over the past few years, I've become very aware of attention and thought about it a lot and this conversation is well worth the listen if you're interested in the topic as well.