Is there a battle to enter our heads?
Yes, there is a dispute over our attention. Today for the economy and politics our attention is the main good.
The perverse thing is that we feel free, with many options.
Freedom is going beyond the options that exist and being able to conquer something that does not exist.
Tell me how to be free.
In the first place, freedom is rejecting what is, not settling for what is given, but transcending it in search of something that does not yet exist. Freedom is not positive.
It is hard.
It is not something that already exists and that I want, it is the effort to reject what is there in order to achieve something else. Freedom is transformation.
Who is going to leave the comfort of the sofa and the remote for a mystery?
It would be necessary to see if this freedom to choose among hundreds of series and information options is as comfortable as it is presented, because then all the studies reveal that the anxiolytic is the most consumed drug.
TRUE.
So that comfort has a lot of suffering and discomfort, because it is the comfort precisely of non-freedom, of life resigned to what there is.
And what's up?
Often a job that you don't like subjected to bad conditions to produce something that you don't see as useful or interesting. Sometimes it is necessary to risk that false comfort in search of that something else.
What other thing?
Desire: what makes your existence worthwhile, that something vibrates in your life. The question of desire in each person's life and in life in common is the essential question that is largely neutralized today.
What do we understand by desire?
It is confused with an object that we lack, something that we want to own; but it is rather a force that sets us in motion.
Where there is desire, there is attention.
It is the heart of Simone Weil's philosophy, the connection to the new technologies of young people is actually a lack of connection, of desire: if we are doing something that makes us vibrate, there is involvement, care, attention.
In this society we are full of obligations and few satisfactions.
It would be interesting to think of a transformation so as not to resign ourselves to a life that is made up of obligations that others have thought for us. In the end it seems that we only have the practice of dissimulation left.
¿…?
Inhabiting two truths, trying to do something else that connects more with our desire than what they ask us to do. But resigning ourselves to a life that others have defined for us seems like a living death to me.
Has it always been this way or do we now have a distortion about control?
Now there is a very strong dispute about what is a desirable life. Capitalism offers us images of desire, it seeks our most intimate adherence, and this is that we buy its idea of happiness.
They are very insistent, it ends up penetrating.
That is why it seems important to me to start from rejection, from not being satisfied with what exists.
And does it have to do with presence?
Yes, because when there is desire and attention we are present in what we do, we are not halfway, thinking about something else.
And if we don't like what we do...
It's not about liking, that's the Facebook phrase: I like it, I don't like it. Many times we don't like desire because it requires effort and condemns us to low moments in any relationship, friendship or work, desire is not always joyful, but it can be full, make sense to me.
Is desire movement?
Yes, and the best way to start is with what doesn't work, what hurts us in life that leads us to be anesthetized by Netflix and so on; we are there because there is something that cannot be pacified, that makes me suffer.
You have to keep track of the question.
Yes: what's wrong with me, why this boredom; they are transforming questions, because pain does not leave us alone.
You speak of an eclipse of attention, not a deficit.
Alexander the Great, the most powerful man of his time, went to meet Diogenes the Cynic to tell him that he admires him very much and that he will grant him any wish, and the philosopher in his barrel only asks him to step aside, that the sun is blocking him .
A rebellious gesture.
The eclipse of attention is this plugging of the light of attention, all those algorithms, protocols, economies that promise us everything, like Alexander the Great, in exchange for us giving them the freedom of attention, in exchange for our passivity.
