Your Body is Inside of a Mountain
Muscle memory in the scroll. Phantom vibrations like ghost limbs.
What does it mean to try to hold a thought when everything wants to split it into shards too small to glue together? My creativity breaks apart mid-sentence, always, because some notification pulls me under. I take screenshots of things I'll never look at again. Blue light shines in my face while I should be sleeping. The violence isn't in the phone but in what it represents: capitalism's endless desire for our partial attention.
I watched a video essay recently on what killed the movie start and learned that Netflix tells screenwriters to make characters "announce what they're doing" so viewers who have the program on in the background can follow along (Wirebeat)The thought disturbs me deeply: entertainment designed to be half-watched, to accommodate our shrapnel of attention. The idea of an art form itself warping to our minds as a way to solidify profit scares me. I think about it constantly.
I swing between obsession & complete avoidance: days where I can't put it down followed by a kind of digital fast—starving myself of connection. That text from last week sits unanswered, a boulder of anxiety that I carry in my pocket. The notification number grows. Red circles like tiny wounds on my home screen. And then, really, the ideas I used to have—the ones that would float up in quiet moments—have stopped visiting, avoidance or not.
My mind once made connections between unexpected things. Now it craves the familiar pull-to-refresh: the rhythm of it. Creativity requires space, requires boredom, requires the kind of emptiness that we've been trained to find unbearable.
I want to curb both my digital attachment & my frantic avoidance but find myself unsure how to exist in the middle. How does one use this specific tool without becoming a tool themself? I know that making things—real things—requires sustained attention, but my attention has been parceled out, sold off in tiny chunks.
Johann Hari said "your attention didn't collapse. it was stolen." and I feel this. God, I FEEL it.
Attention as the new oil. extracted, refined, sold back to us as content in an algorithm. I want deep focus as an act of rebellion and a way back to my creative self—not a productivity hack but refusal to be monetized.
Did you know “they” store documents in abandoned mines? Deep beneath our feet where humans once extracted resources from earth, corporations now store billions of paper files. The poetry crushes me with its weight—we've become the mines now, our attention the resource being extracted. Old information sleeps inside mountains, new ideas struggle to surface through the constant distraction of our screens. My attention is waiting to be recovered, rather than mined. Does that make sense?
My friend told me when he worked in those mines, he would sit in his car, head between knees, trying to breathe through the knowledge that his body was inside a mountain. I feel that claustrophobia when I reach for my phone without thinking, when I avoid important messages, when I can't remember the last time I made something without checking a notification halfway through. Mining our creativity requires we venture into that darkness, away from the constant noise, reclaiming what's been buried: the panic of disconnection giving way, eventually, to air.
I love you.
Liah