Slowing down makes reality vivid, strange, and hot.
Dopamine is often portrayed as a pleasure chemical, but it isn’t really about pleasure so much as the expectation that pleasure will occur soon.
A stress hormone like cortisol, on the other hand, has a half-life of 60–90 minutes and so can take up to 6 hours to fully clear out after the onset of an acute stressor.
The more time the different systems of the body have to synchronize with each other, and the deeper the experience gets.
When we let our attention linger on something, our bodily systems synchronize and feed each other stimuli in an escalatory loop that restructures our attentional field.
If you focus on your anxiety, the anxiety can begin to loop on itself until you hyperventilate and get tunnel vision and become filled with nightmarish thoughts and feelings—a panic attack.
If you learn to pay sustained attention to your happiness, the pleasant sensation will loop on itself until it explodes and pulls you into a series of almost hallucinogenic states, ending in cessation, where your consciousness lets go and you disappear for a while. This takes practice. The practice is called jhanas, and it is sometimes described as the inverse of a panic attack.
The fact that we can enter fundamentally different, and often exhilarating, states of mind by learning how to sustain our attention is fascinating.
I realized that good art—at least the art I am spontaneously drawn to—has little to do with communication. Instead, it is about crafting patterns of information that, if you feed them sustained attention, will begin to structure your attentional field in interesting ways. Art is guided meditation. The point isn’t the words, but what happens to your mind when you attend to those words (or images, or sounds). There is nothing there to understand; it is just something to experience, like sex. But the experiences can be very deep and, sometimes, transformative.
When you think from first principles about what generative AI can do, and what jobs it can replace, it’s the kind of things that young college grads have done in white-collar firms.
Young workers aged 22–25 in “highly AI-exposed” jobs, such as software developers and customer service agents, experienced a 13 percent decline in employment since the advent of ChatGPT.