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Chasing Our Elusive Attention | Meghan O’Gieblyn | The New York Review of Books

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As AI erodes our attention spans and expressiveness, philosophers like Simone Weil and Arthur Schopenhauer offer profound insights on what it means to be an individual.

It was during the joyless middle years of the first Trump era that I started attending Mass. We were living in the Rogers Street house, in a neighborhood cordoned off from the rest of our college town by the intersection of the lake and the river, which created something of a microclimate. In the winter thick fog banks rolled in each morning from the lake, and in the summers the humidity was almost tropical: monstrous plantain lilies extended over the sidewalks, mosquitoes loitered, blood drunk, in the shade, and Persian ivy grew so prolifically across the windows that our apartment was…

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