The most frightening thing about these new consumption patterns is that you miss large but subtle aspects of life, the depth, magic and fantasy that bubbles up as weird emergence in the quiet moments before you sleep, when you wake up, exploring alone etc.

I'm hooked as an adult and can already see that i've become addicted to superficiality but the battle is getting increasingly harder as tech hooks deeper and deeper into our neurology.

There was a wave of books 10 years ago, "The end of absence" one them, exploring the themes of being the last generation to have experienced both before and the after 24/7 media consumption.

In one way it's echoing historical cycles like Thoreau talking about noisy trains in the distance distracting his poetry from his wood cabin in 1854 - but in other ways the distraction has become so exponential i seriously fear a generation will have problems with concentration, imagination or autonomy of thought.

Will they learn the beauty of solitude, that you often need some amount of boredom or tranquility for fantasy to arise, and that as in meditation the exploration of internal states can be key to a good and interesting life.

I'm reminded of a video game i once played about the native american ritual called Vision Quest where one isolates himself in a dark cabin - and as a lack of inputs creates vivid imagination like in a floatation tank - one finds his purpose eventually.

Not much different than religious sabbath or sitting meditation. To get something beautiful you have to remove noise.