Antivirals - by L. M. Sacasas - The Convivial Society:

Hannah Arendt once observed that “everything that lives, not vegetative life alone, emerges from darkness and, however strong its natural tendency to thrust itself into the light, it nevertheless needs the security of darkness to grow at all.” I think about this line all the time. In the era of social media, we have yielded to the strong tendency to thrust more and more of our lives into the light without availing ourselves of the nurturing darkness. In Arendtian terms, we sacrificed both the proper goods of private life and the proper goods of public life by subsuming both into a realm of digital sociality.

It is time, I think, to allow ourselves a respite from the public light, to rediscover the pleasures that attend practices and deeds done for their own sake.