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Our Smooth Brains Need A Reboot

Our Smooth Brains Need A Reboot

Plus, Native representation and the democraticizing potential of slow television.

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Anna Haines
May 23, 2021
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Last week, I got into our cultural obsession with dissociation and numbing out. Ottessa Moshfegh captures the feeling nicely in My Year of Rest and Relaxation,

“Every time I lay down in that supply closet I went straight into black emptiness, an invite space of nothingness. I was neither scared nor elated in that space. I had no visions. I had no ideas. No insane conversation with myself. It was peaceful. There was no work to do, nothing I had to counteract or compensate for because there was nothing at all, period. And yet I was aware of the nothingness. I was awake in the sleep, somehow. I felt good. Almost happy.”

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