We're drawn to the comfort of what we know, but it's paradoxical. Any definition of freedom and awakening would require not being in a loop. We use to say technology high jacks your mind. High jacking is a narrowing and a repetition and a non freedom. It also reminds me, psychologically, lookingo the psychoanalytic tradition, where you keep looping around the same behavior Sor the same patterns of bad relationships or unhealthy things. And i find that fastininteas thinking about lessons for how do you design technology to avoid loops.
When you’re gripped by anxiety, fear, grief or dread, how do you escape? It can happen in the span of a few breaths, according to meditation experts Jack Kornfield and Trudy Goodman. They have helped thousands of people find their way out of a mental loop, by moving deeper into it. It's a journey inward that reveals an important lesson for the architects of the attention economy: you cannot begin to build humane technology for billions of users, until you pay careful attention to the course of your own wayward thoughts.