A year ago I started binge-watching shows during workouts and didn’t notice when it became a problem. Then a new season dropped, I finished it in 48 hours, and I sat in front of the screen feeling a specific blankness — that sensation of having consumed something and received nothing. This essay is about that feeling. Not screen time. Not the hours. The architecture beneath them, and what it is doing to our capacity for depth.

This is the first in a short series of essays in conversation with the German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han, whose book The Disappearance of Rituals I cannot stop thinking about. Han names what most of our cultural commentary cannot quite reach: the loss of the forms that once let experience accumulate into meaning. Over the next several essays I’ll put his diagnosis to work on the actual texture of our lives — our screens, our feeds, our worship, our politics, our relationships. Here is the question this one leaves you with: what have we quietly trained ourselves out of?

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