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Rewilding your attention
To find truly interesting ideas, step away from the algorithmic feeds of Big Tech.
Recently I read a terrific blog post by CJ Eller where he talks about the value of paying attention to offbeat things.
Eller was joining an online conversation about how people get caught up in the “status and celebrity game” when they’re trying to grow their audience. They become overly obsessed with following — and emulating, and envying— the content of people with massive audiences. The conversation started with this poignant essay by the author Ali Montag; she concludes that rabidly chasing followers endows your writing (and thinking!) with “inescapable mediocrity”. (It also tends to make you miserable, too, she points out).
Then Tom Critchlow joined in, tweeting about Ali’s essay, and he used a very memorable phrase …
“Rewild your attention” — that’s a wonderful way of putting it! (Or as CJ Eller titled his blog post, from which I got my title here: “Rewilding Your Attention”.)
