The Summer I Turned Attentive

At Columbia, the concept of living in the moment is an archaic legend, like affordable tuition or the drunken anecdotal stories my uncle had told me about strippers in Butler during finals season in the ‘80s: nice to have, but also distinctly implausible. For most, it’s more common to have your attention span dragged in every which direction, constantly pinged by Slack notifications from your third unpaid internship and seventh evil situationship, stopping for a breath only to be submerged by a whirlpool of IG Reels parading as life advice from parentally-funded-peers-from-the-Midwest-turned-parasocialites.

Fun goes to die online: If we spend all our time worrying about our futures or our public image, we are left stranded in the void, a place even worse than hell or Ithaca. To be sure, a diagnosis of incurable try-hard syndrome is how we arrived at this college in the first place. Still, there is also a mythical quality of leaving this anxiety by the wayside that is appealing to those pursuing linear success. This summer, a certain intrepid Sundial writer decided to shut her phone down and partake in events centered around the Luddite community in New York that aspire to usher in connection rather than progression to Wall Street, Palantir, and death.

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