"The desire to master a craft, to read slowly, [...]"

By the time I got to that part my reading had degraded to mere skimming -

a perfectly placed reminder :-)

Here's another angle on the issue: As humans, we evolved these useful litte machines of desire.

Desires to feed, mate, socialize attend and get attended to. All of those came about because they had some utility, a purpose.

Over time we found ways to exploit those machines using substitutes.

- Sweets are a substitute for nourishing food.

- Porn feeds on our desire to mate.

- Social media overloads the fine-tuned machine meant to orient us in the tribe.

I suspect a big part of capitalism is creating ever more efficient and subtle ways to highjack these aspects of our humanity on a grand scale.

Damn.