On Immersion - by Laurel Schwulst - Another Day in the Dome

I was curious about these amazing parts of life that feel so meaningful — like portals, where time and space take on a totally different, enchanted feeling. I remember first writing this list to expand on the way Jenny Odell, in her book How to Do Nothing, put it: I stopped looking at my phone because I was looking at something else, something so absorbing that I couldn’t run away. That’s the other thing that happens when you fall in love. Friends complain that you’re not present or that you have your head in the clouds; companies dealing in the attention economy might say the same thing about me, with my head lost in the trees. Immersion is defined as “an absorbing involvement.” It certainly has liquid qualities. And apparently an “immerser” is someone who baptizes another person, using water. * It might be useful to begin with a regular universal immersive experience: sleep. For something so everyday, it’s amazing that sleep is so mysterious. Like outer space, like the deep ocean. Th

I was curious about these amazing parts of life that feel so meaningful — like portals, where time and space take on a totally different, enchanted feeling. I remember first writing this list to expand on the way Jenny Odell, in her book How to Do Nothing, put it: I stopped looking at my phone because I was looking at something else, something so absorbing that I couldn’t run away. That’s the other thing that happens when you fall in love. Friends complain that you’re not present or that you have your head in the clouds; companies dealing in the attention economy might say the same thing about