My Distraction Sickness
Image by Screen Shot of New York Magazine
We’re all addicted. And we’re all in trouble. That’s the blaring siren of a message from Andrew Sullivan’s New York magazine cover story from September, “My Distraction Sickness — and Yours.” The piece tells the personal story of how Sullivan unplugged from his life as a hyper-prolific blogger and spent time recovering at a silent meditation retreat in Massachusetts. But there is universal resonance when Sullivan writes that his relentlessly plugged-in online life “was actually becoming a way of not-living.” I had many memorable cultural experiences this year —Paul Kalanithi’s posthumous memoir, “When Breath Becomes Air,” A Tribe Called Quest’s comeback album “We Got It from Here…Thank You 4 Your Service,” Barry Jenkins’s gorgeous film, “Moonlight” — but Sullivan’s piece is the one that haunted me most. “Just look around you — at the people crouched over their phones as they walk the streets, or drive their cars, or walk their dogs, or play with their children,” he writes at one point. “We have gone from looking up and around to constantly looking down.”
A message from our CEO & publisher Rachel Fishman Feddersen
I hope you appreciated this article. Before you go, I’d like to ask you to please support the Forward’s award-winning, nonprofit journalism during this critical time.
At a time when other newsrooms are closing or cutting back, the Forward has removed its paywall and invested additional resources to report on the ground from Israel and around the U.S. on the impact of the war, rising antisemitism and polarized discourse..
Readers like you make it all possible. Support our work by becoming a Forward Member and connect with our journalism and your community.
— Rachel Fishman Feddersen, Publisher and CEO
