There's a great line by Albert Camus.
He says, life should be lived to the point of tears.
In other words, we should strive to be moved, to be transported,
to be shaken.
We all want to be touched by something
greater than ourselves.
That's a difficult thing to do.
And so I've become really obsessed
with the idea of experience design, which is basically
hacking experience, hacking subjectivity.
Now, what is experience?
What is first person subjectivity?
Well, in a way, it's that evanescent flux
of sensation and perception that is, in a way, all we have
and all we are.
It's the multi-dimensional matrix
of first person experience unfolding moment by moment.
It's the voice in our head that lets us know that we exist.
So how can we inform, how can we script that narrative?
How can we be the director of our own movies, so to speak?
And it turns out that the trick is attention.
To hack experience, you've got to hack attention.
In a fantastic article by Diana Slattery
says that what is required is the capture and control
of attention to create a state of deep immersion,
of deep absorption.
And this kind of immersion is the prerequisite
for any kind of interpersonal persuasion, transformation,
or education to take place.
In other words, any kind of phase change in consciousness,
any kind of true inspiration, transformation, catharsis
requires this deep immersion, this state
of focused attention.
And again, that being the key to experience,
that being the key to scripting subjectivity, the narrative
of your own life, and that seems to be ultimately
the key to happiness, the meaning of our lives,
this kind of deconstructing of our consciousness
and tweaking our perceptual apparatus.
To kind of engineer a kind of neural nirvana,
to trade in real virtualities, to trade in subjectivities,
that is what it means to be human.
And that is what we are increasingly becoming masters
at doing, at distilling, at creating, and I love that.