"Blessedly Disconnected"

Fast Company excerpts Richard Watson's new book, Future Minds: How the Digital Age Is Changing Our Minds, Why This Matters and What We Can Do About It:

If we are very busy there is every chance that our brain will not listen to reason and we will end up supporting things that are dangerous or ideas that seek to do us, or others, harm. Fakery, insincerity, and big fat lies all prosper in a world that is too busy or distracted.

Put bluntly, if we are all too busy and self-absorbed to notice or challenge things, then evil will win by default. Or, as Milan Kundera put it: "The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Or of reason against Palinism.

(Photo via Regine of The Open, by Mattia Casalegno, "a mask that wraps around your face and forces you to smell a fresh patch of grass and listen to your own breath.")