The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction

by Matthew B. Crawford

Without the ability to direct our attention where we will, we become more receptive to those who would direct our attention where they will—to the omnipresent purveyors of marshmallows. To the extent that the power of concentration

And in fact what we do, it turns out, is run in such a way that the image of the ball appears to move in a straight line, at constant speed, against the visual background.

The world in which we acquire skill as embodied agents is precisely that world in which we are subject to the heteronomy of things; the hazards of material reality. To pursue the fantasy of escaping heteronomy through abstraction is to give up on skill, and therefore to substitute technology-as-magic for the possibility of real agency.

How we act is not determined in an isolated moment of choice; it is powerfully ordered by how we perceive the situation, how we are attuned to it, and this is very much a function of our previous history of shaping ourselves to the world in a particular way.