The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming An Individual - Matthew Crawford

Have we lost the ability to discriminate between the things worthy of attention and the things that are not important? Come join Triangle Heterodox Club to discuss Matthew Crawford's The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction. This is was one of our survey picks!

"We often complain about our fractured mental lives and feel beset by outside forces that destroy our focus and disrupt our peace of mind. Any defense against this, Crawford argues, requires that we reckon with the way attention sculpts the self.

Crawford investigates the intense focus of ice hockey players and short-order chefs, the quasi-autistic behavior of gambling addicts, the familiar hassles of daily life, and the deep, slow craft of building pipe organs. He shows that our current crisis of attention is only superficially the result of digital technology, and becomes more comprehensible when understood as the coming to fruition of certain assumptions at the root of Western culture that are profoundly at odds with human nature."

Matthew Crawford is a researcher at the Institute for Advanced Studies at UVA, whose previous book Shopcraft as Soulcraft argued for the importance of manual work.

For those who read our previous reading, Why Liberalism Failed, consider how the arguments Deneen made about choice as the thing to maximize, technology liberating us from constraints, and tradition relate to Crawford's concerns over the world losing a kind of friction and constraint he believes is necessary to attention and human flourishing.

No One Asks to be Buried with Their IPad
https://archive.ph/E4iKV

Example of the Role of Friction for Meaning and Enjoyment in Games
https://www.gamedeveloper.com/design/did-you-know-the-car-in-pacific-drive-has-a-soul-

LA Times Review (with some critical context)
https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/are-you-out-of-your-mind/