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 Blackbird Spyplane
 
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 This life gives you nothing
 
 Your attention is all you have. Wasting it is annihilating. Blackbird Spyplane
 saves literacy in a monumental Year-End Essay.
 
 Dec 16, 2025
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 [30]
 [https]
 
 1 — All is full of Screen
 
 A disconcerting question strikes me alarmingly often these days. I’ll be out in
 the world, and I’ll see something … let’s call it picturesque. Say I’m walking
 along a nature trail as a white wall of fog avalanches over a ridge, down a
 canyon of pine and oak, toward the blue waters of the Bay. I will find myself
 thinking, “My god, that is beautiful.” And then — even if I manage to keep my
 phone in my pocket, resisting what’s become a powerful instinct to reach for it
 — I will feel a strange tremor of uncertainty: “Am I looking at a screen right
 now?” I wonder.
 
 In the moment, this uncertainty is not fully articulated, nor, thankfully, does
 it emerge from some extreme delusional state where I’ve lost my hold on
 reality. It’s more of a pre-cognitive kind of category confusion. And at the
 core of the confusion is this: As my life has come to consist so
 overwhelmingly, and for so many years, of looking at images on screens — and of
 looking at the world through a camera, which is also a phone, which is also a
 screen — the distinction for me between the screen and the non-screen can
 wobble.
 
 I still know the difference intellectually. But I don’t always necessarily feel
 it. That is the disconcerting part. I stare at the hillside, try to pick out
 individual details and weave them into a living, breathing totality that also
 includes the cool air on my skin and the birdsong in my ears. As I do this, I
 tell myself, “This is a real place, this is not an image of a place,” and I
 repeat that a few times, trying to will back the border dividing the two.
 
 [33]
 [https]
 
 Here’s how I make sense of this wobble between world and image.
 
 For a time, when I was much more active on Twitter than I am now, I’d find
 myself, e.g., washing dishes and, without wanting to, thinking about various
 mundane things in the form of tweets. Some nascent half-kernel of an idea would
 come to me and, like a hack comedian for whom every banal thing is material, I
 would immediately start working it over for any and all tweet-like potential.
 
 Maybe there was a tiny bit of dish soap left at the bottom of the bottle, and I
 considered diluting it with water to get it out more easily, and make the
 bottle last longer. I wouldn’t simply think that. Thanks to Twitter, I’d think
 something exponentially more inane and annoying, such as, “The masculine urge
 to water down the dish soap…” or “The two genders [picture of brand-new dish
 soap vs. picture of old diluted dish soap]…” or “Choose your fighter [same two
 pictures again]…” or “Wake up babe, new diluted dish soap just dropped,” or
 “Men will dilute the last millimeter of dish soap rather than go to therapy…”
 or “No but the way I just diluted the dish soap…”
 
 And so on. Just cycling through a procession of dumb, Twitter-borne
 phraseologies as they ran through my head, like a radio on the fritz skipping
 stations. It was a bit like I was idly playing a “brain teaser” puzzle, and a
 bit like my brains were oozing out of my ears. I’d spent so many hours of so
 many days reading tweets — encountering other people’s thoughts filtered
 through the specific character limits and idiomatic conventions of that site —
 that the seams between my own experiences, thoughts, and tweets began, on some
 level, to delaminate.
 
 I worry that something analogous has happened in my relationship to looking.
 The same way that an idea would occur to me and I’d immediately reach for a
 Stock Twitter Phrase to give it form, whenever I see anything that interests me
 now, there’s a looming sense in which my phone is there with me, framing and
 constituting the sight, even if I never post the picture, even if I never look
 at it again and, weirdest of all, even if don’t take out my phone.
 
 The same way I once conditioned myself to think in tweets, I’ve conditioned
 myself to see in “posts,” in “grid pics,” in “stories,” in flicks texted to the
 group chat, in .HEICs, and so on.
 
 This is the underside of what people mean when they describe an extremely
 “sticky” piece of technology: It can stick to you, like the facehugger from 
 Alien, even when you’re not using it.
 
 [36]
 [https]
 
 How to get yourself unstuck?
 
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 
 2 — Your attention is all you have
 
 One afternoon this fall I found myself “thinking in Instagram reels.”
 
 I had an idea for a video I wanted to make for the Spyplane IG, which I hoped
 people would find funny. The premise isn’t worth describing except to say it
 involved me reading from some book broadly coded as “smart,” as a prop. I
 scanned our shelves for something that fit the bill, until my eye landed on 
 Swann’s Way.
 
 I don’t know how Erin and I came to own this copy, but we’ve had it for ages.
 I’d never read it, nor had she. That didn’t matter: This was a perfect “smart
 book” for the video I wanted to spend the next ~hour improvising, shooting and
 editing. I pulled the novel down and started searching for a passage that
 sounded appropriately “high-flown.”
 
 And it was at this point that I enjoyed two unexpected, interconnected
 revelations. The first was that the opening pages of Swann’s Way are beautiful
 and captivatingly trippy. The second was that I did not want to die, whenever
 that day comes, having made an IG reel with a throwaway punchline about Proust,
 but not having actually read any Proust.
 
 There’s a lot of talk these days about the death of literacy. No one reads,
 video’s eating everything, we’ve grown stupid, and our alienation from written
 language is only making us stupider.
 
 For me, this isn’t distant, theoretical hand-wringing. I feel it firsthand, in
 the erosion of my own ability to concentrate on a piece of writing of any
 significant seriousness and length.
 
 I am, of course, not alone in this. Our attention has been transformed into one
 of the few remaining reliable “growth markets” by a parasite economy much
 better suited to sucking and siphoning than it is to building new things. This
 means that everything wants to get into our eyeballs, and it goes without
 saying that there are far more effective technologies for getting in people’s
 eyeballs — and turning a profit there — than books.
 
 But your attention is, on a foundational level, all you have. This is why it
 feels worse than bad to waste it. It feels annihilating.
 
 And so I decided not to make an IG reel, and instead, to finally read Swann’s
 Way.
 
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 
 3 — Magical mornings with the anti-phone
 
 Every morning for ~6 weeks, from late September to early November, I got out of
 bed early, put on some coffee, and sat with Proust for an hour or so in the
 quiet of predawn.
 
 I moved slowly. The sentences in Swann’s Way are long, at times comically so:
 stuffed with asides, nested clauses, digressions, and spiraling detours into
 metaphor. There might be all of three sentences on a given page, and it was not
 uncommon for me to make it through just 10 pages in the course of that predawn
 hour.
 
 This was fine with me, because the point wasn’t to burn through the book at
 1.5x speed. The point was to sink into it, to stretch out, and along the way, 
 to remind myself that I’m an adult and my attention is my own.
 
 In that light, Proust was perfect for the job. Swann’s Way requires total
 concentration. If your mind wanders 1/6th of the way through a sentence, you
 will lose your bearings, and the sentence will spit you out. And yet the book
 isn’t punishing or difficult in the way of Ulysses or Derrida. It just moves at
 its own speed, and if you decelerate, and lock in, it’s a delight.
 
 The story takes place in the 19th century, and unfolds at the speed of carriage
 rides, long walks through the countryside, and letters dispatched across Paris.
 There is no immediacy in it, or at least much less than we’re used to. There is
 a plot, but the book is less about that than about trying to render the
 experience of being alive in language as vividly, granularly, abundantly,
 comprehensively and encompassingly as possible.
 
 There’s an extravagance of words, devoted to capturing interior and external
 life in detail, whether it’s the way a shaft of sunshine looks as it passes
 through the windows of a provincial church and lands on a patch of stone, or
 the foolish, contradictory behavior of a man who grows infatuated with a woman
 he does not seem to love, and who does not seem to love him, either. (I read 
 [39]this translation.)
 
 [40]
 [https]
 
 To actually read Swann’s Way, it was necessary that I start the day with it,
 and that I didn’t look at my phone first under any circumstances. Getting in
 some scrolling beforehand would have been like waking up before sunrise,
 driving to the gym, and then saying, “I’ll just eat this box of donut holes
 before I get on the treadmill.” Nothing doing. On the few days when I made this
 mistake — thinking, against my better judgment, ‘I’ll just check the weather
 real quick’ — the spell was broken, I was still on the phone 40 minutes later,
 and my concentration was shot. I couldn’t get any traction when I tried to
 switch over to the novel, if I managed to pick it up at all.
 
 Despite the gym metaphor, I don’t want to instrumentalize reading into
 something you should do for “gains.” You need absolutely no reason to immerse
 yourself in a great book beyond the vast intrinsic pleasure of doing so.
 
 But in my case I was reading Swann’s Way not only for that pleasure, but also
 because phones have trained my brain to work in a way I don’t like, and I
 wanted to re-train myself: To rebuild my capacity for sustained attention like
 a muscle, to diminish the desire to scroll, to reclaim time spent within
 myself, uncoerced, undistracted, imagining and creating, in the particular way
 that only happens when you’re reading.
 
 [43]
 [https]
 
 This hour of predawn Swann time became a ritual I depended on and eagerly
 looked forward to. You can analogize it to runner’s high, you can analogize it
 to core strength, but at the end of the hour, I came away with something more
 than just my normal nagging feelings of dissatisfaction with the way the
 internet organizes our thoughts. I’d done a set of Proust reps to failure —
 something actively pleasing, and actively fortifying, that would be with me for
 the rest of the day.
 
 Blackbird Spyplane is a subscriber-powered, spon-free independent miracle.
 Upgrade to our Classified Tier today, support greatness, and enjoy a better
 life instantly in the inner sanctum — Jonah & Erin
 
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 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 
 4 — The good in flicking up everything
 
 Why do we pull out our phones at concerts instead of just watching the show?
 
 Why do we pull them out at the beach instead of just watching the sunset?
 
 I don’t think it’s because we’ve become automatons. I think the widespread
 impulse to take a photo of everything is in fact, at root, a creative one. It
 reflects a desire to not just receive life passively, but to intervene in it
 creatively: To frame the shot, to find the most compelling angle, to draw out
 the emotion, to honor the light… to participate.
 
 The problem is that the cameraphone, connected as it is to our online lives,
 doesn’t just serve the creative impulse and stop there. It risks cannibalizing
 that impulse, co-opting it, colonizing it, and ultimately thwarting it. Because
 the cameraphone allows us so readily to stop noticing the thing we’re
 photographing, and instead to outsource our experience of experiencing to the
 phone, much like we’ve outsourced our sense of direction to Google Maps.
 
 What’s more, when you start shooting video at the concert, your experience of
 watching [58]Spyfriend Cameron Winter perform in real time is captured and
 subordinated by your desire to commemorate that experience for some vaguely
 imagined Future You, and/or to post the footage for the benefit of some vaguely
 imagined Impressed Other People.
 
 This ultimately makes you more absent, and less present, to your life. And yet,
 again, I suspect that trying to rack up faves on a pic stems from something
 wonderful, which is our communal urge to share our experiences with other
 people: Are you guys seeing this sunset??
 
 Our appetite for life is so big that living just one life doesn’t always feel
 like enough. We want to know what other people’s lives are like, and we want
 other people to live some of our lives, too.
 
 [59]
 [https]
 
 A book is, we know, an unrivaled technology for living more life.
 
 The contemporary internet-abetted image, on the other hand, is a highly potent
 yet f--ked-up technology for living more life. It comes with all kinds of
 strings attached, and it has a way of leaving us feeling lonely, lacking,
 unsatisfied, and jittery.
 
 This is not thanks to creeping moral rot on our parts. Quite the contrary, it’s
 because these feelings of loneliness and dissatisfaction serve the twisted
 prerogatives of the people who design and make money from the technology
 sucking up our attention.
 
 And those are not the prerogatives of people who write great books.
 
 ━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
 
 5 — The remedy
 
 When I felt my thoughts morphing into tweets, the remedy was to spend less time
 on Twitter. The remedy for seeing everything as a digital image of itself is,
 similarly, to see less screen.
 
 Avoiding screen is harder to do than avoiding a single app, but there are ways.
 
 Early one morning in early November, I finished Swann’s Way. I sat there in its
 afterglow for a while, looking out a window. I was at a house on the Sonoma
 coast, where the sunrise was pushing through the fog, which itself pushed
 through a stand of redwoods. I didn’t need to assure myself that this sight was
 real and not a screen. The book had left me in a state similar to one I’ve
 enjoyed on psychedelics: my attention felt focused, even as my mind was free to
 wander.
 
 It felt good to sit there and let thoughts blossom slowly, and instead of
 taking a picture of the redwoods, the way I’d normally do, I wrote down what I
 saw as I looked at them: the drops of water clustered in the boughs, the
 particles that drifted past in dense enough concentration that they counted as
 “fog” but were also perceptible as individual instances of moisture. Grains of
 sand, and also the beach, at once.
 
 Then I took a picture, which, when I consult it now, looks dramatically
 different from what I saw, and from what I remember.
 
 [62]
 [https]
 
 Every morning since then, I’ve continued the ritual of waking up early and
 devoting an hour or so to reading before the day begins — and, very
 importantly, before looking at any screens.
 
 I moved on from Proust to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s famous My Struggle novels,
 which I’ve been meaning to read for more than a decade, and which felt like a
 good segue for a few reasons. Knausgaard is overwhelmingly concerned with
 memory, and he applies an abundance of language to capturing quotidian
 experience and expansive insights alike.
 
 In the second book of the series, set in the mid-2000s, there’s a passage where
 he writes about settling into the sofa with his wife to watch a DVD. His real
 subject is attention:
 
     …we wanted to be entertained. And it had to be with as little effort and
     inconvenience as possible. It was the same with everything. I hardly read
     books anymore; if there was a newspaper around I would prefer to read that.
     And the threshold just kept rising. It was idiotic because this life gave
     you nothing, it only made time pass. If we saw a good film it stirred us
     and set things in motion, for that is how it is, the world is always the
     same, it is the way we view it that changes.
 
 Twenty years later, things are the same, but more so. The threshold just keeps
 rising. And it is worse than idiotic, because not only does this life gives you
 nothing, not only does it make time pass — it steals life from you.
 
 In his books, Knausgaard often finds himself among other people, wishing he was
 alone. Proust, for his part, was a severely asthmatic child, this left him
 frail into adulthood, and by the time he wrote Swann’s Way he’d largely
 withdrawn from society, sticking to his rooms and writing. This isolation may
 have been maddening and painful — you need to spend time chopping it up with
 the f--king homies to thrive. But it also cleared the field for his imagination
 to flower, for him to dig into himself, open himself up and, in so doing, to
 push outward. In other words, by writing, he broke confinement.
 
 Today we are all of us lonelier, and more alone, than ever. But we’re never
 alone, either, because our attention is hijacked, our time feels crunched, and
 our cells travel with us everywhere we go, padded with layer upon layer of
 endless, overlapping digital distractions. The Goon Cave is becoming life’s
 organizing principle.
 
 And yet I know we still have more time on our hands than we realize: our phones
 take lots of it from us, yes, but there’s lots of time we surrender to our
 phones, too. We’ve grown accustomed to filling our time with scrolling because
 scrolling is diabolically easy. We can find ways to engineer away some of that
 scrolling, however, and replace it with things that do not merely distract us
 but speak far more resonantly to the questions we’re trying to ask when we
 start scrolling in the first place.
 
 When we do this, we don’t just find ourselves with more time on our hands, but
 with more life on our hands, too. Because we set things back in motion. The
 world remains the same, but the way we see it changes.
 
 P🌅E🌅A🌅C🌅E until next time,
 
 Jonah & Erin
 
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 [85]
 Marcy Thompson's avatar
 [86]Marcy Thompson
 [87]Dec 16
 
 A couple of days ago, I sang Handel's Messiah with a local church choir. I'm
 not religious, but I am a former chorus nerd; it had become part of my past,
 and I missed it. So, for a few weeks I rehearsed with the choir, learned the
 part, and refamiliarized myself with what it means to sing with a group. The
 concert on Sunday was glorious: a room full of human beings singing, playing
 gorgeous instruments, responding to each other synchronously in a collective
 effort to bring to life something that was written almost 300 years ago. It was
 a thrill. Later, I realized I hadn't taken a single photo of my time with the
 choir, I had no recording of the event. And, although I was initially saddened
 by that, I realized that -- instead -- I actually had the music I had sung at
 the concert playing in my ears. A most beautiful kind of reminder.
 
 Here's to having more life on our hands.
 
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 Reply
 Share
 [89]1 reply by Blackbird Spyplane
 [90]
 shonni's avatar
 [91]shonni
 [92]Dec 16
 
 Hey Jonah, thanks for this truly great piece. I’m the chair of the English
 Department at Fordham and a longtime BBSP subscriber (and have actually taught
 BBSP pieces to students for a few years now in a course on fashion and
 literature). We actually just revised our vision for our department to center
 “the arts of attention: reading, writing, conversation.” Would it be possible
 for me to share this piece with our English majors? Appreciate the
 consideration.
 
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 Reply
 Share
 [94]1 reply by Blackbird Spyplane
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 [23] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!-pUp!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F48146675-4653-4f0b-a8d0-d266c8af498a_1271x1571.png
 [26] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/the-blackbird-spyplane-interview
 [27] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/the-35-slappiest-clothing-shops
 [28] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/2025-blackbird-spyplane-gifts-list-gratitude-edition
 [29] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/the-year-jackets-rocked-again
 [30] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!3pkc!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F99573365-8f85-498c-85f5-fd3d3a689296_1208x493.png
 [33] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!Blep!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F820d5f12-c70c-49c9-9a74-c01053e244c6_232x412.gif
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 [39] https://bookshop.org/a/32497/9780375751547
 [40] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!2hex!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2Fec4f87df-ed2c-4e01-bced-198cd44b595f_2000x2596.png
 [43] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/$s_!necs!,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F5fdc0f8d-adc1-489e-a0e8-c36dc3ff6501_1208x529.png
 [58] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/cameron-winter-interview-geese-the-urge-to-respond
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 [77] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/this-life-gives-you-nothing/comments
 [85] https://substack.com/profile/2725960-marcy-thompson?utm_source=comment
 [86] https://substack.com/profile/2725960-marcy-thompson?utm_source=substack-feed-item
 [87] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/this-life-gives-you-nothing/comment/188413875
 [89] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/this-life-gives-you-nothing/comment/188413875
 [90] https://substack.com/profile/802405-shonni?utm_source=comment
 [91] https://substack.com/profile/802405-shonni?utm_source=substack-feed-item
 [92] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/this-life-gives-you-nothing/comment/188414352
 [94] https://www.blackbirdspyplane.com/p/this-life-gives-you-nothing/comment/188414352
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