meditations on a snail
Today marks the congressional removal of Tiktok from the U.S. market. I welcome this change; I regard short-form content as deleterious to the human attention span, not to mention the negative effects on mental health and political stability that algorithmically generated content is known to produce.
Attention is our most precious resource. I have just finished reading the book "The Sound of a Wild Snail Eating" by Elisabeth Tova Bailey, written by a patient bedridden by long-term illness, who finds companionship in a wild snail that she houses in a terrarium at her bedside. Amidst chronic fatigue, watching the snail becomes her primary form of recreation and a respite from missing the human world her illness prevents her from rejoining.
In her close proximity to this animal, the author became the first person to observe a snail hatching its eggs. Had she possessed the fractured attention span that short-form content so often leads to, she could never have made this contribution to science or written this long-form poem to her snail. Attention, curiosity, and sustained effort over time are what have enabled every scientific breakthrough and every creative accomplishment of our species. If we allow our attention spans to diminish and be hijacked – as I, too, often feel myself succumbing to in this world of addiction and distraction that we live in – we lose the fundamental ability to think deeply, and ultimately, to create.