Michael Harris > Quotes

“we aren’t lonely because we are alone; we are lonely because we have failed in our solitude.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“When we think we're multitasking we're actually multiswitching. That is what the brain is very good at doing - quickly diverting its attention from one place to the next. We think we're being productive. We are, indeed, being busy. But in reality we're simply giving ourselves extra work.”
― Michael Harris

“When we grip our phones and tablets, we’re holding the kind of information resource that governments would have killed for just a generation ago. And is it that experience of everyday information miracles, perhaps, that makes us all feel as though our own opinions are so worth sharing? After all, aren’t we—in an abstracted sense, at least—just as smart as everyone else in the room, as long as we’re sharing the same Wi-Fi connection? And therefore (goes the bullish leap in thinking) aren’t my opinions just as worthy of trumpeting?”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“If solitude feels painful, it's only because we don't know how to be alone.”
― Michael Harris

“At the end of that Roger Ebert essay, he says he decided to force himself to do the reading that he knew, deep down, his brain wanted and needed. When he gave himself the proper literary diet (and found a room in the house where his Wi-Fi connection failed), “I felt a kind of peace. This wasn’t hectic. I wasn’t skittering around here and there. I wasn’t scanning headlines and skimming pages and tweeting links. I was reading. . . . Maybe I can rewire my brain, budge it back a little in the old direction.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Every technology will alienate you from some part of your life. That is its job. Your job is to notice. First notice the difference. And then, every time, choose.”
― Michael Harris

“As the twenty-first century lurches forward, though, we find that love letters—so awkward, so slow, so exhausting to compose—are an endangered species. We forget that romantic connections benefit from solitude nearly as much as the beloved’s company.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“As we embrace a technology’s gifts, we usually fail to consider what they ask from us in return—the subtle, hardly noticeable payments we make in exchange for their marvelous service. We don’t notice, for example, that the gaps in our schedules have disappeared because we’re too busy delighting in the amusements that fill them. We forget the games that childhood boredom forged because boredom itself has been outlawed. Why would we bother to register the end of solitude, of ignorance, of lack? Why would we care that an absence has disappeared?”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Experiment. Live a little. And remember that the fear of absence is the surest sign that absence is direly needed.”
― Michael Harris

“The difference between Before and After is that today we need to safeguard our inner weirdo, seal it off and protect it from being buffeted. Learn an old torch song that nobody knows; read a musty, out-of-print detective novel; photograph a honey-perfect sunset and show it to no one. We may need to build new and stronger weirdo cocoons, in which to entertain our private selves. Beyond the sharing, the commenting, the constant thumbs-upping, beyond all that distracting gilt, there are stranger things waiting to be loved.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“In reality, life outside of orderly institutions like schools, jobs, and prisons is lacking in “gold star” moments; it passes by in a not-so-dignified way, and nobody tells us whether we’re getting it right or wrong. But publish your experience online and an institutional approval system rises to meet it—your photo is “liked,” your status is gilded with commentary. It’s even a way to gain some sense of immortality, since online publishing creates a lasting record, a living scrapbook. This furthers our enjoyable sense of an ordered life. We become consistent, we are approved, we are a known and sanctioned quantity.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Despite the universality of this change, which we’re all buffeted by, there is a single, seemingly small change that I’ll be most sorry about. It will sound meaningless, but: One doesn’t see teenagers staring into space anymore. Gone is the idle mind of the adolescent.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Our best thinkers may also crave solitude because, as Storr notes, “ideas are sensitive plants which wilt if exposed to premature scrutiny.”25”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“If you believe that some opinions are in fact better than others, then you, too, are an elitist of sorts.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Switching our allegiance from one Big Brother to the next cannot purchase independent thought.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Has social media made us socially obese—gorged on constant connection but never properly nourished?”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Our online crowds are so insistent, so omnipresent, that we now must actively elbow out the forces that encroach on solitude’s borders, or else forfeit to them a large portion of our mental landscape.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“nervous hive mentality; it reminds us the self is no monster after all.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“No two generations in history have experienced such a highlighted cognitive dissonance, because never has change occurred at so rapid a pace. Look at the rate of penetration—the amount of time it takes for a new technology to be adopted by fifty million people. Radio took thirty-eight years to reach that mark; the telephone took twenty years; and television took thirteen. More recently, the World Wide Web took four years, Facebook took 3.6, Twitter took three, and the iPad took only two. Google Plus, which nobody even finds useful, took only eighty-eight days to be adopted by fifty million.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Perhaps future generations will hack the system, move at will between storytelling technologies. As for me, I was retreating from the social option. I began taking myself to the water’s edge in order to read—away from the phone and the terrible Cyclops eye of my modem. On the seawall, bundled against wind and propped up with a sweater for a seat, I rediscovered a frame of mind that I was in danger of forgetting—real, trance-like reading that obliterated my anxieties, my fussing daily life.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Our generation seems to be facing a crisis of critique. We want to know what’s best, we want to know where to eat and what movie to see, but we’ve begun to forget that real opinion, real critique, must always come out of an absence of voices—from a singular subjective viewpoint. You”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“We cannot compound the ideas of others into a singular meaning for ourselves unless we’re given a private mental workshop in which to hammer at them. (Will I ever be able to write my book, I worry, if I can’t build such a workshop for myself?) Without daydreams our minds are only parrots—or, worse, computers. Daydreams are the engineers of new worlds.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Until recently, though, there were still moments in the day when the busyness abated and life’s pace decelerated. You would find yourself alone, separated from friends and colleagues, and you would be thrown back on your own resources, your own thoughts. Such interludes could provoke feelings of loneliness and boredom. Yet they also provided opportunities to tap into ideas, perceptions, and emotions inaccessible to the social self.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“Bullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a person’s obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Here’s how a filter bubble works: Since 2009, Google has been anticipating the search results that you’d personally find most interesting and has been promoting those results each time you search, exposing you to a narrower and narrower vision of the universe. In 2013, Google announced that Google Maps would do the same, making it easier to find things Google thinks you’d like and harder to find things you haven’t encountered before. Facebook follows suit, presenting a curated view of your “friends’” activities in your feed. Eventually, the information you’re dealing with absolutely feels more personalized; it confirms your beliefs, your biases, your experiences. And it does this to the detriment of your personal evolution. Personalization—the glorification of your own taste, your own opinion—can be deadly to real learning. Only”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“The daydreamer is like the tree in which she crouches, oblivious to the red-faced plans of industry. It’s understood that if someone were to come along and put her mind “to use,” she would gain little from the interruption.”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World

“It is, however, necessary to combine the two things, solitude and the crowd, and to have recourse to them alternately: the former will make us long for people, the latter for ourselves, and the one will be a cure for the other: our distaste for the crowd will be cured by solitude, our boredom with solitude by the crowd.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“It’s hard to remember what we loved about absence; we never ask for our deprivation back.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“What a lovely thing, to shut up and listen and not broadcast anything back. There’s a certain serenity in it and even a kind of light grace.”
― Michael Harris, The End of Absence: Reclaiming What We've Lost in a World of Constant Connection

“Beauty begins the moment you decide to be yourself. —Coco Chanel”
― Michael Harris, Solitude: In Pursuit of a Singular Life in a Crowded World