Our Smooth Brains Need A Reboot
Plus, Native representation and the democraticizing potential of slow television.
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.”